Fl studio beat making full#

To use a keyboard or drum pad to play the notes in live, hit the RECORD button right here. But they do come in handy.įor this tutorial, all you need is a computer/laptop and a demo of FL Studio.Īnyways, if I press play while the metronome is enabled, you’re going to hear a click on every single beat – it’s basically counting out the time for you so you can stay on beat when playing the notes (this has to do with “bars” mentioned above) This is important to know – you DON’T NEED any crazy equipment or midi keyboards and drum pads and all that shit to make dope beats. This helps you out a lot when you’re playing and recording notes from a MIDI keyboard or drum pad, instead of clicking the notes in like we’re going to do in this video. This button right here is the METRONOME, which is a helpful “click track” that will playback a click or tick on every beat. You can set it to whatever you want, but I’m gonna use 160 for the beat we’re gonna make in this video. It’s measured in BPM or beats per minute.

This 140 right here is the TEMPO of your beat – or how fast/slow you want your beat to play back.

Fl studio beat making full#

If you go back here and choose SONG instead of PAT mode, it’s gonna play the full arrangement that you’ve got drawn out in the playlist window – with all the different patterns playing together. You choose different patterns right here where it says “Pattern 1” – you just click the up or down arrows to select a different pattern. If you have it set to PAT right here, it’s only going to play the current pattern you’re working on, looping over and over again. This is where you start and stop the playback of the music you’re creating in all the other sections of the software. As you can see there’s a play button and a stop button.

The last section I wanna go over right now is called the TRANSPORT CONTROL section (5) – which is right up here across the top of the window. It’s a more advanced topic called mixing and mastering, but it’s good to know about the basics of it. You use it to get everything sounding clear and clean. You adjust things here so that nothing is too loud or too soft, or isn’t sitting right with the other sounds. Right here is also where you can add different effects to your sounds like reverbs, echos, distortion and more to change up the tone, or help it sit better in the mix of all the sounds. This is where you take all the different sounds in your beat and adjust the volume (which is obviously how loud the sound plays back relative to other sounds) and panning (whether the sound comes from the center or more from the left or right speakers). The next section you have to worry about is called the MIXER section (4). That’s called “arrangement” in music and it’s a more intermediate topic that you’ll keep learning about. This makes things change up and stay fresh across your entire beat so that your idea starts to shape into a full song instead of a boring, repetitive loop. So in the playlist, you can bring in different loops/patterns and take out different loops/patterns in various places by drawing them in or dragging them over. Now if you don’t understand what I mean by “4 bars” or “8 bars” – it’s how you count time in music. The next area you should know about is called the PLAYLIST or ARRANGEMENT WINDOW (3). This is where you take the different patterns/loops you create in the channel rack and lay them out in different places across a timeline, so you aren’t stuck with a repetitive 4 or 8 loop that just plays over and over again without changing. If you want to mute the sound so it doesn’t play back, you’d click this green light. You can turn the volume up or down of the sound/instrument or move it between the left and right speakers using these knobs here. This brings up a piano sequencer where you can draw in actual notes at different pitches up and down the length of the piano. If you’ve got a melodic instrument like a piano, you right-click on that instrument name and choose PIANO ROLL (not pictured). This is best for drum and percussion sounds. If I want to remove a note/beat, I just right-click on it. So for example if I wanted the kick drum to play on these different beats, I’d draw them in by clicking on the squares with my mouse.