FL Studio Tutorial - Complete Music Producer 4h+ Course

in this 4 and a half hour beginner music producer course you're going to learn everything you need to know to start making your own music in FL Studio whether this is your first video on making music or you've been already

producing for a few months this will be the most important 4 hours you're going to experience even if you've already took all their courses or tried learning on your own my name is Max founder of

mix elite.com where for years we've been teaching millions of producers online and turning no name bedroom producers into hit makers if you stick by follow along with this course and download all

the resources you'll find in the first link below I promise that by the end of this course F studio will be your second nature you'll be turning ideas into real music like it's a game you'll be able to

write your own fresh sounding chords and Melodies program Amazing sounding drums arrange your ideas into full songs record and mix vocals and then mix and

master your track until you have a full song ready to be released on Spotify or YouTube so clear your schedule put your phone away and turn this video full screen because you're about to master

all the fundamentals of music production this course is divided into a 7-Day experience with daily homeworks and no prior knowledge required so if you want to go through it in a structured daily

manner check the first link in the description you'll also find there the bonus chapter but just know that I'll be referring to the chapters and time stamps you have below as days because

every day we cover the next topic that builds on top of the previous one step by step ready so let's just take a few few minutes to cover all the gear you actually need to start making music

first off the right computer music production apps and all the virtual instruments and effects are quite heavy to run you'll likely be fine for the coming months with your current setup

but what I need you to look for is CPU with highest single processor core speed and amount of ram so if you're upgrading CPU look for at least Intel 13th gen i5

and for Ram at least 16 GB or 32 if you want to futureproof if you prefer Mac M series processors are unbeatable for music production and all major music making programs are also available on

Mac OS so you're good to go don't forget about storing everything on an SSD if you don't want to be waiting long minutes for your projects and instruments to load next essential will be your headphones music is made out of

frequencies and only your headphones control how clearly you hear the music you make a good pair should have a flat frequency response so from lows like sub

and base through mid frequencies to high frequencies we want our headphones to not colorize any of these parts because the goal is to make sure that the music

we make translates well to other playback systems like car stereo laptops or earbuds they also should have good Imaging so how clearly you can tell

where each sound is coming from like knowing the guitar is on the left and the symbols are on the right so when looking for headphones keep these two factors in mind but inside today's download you'll find a list of

headphones we recommend for every budget that's all the necessary Hardware you need to make music believe it or not everything else is totally optional but there are still few things that you will

find on most home studio desks first is an audio interface you'll need one if you want to connect your PC with your microphone or speakers which in music production world we call studio monitors

if you just want to record up to two inputs like a guitar and a vocal at the same time a two input audio interface will be enough again you'll find a few recommended in the downloads for now

just remember to watch out for Ultra cheap interfaces because they can break quickly introduce latency or not give your microphones enough power to record we'll talk about recording vocals later

in the course but you might want to get yourself a pair of studio monitors to choose a great pair same as with headphones make sure that the frequency response is flat you don't need a

full-blown setup with a subwoofer if you have an average size room 5 in speakers will be perfect don't go for anything higher than that unless you have a huge

Studio space monitors don't wear out like headphones so for about $300 you can get an amazing sounding pair that will keep for 10 years or more with the

monitors however placement matters even more than the gear itself the first key is to use the perfect studio monitor placement calculator to find where

exactly to position your monit monitors you'll need to measure your room type in some numbers and it will tell you the exact placement the link to the calculator you'll find inside the downloads so keep it until you get your

first pair then you tilt your monitors toward your ears with tweeters those small membranes at your ear level and finally your head and the two speakers

should form an equal triangle pretty simple right but even with this setup when you're making music The Sound will bounce and Echo around your room unless you fix it with some acoustic treatment

you don't need to hire an expert to buy expensive panels shelves with books some sofas carpets mattresses all kinds of heavy stuff diffuse and absorb the sound

a lot that's why having studio in your bedroom is definitely a good idea if you have completely plain walls you can get some acoustic foam for cheap but this

will only dampen the mid to high frequencies like human voice the most Troublesome are the low frequencies and why am I talking about this because this will all build up causing you to

mistakenly think that your music sounds bad so it's just even good to be aware of this if you like to fix this and absorb those low frequencies building up you need very dense material like rock

wall but even getting an old mattress and putting it against the wall will make a huge difference the last thing is that some people think that to make music you also need an midy controller

like a midi piano keyboard these just control the virtual instruments will install you don't need need any controller at all if you want to tap in some rhythms like drums or simple

Melodies your typing keyboard can work like this as well so having a Medi keyboard is cool but definitely optional spoiler alert you also don't need any real instrument every instrument you can

think of and more you can find in the form of a virtual instrument that you can use to make music with and no you don't have to be able to play any instrument at all that's why you have us

here with you all right you've got the gear now the software so let's focus I'm going to share some key info as a music producer you'll use one main piece of software that will run all of your music

production needs inside this is what we call digital audio workstation or Daw 70% of people on Earth use only four

most popular ones that are Pro Tools logic pro aeton life and a studio for some reason or the other each of these Daws has different type of fans Pro

Tools became the standard for people recording live in logic pro a Mac only tool beloved by songwriters Ableton life is for Tech lovers Geeks and live

performances and finally probably the most popular one E Studio it's easy to start hard to master popular with beginners and Pros making hip-hop house

trap ADM film music and everything in between each Daw is made out of the same elements that just basically look different that's why we always recommend

to start with E Studio a door that will definitely let your creativity fly as far as you wanted to and if you'll ever want to change it's just a matter of days each of these come also with their

own trial so you can test them out and different price versions so you don't have to pay for everything if you don't need it our Daw of choice for this course is f studo it has fully

functional unlimited free trial you just can't open the projects but other than that you can really really learn a lot if you're looking to purchase the full version get the Producer Edition it's

the best bank for your back give Giving You Everything you'll ever need it's much better to keep the difference you'll spend on other versions and spend it on your Knowledge and Skills so let's download it and start installing and in

the meantime before we dive into it let's understand the process and workflow behind creating a track from start to finish naturally the first step is coming up with ideas that will be

writing chords writing Melodies creating sounds that inspire you browsing or also writing lyrics then we start the production session where we take the

chords and Melodies we wrote and add additional elements like bass drums percussion maybe we add more layers to it make the whole idea have more arms

and legs after we need to structure all of this brain dump in time this is what we call an arrangement so that our song has its intro outro chorus or drop

breakdown or verse however you'd prefer to call it the fourth step comes in and it's the most timec consuming and the most technically complic ated process it's mixing and it's all about making

our tracks sound just as the professional tracks you hear on the radio or festivals we'll be applying different processing and effects to each element that we've already wrote as an

individual or as a group to create a well balanced mix it takes about 5 to 10 hours on average of course more if your track is very complicated as soon as you decide that it sounds good you have

ready as we call it Final Mix at this point we'll export the track into a single audio file and put it into a fresh project to do the final polishing

process called mastering this is the final 5% of preparing your track for the release we'll make sure that the song is loud and up to the current industry standards the thing here is that since

you're used to your track so much the mastering process is sometimes outsourced to a professional for a fee so they can dive in with fresh ears and make the best decisions and the fin step

we get to is releasing you'll be contacting labels if you have a manager they will be doing it for you and labels will take care of all the publishing and promoting the track for you you can also

release your music on all platforms like Spotify or YouTube by yourself that we also cover later in the course all right F St installed today we'll cover the layout navigation and Basics and every

next day of the course we'll dive deep into each of the components so by the end of the course you'll be able to confidently use all of them on your own to create full songs when you first open

up app Studio you'll see this welcome window that allows you to choose which project or demo project you'd like to start with by default we have it set up to this one and we don't really want

this to show up in the future so just let's mark this and start new all of this might feel complicated but let's start one by one first thing you'll notice on the left side of the screen is

the browser think of it like a big components library for your song by default you'll see the FL Cloud over here which is a subscription product offered by eel which you definitely

don't need right now so let's go over to all you see here many different followers but you'll mainly use this area to drag and drop individual sounds into your project like dram hits we

music producer call them samples the ones that come by default in FL Studio you'll find inside the folder packs so you can definitely ignore everything

else other than that inside you'll find many different sounds and the main place of your project is the playlist this is where we put all the pieces together in time and if you

click around you'll notice that you're placing down socalled patterns patterns are like building blocks of your music a pattern can have drums melodies

baselines or any combination of sounds and you can use the same pattern as many times in your song as you want and if you double click the pattern you'll open up the channel rack this is this is the

third key window in FL Studio and here's where you create patterns by default you should see a few channels pre- loaded already for you in the channel rack each channel has so-called step sequencer

with left click you can add those at random like this and with space bar you can start playing and with right click you can delete pretty quick and intuitive right

technically you can make them infinitely long but watch what happens in the playlist it actually just repeats itself because we have the same pattern over and over placed like this right inside

the playlist you also delete by right click so we have two different types of elements we have samples that mainly are just for drums and we also have virtual

instruments which is this Flex base over here let's try to add it like this the problem is that in the Steep sequencer we can only see steps the Rhythm basically right all virtual

instruments like this one have some kind of settings to open it up just click on the name and it will show up pretty intimidating at first but all of those gives you some kind of control over how

this sound sounds and it's definitely not as complicated as you might think since it's a melodic instrument we should be able to make it play different pitch as well that's what you can do by

clicking a different keys on your keyboard [Music] this virtual instrument or VST plugin as

we call it is called Flex it's a stock F Studio plugin and technically we should say that it's a synthesizer since the sounds are made artificially by

synthesizing different waveforms it is not a pre-recorded real life instrument right but it has a lot of different sounds you can choose from

[Music] so this would be super fun coming back to the channel Mark the problem now is that we only have those

steps instead since it's a melodic instrument we'd like to write a melody that brings us to one of the last Windows you'll find in every Daw to open

it right click and choose piano roll here you can dial in the notes you want your instrument to play again in time right it will basically mimic the Steep

sequencer but allow you to choose different pitch of the channel you want to [Music]

control we'll Dive In Depth into it tomorrow everything you'll write in you'll also see inside the channel rack I also want to make it a little bit quieter for that you have this handy

knob next to the channel name and the one on the left controls the panning so where the sound is on the left ear or that right

here there are many different stock VST instrument plugins in app Studio you can find all of them by clicking on the Plus in the channel rack again many different

options but if you would like to look for instruments you'd go for synth group or synth classic all the other ones are basically just utilities that will not

really use that often for example we use the one from synth classic which is this Flex over here right so if you'd like to add another instance or another Channel

you just click on it like [Music] this you need to know that the VST plugins Market is huge and there are hundreds of companies making their own

plugins instruments and effects other than the stock ones you'll find find here there are many free instruments online that will cover and install tomorrow same with the samples I don't

really like how those drums sound so that's why you can go into the packs inside your browser and find different drum sounds and simply drag and drop to replace them

[Music]

these stock ones are also not ideal the quality of the sounds you use play a big role in the final quality of your track that's why we've prepared for you a pack with our best cated examples that are

used by top tier artists around the world so you can be sure you're using the best sounds you will find them in the later downloads in the course when we'll be covering drums so as you can see making patterns like this inside

Channel rack is a great way to brainstorm if you want a clean slate just click on the plus next to the pattern name to add a new pattern if you want to can name it and you'll see now

that the pattern is empty a new pattern showed up in the so-called picker panel and you can also place it in the playlist so I'd like to now play whatever we have here in the playlist

but as you can see when we hit space bar nothing happens unless we actually go to the pattern and double click the pattern that's what we have the top menu bar for

majority of those settings over here will not be any useful to you I personally don't even use 90% of what you see over here the most important panels are this hint panel that

basically will tell you what you are hovering your mouse over and and whatever you have active right now let's say Channel rack and you hit F1 on your keyboard it will take you to the manual

from my experience when people start to read through those manuals you can really get totally lost so I personally don't recommend this unless you're looking for some specific feature right

next you'll see two knobs the one on the top is for the main volume of your FL Studio I would not be using it ever it's basically an extension of your default

Windows or mic OS volume then we have Master pitch [Music] which is just changing the pitch of the whole project you also never actually

use this knob unless you want to you know just have fun then we have the sunk position which I don't find any useful ever unless you want to change the position from where you want to start

playing your pattern from which I don't know may happen then you have the pattern or song mode so when we wanted to play our song so our playlist you need to just change it to

song if you want to go back to changing the patterns you just can change it to the pattern and it will be playing whatever active pattern you have right now then

you have the BPM so this is the beats per minute it defines the tempo of your track all the music styles are always somewhere between 90 to 160 inside

today's downloads you'll also find the guidelines of how to perfectly choose it then the whole area over here is about recording so if you are recording anything which will get into later in

the course you might be using some of those settings and all of these are pretty friendly like countdown before recording or overb which is basically record on top of what you already

recorded for example you might want to record the rhythm of your Kick Drum right so I can click on my typing keyboard and I will have some kind of a

rhythm I can then just click record and since I just want to record the notes of the kick I just hit notes and

automations now if I hit play and start hitting on my typing keyboard you can see it's basically exchanged if you'd like to wait for the input to start you can just now hit play

as you can see I hit the play button and if I stop you can see it exchanged so now we need to uncheck both of those buttons so we can play the

song right now you have stuff like countdown before recording or blend recording so if we now arm the recording again and start playing as you can see we've added both

notes that were not here but we did not delete the other ones right so we just adding new notes and if you enable Loop recording it will be

looping the pattern all over again let's come back to everything we had before so if you want to record anything those are the settings you might want to play around with then we have the song

position you can see it in beats or if you click it in minutes and seconds then you have the snap or quantizations of your project so if you change it to

nonone nothing in the playlist will stick to the lines and the grid which can cause a lot of troubles because the rhythms can sound off so let's come back

then we have the pattern settings which are also very very simple if you want to add a new pattern you can just click on the Plus or if you want to for example clone the pattern or rename it all the

options you'll have in here so this is also very very optional and you don't need to know about all of these to start making music and then we have five most

important buttons that are just opening the playlist opening the piano roll the channel rack and the mixer now the mixer

is the last key window inside Apple Studio that we'll use in the fourth step of our workflow which is mixing believe it or not I've been making music for a

very long time before I even started to look into the mixer so get used to opening and closing the different windows we have the playlist view over

here then the piano roll that you can open by right clicking on the channel or opening the window through the button over here and then choosing the channel

you want to edit from the drop down menu over here you can see we have all of the same channels as we have in the channel rack and then what's up with the mixer

if you remember inside the channel rack we have those numbers that we can basically roll out those tell us to which mixer track this element is

connected to so for example our kick is now connected to mixer track one our instrument we have connected to the track number five as you can see when it's playing we have nice volume

indicator mixer can be intimidating because people often make jokes and ask Studio Engineers if they know what all of these knobs are doing but the truth is that every single track is exactly

the same and controls the same things it's just prepared to process a ton of instruments right so you can see a lot of those but it's just for your

convenience when I play you can also see that the master truck is also showing the signal coming through this is because all of those individual mixer trucks are connected to the master track

so this is kind of our group of everything we have in our project mixer is super cool you'll totally love it as soon as we get into the mixing phase in our course for now don't worry about

anything else other than what we've already already talked about by now you have a good idea on what kind of Hardware you need what software to choose what's the process of creating a full song and the rough overview of how

to start using App studio and your homework for today is of course download today's pack you'll find in the button below this video the side for the hardware you want and download app

Studio then I'd like you to explore the stock packs inside the browser and play around with them definitely build a simple pattern inside the channel rack and place it in the arrangement View and

also so play around with the presets you'll find in the flex synthesizer to find some sounds you like or even try

out different SC app Studio has built in today we'll get into the first phase of producing a track which is ideation finding sounds and writing chords and

Melodies so what actually makes up for a great song you know already that music is made out of frequencies and well balanced song Would naturally have a

well balanced frequency spectrum meaning that all the frequencies in the Spectrum would have some kind of element occupying it we dive deep into each of the spectrum on day four when we'll be

mixing for now you need to know that usually our track should have a few elements that each will be focused on a different frequency spectrum that's why you'll see bands have three to five

elements like base occupying lows keyboard and guitar and vocals all occupying the mid frequency is because the mid spectrum is the meat of your

song and then highs that is occupied usually by symbols drums usually take the whole Spectrum a little bit because they create the Rhythm and the groove so no matter the style you produce you'll

be most likely having at least three key groups of instruments in your track since we usually start with the chords and Melodies I like to use a piano to come up with some ideas and then we can

always replace it with any synthesizer you like or a different instrument if you've done yesterday some homework you should have a rough idea what stock synthesizers F Studio has to offer the

flex synthesizer we've already tried out and while it has many cool sounds I'll be honest with you there are other also free instruments available online made by third party companies that only focus

on creating the freshest and highest quality sounds don't get me wrong you're just starting out there's no need to install anything extra if you don't want to but I want to help you get better

fast and better starts with choosing better instruments so before we dive into writing chords let's find and install thirdparty instruments this way you'll have more and better sounds to

play with as you make music and also be able to explore and install new instruments on your own so I love real instruments they bring life into your music none of this is sponsored and you'll get the download link to all

plugins in the course downloads at the end of today's video the hands down best free VST instrument plugin is Labs by ped SPF Fire audio it has all the real

instruments you'll need so let's search for labs and you'll see the speedfire audio Labs you can just go to try free and continue without subscribing and then just create an account then I am on

windows so I'll download for Windows now let's go install and always the important part will be your VST or vst3 folder so just make sure you remember

that path and let's install and now Labs opened as a standalone window usually will'll never need anything Standalone so we can just delete those guys we'll

be opening and playing this instrument inside FL so we just need to go to FL Studio options and file settings then you'll find the plugins area you need to click on manage plugins now the only

important part is the plugin search path app Studio has by default enabled the default Windows paths so if you changed the path where your VST plugin installed

you need to make sure to add it by clicking on this button over here it is a default folder for me so I can just click on find installed

plugins now it will show up all the different plugins you have installed as you can see I have a lot of them but we want to search for labs and if you write

in we'll have laps over here we can favor it so that it shows up quicker for us and now close the windows this just tells you what we've done already so we

can close it and then as you remember to add a new instrument will go to our Channel rack then click on the plus and you will find Labs over here so we can click it and now we can log in or if you

don't have an account you can make a free one on the same website where we've downloaded the plugin and now you see everything here is empty to add new packs you need to click on explore packs

button over here and now we can play the preview of any pack and we are interested only in those free ones so we can just hit on the free tier since most

of the packs here inside this plugin are free [Music]

[Music]

[Applause] you will love playing with this playing I'm looking for just a simple piano so we can clearly hear what we'll be

building but you can choose any one that you want soft piano is perfect for this purpose while it's downloading let's explore what's going on in here we can

see the piano keyboard and this is the fundamental of all music all of it happens on a musical keyboard the white and Black Keys are called notes just

like letters make words and sentences noes come together to create Melodies and harmonies if you look closely at the keyboard you'll notice a repeating

pattern every 12 keys this group of 12 notes is an octave once you reach the 12th note the pattern starts over and over again but at higher pitch but we

never write a song that's using all of the notes rarely we just use seven notes that create a scale it's like picking certain colors to paint a picture it

helps us to set the mood and feel for the music there are many different types of scales but the two most important ones are major scales these are happy

and bright and minor scales these sound more serious or sad I promise the last word to remember here is the distance from one key to another which is called

semitone or half step and two together are called a whole step it's important because when watching different tutorials you'll see people mentioning this and knowing half steps or whole

steps amount helps us build scales and create The Melodies and chords in songs all right so for example a major scale will follow the wi key pattern it's

pretty easy so it's whole whole half whole whole whole and half this gives us

notes c d e f g a b since we built the scale starting from C the C is our root node so the scale is called

what yes C major for minor scale the sequence of steps is a little bit different it's whole half whole whole

half whole ho and in today's music pop hip hop R&B and any electronic music minor scale is definitely more popular thankfully you don't have to remember

the sequence since E Studio has a built in piano roll helpers for that so we have it installed now let's go and open piano roll I hope you remember how we do

that you can see a little bit lighter and darker highlights over here so you can just Place notes like this it will be a C major scale and if

you just place it anywhere it will [Music] create E major scale for example right because the scale starts from node e to

open helpers is very easy you can just right click on the Node icon on the piano roll menu bar and just click on

default and then choose for example a major scale right so we now have exactly the same highlights right but if we choose for example root node let's say

we want F you will see that the highlights changed a little bit so now we are starting with f and you can also see the f f is marked as the darker

note if you this time left click on the Note icon it will enable snap to scale so it will not allow you to put notes anywhere else other than on the scale

notes this is definitely useful I don't know why it just feels weird to do that because you know happy accidents right so I'll disable the snap to scale and go

for a minor scale so what's going on we have a lot of minor scales the thing is that all of those minor scales differ by one note or just two notes maximum but

the most common one is minor natural and minor harmonic which is my personal favorite same with major all of those scales are major they just have a little

bit different Vibes to them so if we go for let's say minor you'll see now we [Music]

have and if you choose the harmonic minor we [Music] have so those two notes basically differ

but let's go back to natural and now that we've chosen a scale we can start building chords and a chord is when you play three or more notes at the same time so

technically this is a chord right or this one to play the notes quickly like this I hold left alt and right click you can see that I'm going only on the

highlighted scale since we've enabled the helper over here so then a chord progression is a sequence of chords played one after the other so technically

this it's a chord progression right but there are some rules to make it sound great because the chord progression is the backbone of your song most songs have just four chords in their

progression and they just rep repeat and repeat through the whole song or even two chords in the progression chords also Define what kind of Melody we can play it is a part of extensive music

theory but since there are only seven nodes in a scale we can only make seven basis chords so there are not many ways we can go for when writing the chord progression it's always easiest to start

with the root Noe or Bass note as some people call it the root just like in a tree it's the lowest node and it serves as a foundation for the rest of the

chord we musicians use Roman numerals to tell their progression so here's a popular we can go for that is

one then five so we count all the white notes up to five also counting the first note so we go 1 2 3 4 5 and as you can

see I place it after the note right so we let it play for one beat and then on the second beat so we have one five then

we go to Six so one Higher and four so one lower than five then we build a chord by stacking every third note so we just Skip One

Note in between so we go one skip one place one skip one place one same here

skip one place one skip one place one skip one place one skip one place

[Music] one you can hear that it's getting very very high in Pitch so we can Mark everything hold control and hit arrow

down on your keyboard it will take it an octave lower so everything will sound the same just one octave lower [Music]

now imagine what happens if we keep building the chord by skipping one let's add one note to each chord by skipping one

extra like [Music] this now you're getting Jazzy right so you could technically be adding even

more notes but it doesn't really start to sound any better overall we've added the seventh note as you can see those are the seventh notes counting from the

root note of the chord right so we have one two 3 4 5 6 7 another Pro tip is to double the root note and octave lower

this will make our chord sound a little bit more full holding control and shift and left click each of the root nodes of the chord hold shift and drag them

release shift and place them an octave lower it will now sound like [Music]

this another Pro tip here is as you can see the difference between the notes here it goes like this right the highest note is over here and then the highest

note of the next chord is very far away from this one let's try to make it more smooth like this so we can holding control and left click drag our Mouse

over the top notes s to what we've just done with the whole chord progression we just hold down control and arrow down it will sound a little bit

different this is called different voicing so same notes but in different octaves nice let's do that again with a different chord progression we'll go

with one 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 and seven so one Higher and let's extend

it like this now let's build the chord now you can see the FL copied the length of the last note we can just delete it by right clicking and hit on the shorter note and

it will remember this length so we keep building the chord like that and now we can click on this note

so it will copy the length [Music] let's do the similar thing so it flows a

little bit better so we take all of those notes that are a little bit too high and take them down an octave to create a different voicing now it sounds like

[Music] this or what we can do is even take the whole chords other than the first chord and octave lower so it also flows pretty

nice let's hear it

[Music] now if you'd like to make it even longer

you can mark all of those chords and take this Arrow over here and extend the chords and while holding alt release it when you reach the double of the length

right so it sounds now like [Music] that right so something like this would be too fast the perfect length for my ear is

over here now let's delete this and go with something like C SHP why not it will sound a little bit different and give you a different Vibes even though the relation of all the notes is exactly

the same so let's build on one the note is here a little bit too long so we can hold shift and extend it like that we

have 1 six so 1 2 3 4 5 6 2 so two will be here and five so one lower than six and I'm again counting

only the highlighted notes and then let's create chord by skipping one in each it's pretty quick when you have the

helper that's why it's pretty useful to always have it on [Music] let's take the voicing

[Music] down all right so it will definitely work for some Ballot or a little bit happier track let's go and try the same progression but in minor natural and now

we would need to change the root notes and all of those notes so let's go back and go for one we had six here so 1 2 3

4 5 six so we build it like that one in between two which is right only this note differs and then five which only

this note differs now let's take those guys down and hear how it [Music]

sounds you can see at this chord sounds pretty good but it's not in scale that's why I would not turn the snap to scale because you can get some pretty again

happy accidents but let's it take it down as it should be and listen again in proper minor

[Music] natural and lastly this chord for me doesn't sound quite right that's why you

can experiment with different mod modes of the minor scale especially with the harmonic one as you can see all of the

notes are correct but the last note over

here let's try it

[Music] out an excellent progression for Stuff

like melodic trap or any emotional kind of song this could work definitely in any genre now the question you probably ask is how do I know which root notes or

what progression should I actually write on and the problem is that there are no rules for that you can definitely play around with any progression let's turn

on Snap to scale for real quick and even take something like one two three four so we have one two three and four

[Music] sounds pretty nice or something totally random like [Music]

that let me take this one octave [Music] lower and just quickly change the

voicing here of those two [Music] notes a great signing progression even

though it was totally random however there is a list of progressions that work for certain genres and certain Styles and you will find the full list

of the progressions that simply work inside today's downloads because the root noes you choose this is where the magic happens there's no magic in

building a card by Skip One skip one right or just changing how the notes flow in voicing this is not hard the hard part is getting the right

progression because it will Define the vibe of your track as soon as you have a progression like that you can always experiment by adding just random notes

to it let's say we add this one here this one here and this one here [Music]

this didn't work well let's try this

[Music] one a little bit too many notes over here

if you stick to the scale and just build first the progression and then build basic cards out of that and only then start to play with duplicating the root

note and oct the flower or changing the voicing and then adding some notes here and there there's just no way you'll write a bad sounding chord progression

now we'd like to add another simple element like Melody on top of our chords think of it like a lead Melody of a guitar on top of the keyboard or a vocal

on top of a guitar for that I'd like to use a synthesizer so we can blend the realistic piano sound with a synth also that's a great chance for me to show you

the best free VST synthesizer and that is vital let's Google it and you can go down and click on basic which is for free then just create an account and then you'll be able to download it

there's no need to upgrade to Plus or Pro they mainly just differ in the amount of presets that come by default pre-installed but in today's downloads you'll find a ton of presets for you to

choose from so let's install this installation is complete we can go again to options file settings manage plugins and again find installed plugins and

then just search for our Vital you might see a couple of different versions of it I always prefer to use the vst3 format it's the newest one now we can close it go to plus and hit on vital you can

click on work offline or login again and now don't get intimidated this is a fullblown synthesizer that lets you create any sound you can imagine sound

design process is very fascinating and we also have super in-depth courses on just sound design if you'd like to get Pro as a sound designer but we just want to search for a cool preset you can

click on the init preset here and it will show you all the presets you have pre-installed inside vital you can choose one and start playing on your typing keyboard if it doesn't play you

just need to click on the window itself T to [Music] table I don't really like the stock

presets that come in vital there are many free vital preset packs that we can find but we've prepared for you a vital pack that you can find in today's

downloads inside vital just go and import Bank find the folder and double

click on it you'll find it over here

[Music]

pretty cool stuff we have a course that covers vital in depth so you can make any sounds you have in your head if you feel like it you can definitely go in and play around with those settings

especially with the macros on the left which quickly change how those presets sound now let's go back to our piano

roll and now open up the vital piano roll so we can write the melody on top of our chords let's make our piano a little bit louder

and our plaque a little bit [Music] quieter all right so when it comes to writing Melodies a pretty good idea if

you want to skip all the music theory and just like play around yourself is go to your typing keyboard to piano keyboard button and write click it it

will show up the layout and the trick here is to choose the exact same layout

we've chosen for our panal so we chose the C sharp minor harmonic so let's

choose C sharp and minor harmonic now your typing keyboard will only play the notes in the right scale starting from

Z this was a and Q and one so you will only be in scale and now you

can just play around with a rhythm I would start for example with a root node of your track which in this case will be Z AQ or one on your keyboard so we can

do something like this so I'll try to improvise something

[Music] right very very simple we can also record that if you want by arming the

record button changing it to only notes and then we can enable the countdown before recording and

[Music] start right very very simple and now we can unarm the record

let's figure out something even better first framework for writing Melodies that I like you to follow is just to write a simple Melody only on top of the notes that you've already written when

putting down your chords so you can see in the panel roll those gray so-called Ghost Notes if you don't see them you

can go to view and ghost channels or simply hit alt and V so you can see if we call hit alt and V the other channel

we have over here will show up as Ghost Notes so we can just follow the notes like this for example right and that was pretty cool already let's try it out

[Music] maybe you can go a little bit out of those chord notes but still with SNAP to scale

[Music] enabled the idea here is to never keep the Rhythm all the time the same so as

you can see if I were to take all of those notes into one note this is the rhythm of our [Music] Melody you can see that every bar has a

different kind of Rhythm so if you'd like to take this approach we can choose the paint tool and paint over all the notes and then just maybe even like

delete some of them [Music] [Music] right maybe I don't like really the last

part so let's do it like this and now after you've got your random Rhythm basically right we go and change up the

notes so we can go down on up or higher like this doesn't really matter we'll hear how it sounds in a second completely random [Music]

this technique with coming up with rhythms first and then changing up the notes doesn't really work as good as the first technique I showed you because it goes completely random here it goes down

here it goes up up and up and instead we would like it to kind of like maybe flow like this right so that's why this technique with rhythms can get you somewhere it will not necessarily be a

good direction however the third really good technique is just creating something repetitive and then repeating it two or three times in each of those

bars and then in the fourth bar changing it okay so let's try it [Music] out and then just copy it two times so

I'll just take it holding shift copy it two times and then maybe since those guys were going up up up we can go down on the force to change it up a little

bit and create some kind of question right and answer this is what we usually do when creating [Music]

Melodies maybe something else [Music] [Music]

pretty cheesy not going to lie but as you can see it works the best way will always be just trying out and adjusting in real time so start writing the first

bar of your Melody check if you like it and changing one note at a time and not necessarily start all over again getting frustrating because it just doesn't sound nice so that is the third

technique and the fourth one is actually the one that I have showed you in the very very beginning by choosing the correct layout of your typing keyboard

and playing

[Music] around let's say I played a nice melody

but I have not saved it fortunately Apple Studio always records your Medi even if you're not recording for that you can go to

tools and damp score lock to selected pattern last 2 minutes you can zoom out using control and scroll and then zoom in using also control and scroll app

then again we'll mark I think this part I'll copy it with contrl c and then with crl a delete everything and then scroll back and paste those guys back here and

we will take only this [Music] part if you see that some notes are very

close to your chords you can put them into the chord note it for example here or here it should better fit into the

chords

[Music] I like it a lot this is something I

played by accident on a typing keyboard and we have full course just about writing cords and Melodies but those are the essentials you need to know to start

creating your Melodies and harmonies now we covered the mids with our keyboard and Melody the one thing I think you'll love is also making a baseline it's very

easy because we'll take what we already have let's add another instance of vital go into our presets and check one of the

[Music] bases let's take this one open the piano roll and we'll follow the root notes of our track we have the Ghost Notes open

but since we changed the voicing you might not actually remember which node of these was the root node but that's actually also pretty cool exercise so let's try finding the root Noe the root

note of a cord or a root note of a whole track right we can find by trying to hear if it sounds like home all right this is pretty funny but let's try from

the top see if this note feels like com of this chord okay I don't know let's try this one not really and this one okay this definitely feels like home if

you don't feel it just try to practice and try to even like hum what would be the home without hearing the base note itself so it will be C sharp over here

and then maybe let's take it an octave lower or even one octave even lower let's he it sounds even with just one root note

this even by itself could be like this but let's try to find the root note of the order

[Music] chord I think it's F sharp yep and then

[Music] this feels pretty good let's [Music]

see we can go octave lower with the c but I would not suggest you go any lower than this because the base will start to sound pretty weak

keep that in mind to not go too low with your base and if You' like to make the base progression even darker or even more you know emotional you can just

extend the first root Noe and simplify it like [Music] this sounds super cool because the cords

change but the Bas stays the same same inside the macros our presets have those enabled so we can quickly change how the base

[Music] [Music] sounds so today's homework is to first play around with labs and find a few

instruments you like then please create a few card progressions using the progression cheat sheet from today's downloads ideally using different Labs instruments and also don't forget to create a pattern for each card

progression so we can always keep everything and come back to them then download vital and install the free pack and try to create even very very simple Melody like today for each progression

you made today we'll be doing the second half of production stage that is drums and then we'll get into a little bit of

arranging so with drums we have the same rule as yesterday the better quality sound we start with the better it will end up being sure tomorrow we'll get into mixing and you'll see that we can

turn even a really basic instrument into something that's totally unrecognizable however gold in equals gold out so why not start with something exciting right away that's why yesterday

we've already installed the labs and vital plin to not rely on the stock instruments so today I've prepared for you an amazing collection of drum sounds

and these sounds are used by top tier artists worldwide so that you have the best starting point possible and spoiler alert in the music production Community buying sample packs in specific Styles

is pretty common but the one you get at the end of this video we made pretty huge so you will not have to spend any extra money for any other sample pack in the coming months this Loop we've made

yesterday [Music] it feels a little bit troppy so let's build trap drums we could build in the same pattern as we have here but since

it's pretty long we would have to like fill all of the drums over and we didn't really need that much usually only four beats as you can see every beat is

distinguished by different color so what we can do is click on the Plus or scroll up and it will pop up another pattern for us and we can build the drums over here you probably also like to hear the

drums on top of the instrumental so what we can do is go back and choose the pattern one and place it in our playlist View and then scroll up and place

another pattern just like that and then just basically duplicate it so we have it four times so whatever we build right now as you can see it pops up in the

arrangement view as well now we can just go and turn this song mode so we can hear both patterns at the same time let's use those St drums first and then

I'll show you how big of a difference using quality sound makes so trap drums will start with a high head this is this kind of sound and we can go and right

click on the insert and here you'll find a couple of automatic FS to save a little bit of time so as you can see it just fi every second

step then for the snur which sounds like that we'll put it on beat number three and beat number seven and since each

beat starts with the new color so we'll place it on one two 3 four and then it repeats so it's 5 six s right so we can just leave it like that

[Music] then for the kick drum you can place it on any start of the beat or half of the beat where it feels good for you usually

the drums you know create the groove and the Rhythm so you want to show people where's the start of the beat that's why I'll put the kick which is like the fundamental of your drums on the starting

[Music] beat let's turn the down our instruments a little

[Music] bit doesn't sound any good at all because our drum pattern especially the

kick should be at least two bars long and for now we just have it one bar long and the bars you can clearly see in the arrangement view you can see 1 2 3 4 four and the beats are the vertical

lines in between and then beats you also have visible in the channel rack easily looking by the color so that we have four beats in a bar and four steps in a

beat so what we can do is remove those two patterns and extend them so we have it double size like that and now we need

to add more High heads like this as you can see in Arrangement also changed so now we also add a snare 1 2 3 4 5 6 and

seven so we place it here and then let's make a variation of the Krum

[Music] right so we can place it anywhere on the half or the starting so let's maybe try

something random like [Music]

that right [Music] Don't Go Over the Top drums especially in trap music are only to keep the

rhythm going and not necessarily be in the Highlight right so something easier like that definitely

[Music] better if you like to also create a little bit longer variation so for example in this part create drums as we

have have right now and here just make a variation of the kick what you can do is click on the pattern and make it unique it will now rename it to the pattern

number three another thing you could do is also just go into the pattern options and clone it right so it will would create another one we already have it

here so let's make a kick variation like this maybe we can just go with some

extra kicks like this at the end

[Music] right we keep it very simple with a snare and hat for now and just play

around with the kick now let's change up the drum sounds okay trust me when I say this but there are many trucks with as simple drum pattern like this one but

just use amazing sounds so how do we install the sample packs first as we get today downloads you'll see some sample packs inside they usually look like this we have different types of sounds sorted

in different folders so just take the sample packs and place them somewhere on your computer where you know you'll not be touching them anymore because if you do change the path FL will not know where to look for them right so keep

them in one place and then just simply drag and drop them into your browser super easy we need to do this one by one and you can see we have those two packs

already here so let's take this the Supreme drums volume one and first find a cool Kick Drum you can open the folder and just with your arrow down scroll through the

sounds let's take the kick one and just simply drag it over the current Ki we had now let's exchange a SN we look for

snner or clap they usually sound pretty similar claps are more highend Focus so a little bit more bright and snars are a little bit more

Punchy let's take this one and now let's exchange the Hat let's go for a closed hat and drag it [Music]

over if you don't like the sound you can quickly exchange it using shift an arrow up or down in your browser while playing the song so it will automatically

exchange like

[Music] this much better let's check what we

started [Music] with and now here we have [Music]

very very simple but already much better just after exchanging the samples now let's go and create some high head rols FL has a graph editor built in that

allows you to quickly do that let's open it up and whatever Channel you have marked here you'll be able to quickly change it so for example you can see

that not Pitch it opens up a Mini piano roll right so exactly the same thing that you would see see inside the piano roll if you open up manually so inside

we have this repeat function that allows you to quickly create a cool rolls like this let's make it play only the pattern there are no rules for where to make

rolls you should make it where you think it sounds good so play around but one framework that I like to use is change something every four bits so we have 1 2

3 4 we change something here 1 2 3 4 we change something here or if it sounds better somewhere else let's Place one repeat over here like

that it works because we create a contrast so in these three beats we create like the fundamental of the hard pattern so you get used to kind of of

this Rhythm then you change something up so you like tickle the ears and then you do very similar thing over here so you keep the same pattern for two beats and then change it up at the end so don't go

over the top and don't try to like you know Place stuff like that so for example here sounds really nice as well even though we put the Roll

in the second bit but now I would delete the other one to not cramp up the hat with too many rolls now you can of course do a little

bit different things as well here let's go to note pitch and we had the roll somewhere over here so let's change the pitch and check what it does

[Music] [Music] as you can see we only made this change in the pattern number three so we would technically need to go to the pattern

two and apply those changes as well however we can just go to the pattern three Mark the hot pattern click contrl and C go to the PN two and paste it so

if you open now the the graph you'll see all the changes applied as [Music] well and the last thing for hats that I

think you should know about is the velocity where varying the velocity of your hats will also bring them to life so you don't want to sound too robotic I would put down the velocity of every

other one it doesn't have to be perfect even if it's not perfect it's better because it's more human right so we would have something like that a bit less maybe

[Music] even right very very subtle but creates a simple [Music]

difference in the pattern two we could also change a little bit of the rolls so

that they're not too repetitive

[Music] perfect now we can see that we only can have three elements and the beat starts

to sound pretty good let's add some different elements for example perks or rims work very good also claps so perk Rim clap something that

will put as an additional element to like spice the drum Loop up so let's replace this clap over here also similarly as we've done with hat

rolls we'll make the change somewhere around the fourth bit so here and here a very generic pattern is to put the clap off bit on the beat four and five

[Music] now we can change the sound right so we have a little bit of variation the PN two and

three in jums like this a lot of the vibe comes from the hats if we were to exchange the hat and make a pattern where we skip two and repeat the pattern

so we now repeat the pattern again and again [Music] we got drill Vibes right away with stuff

like drillo we delay the snare and place it on the eighth bat instead of the seventh and add one Krum somewhere at the end as well so maybe eighth or

seventh or let's do [Music] both right so if we are saying on this

topic of trap drums it's definitely a good idea to touch slightly upon 88s so 8 is very similar to bass that we used

yesterday but it got really popular to not use it as an instrument like we used yesterday vital right but just use a

sample as the instrument which is possible we can just choose one that we like let's drag it over to our playlist and turn on the piano roll I also change

from song to pattern so you can just try it out an 808 usually behaves similar to a kick drum sometimes people even not use

ayrum at all when they use a to8 base and a to8 base depending on what C progression you made you also can just simply follow the root progression but

follow also the rhythm of your Ki drum so we have Krum on the beat number six so 1 2 3 4 5 6 we have a 808 here so

let's try it out it would require some mixing that will'll get into tomorrow let's remove that for now and create another pattern

and we'll create some simple ADM drums house to be exact let's also use some stock drums first let's open packs go to

drums and just choose a Kick Drum and can just drag them like that so we had previously kick snur closed hat so you just need a

snare let's take this one and for the hats so we have three elements so far if you hold shift and scroll up you can change

the placement so let's put them all the way to the app so you can clearly see them and the house drums we just make with for to the floor beat so we can just fill each four

steps then we add a clap on beat number two and beat number four then we add closed half every off bit so every off

beat and then we can also add a percussion element like we had inside the pattern three as we can remember we can do similar thing we've

done with the rim let's take some precaution element we'll again place it on offbeat but the the problem is that again the drum pattern here is just one bar long

and as you remember at least two bars or four bars is best so we can make variations we can just place an extra kick and make it fill each four steps

and it will extend the pattern for one extra bar and for the off percussion elements we'll do it again somewhere at the end right so let's place it like

this would work if you make it hit just before the next beat you will create this popular disco effect we can also introduce some more

closed hats that work similarly to our Cloud that we have here we'll use a little bit shorter hat to mimic how would real jumps work right

so high head can be opened or closed that's why we have here open head and we can add a close hat somewhere in between what we've done is four to the

floor kick Every Beat then every second beat we place a snur or a clap then every offbeat we put an open hat and then we add a couple of percussion

elements on those steps that come just before now let's replace those Sands with something from our Park we have the prism ADM drums theer let's start with a kick

drum let's take this one for the clap whatever you choose from those PS will be way better than anything

[Music] else then we have our open hat let's take this one closed hat let's take this one sounds good and for the

off perk let's take some Rim now before we play this house drums love swing what swing does is basically it takes all the notes that are neither

onbeat or offbeat and delays them slightly over by a couple of milliseconds creating so-called swing

you can enable it here by turning up this knob we can go with something like 40% sounds pretty nice let's also add another snare which is a pretty common

tactic to give more punch to your drums exactly by by layering different sounds together especially claps you never layer kicks sometimes you just can layer

claps or open hats or precussion elements just to add more

[Music] depth same thing you can do with the has so let's layer it with another one that ideally sounds a little bit different so

if we layer it with a hat that's brighter like this one we'll get an interesting result definitely you can also pound them a little bit to the left and right so both

layers are not in the same place in your headphones basically definitely adds a little bit of excitement right this is what we started with and those were pretty good

sounds already and now this is what we've got by just exchanging with pretty much random samples from the pack now you can start improvising with your other

instruments let's add something very simple like this just for fun bases love offbeat as well especially in house drums so you can

just make a simple variation like this let's mark it and hit contrl and B it will duplicate it just like this as you remember from the heart

rolls we had this velocity the same thing you'll also find inside the piano roll over here in the control section you can also find different parameters

like pan right so if the note is playing on the left or right ear and to be honest I only use note pan or note veloc never anything else so with the velocity

we could maybe Mark all of those notes that we want to change the velocity for and holding all and scroll down take them

[Music] down okay having fun with this I leave to you the question you're definitely

burning to ask is how do I know what kind of sounds to use and you know already how important that is other than getting a high quality sample pack like this one there's no shortcut to learning

how to distinguish what sound is good or bad the more you practice and compare your music to professional Productions the better you'll become at choosing the right sounds so there's no shortcut for

that other than using a great pack right from the start different music Styles require different sounds so keep trying a different sample until it sounds right

and it's much better to have a few great sounds than lots of okay ones some producers even reuse the same drum samples throughout the albums constantly

and it's not a bad practice you should and definitely will build your Unique Style and drums are okay to reuse throughout your tracks now let's get into a little bit of arrangement we can

already arrange an instrumental as simple as we've got so far [Music]

now let's zoom using alt and scroll up and control scroll up this will be how you'll be looking at all of the patterns in Arrangement view so as you can see we

can for example choose one pattern to play at the beginning like [Music] this right and then just repeat the

pattern but the problem is that we've cramped everything all the instruments inside basically two patterns okay so to have an easy time making a cool Arrangement the best it would be if we

had every element so every instrument or drum hit in a separate pattern yes it can get a little bit messier than what we've got so far but let's deal with it

so the best way is just to go to pattern settings and split by Channel as you can see it will put up all the elements separately and what we can also do since

those two patterns they kind of work as one what we can do is group them so we can just mark them and hit surprise controll and G okay we still have the

previous ones as you can see it just added this new pattern which basically has both of our patterns of drums and now we can also go and split it by

channel so now we'll have something like this so let's title it up because it puts all the patterns on top of each other so now we have kick Dr

snur our Rim element and hats so to make it pretty if you want you can always just rename the trucks or rename just the patterns right this is for everyone that just loves beautiful projects so

you can just go right click on the track and rame so we could call this track Kick Drum and now we can just also a color for it accept if you want we can

also Aon name the clips that are inside of this track so instead of mix Elite Supreme kick one we'll have just kick so if we right click and AO name Clips it

will pop up like this I'll do all of them so we have green instruments red drums now we'll mark everything and hit

control and B for bucate should be duplicate right you can make it however long you want I think around 2 minutes will be perfect and now we'll take the mute tool and mute

everything we have okay we'll do socalled additive Arrangement where where we just add stuff in we keep the mute tool on and here is a simple rough

overview of how we can start for the first four bars we have an introduction because we want our arrangement to work as if we were taking someone by hand experiencing our song we don't want to

like you know slap everything right away and go for it we'd like to introduce the mood first and then go slowly so what we can do to help ourselves is to add some markers so we know oh this is intro and

then we'll have something else we can add a marker you can do that by going to playlist options and going to time markers and add one for 16 first bars

we'll have an intro and then after 16 bars we'll have a hook we have a full indepth course just about Arrangements because it's very exciting topic for now

please just follow along so after another 16 bars we'll have a verse let's say we call it verse or breakdown since we are kind of like making a vocal is song we'll name it verse and now we'll

add another hook now it doesn't really matter you could call this verse and this hook and this verse we just want to differentiate between what will be changing over here and now here since we are just finishing we'll have an ultra

okay if you'd like to make your track longer then you would basically for example take the outro over here and here would have verse two right but we'll just make it a little bit shorter

because 2 minutes for a track like this I think it's enough and now for the introduction I like to to introduce with just the meat of our track so our piano

right plaque is kind of like a lead element and Bas just fills out everything else for the whole intro we have the piano of course and then usually after four or eight bars we

introduce some change so in the eighth bar I would introduce plaque and in the 13th bar I would introduce base so we have like it's slowly going up okay and

then for the hook we definitely want to go all in with all the Dr and all in of course with all the elements let's play to check what we've got so

far we can also make the track a little bit faster by going to 140 because trap

is usually around 140 and not 130

[Music]

okay so together with the base we could introduce for example a hat or Rim doesn't matter we just like to instead of going you know straight all in into the hook we would introduce one element

before maybe even a kick or even a snare it doesn't matter whatever sounds better to you but we just want to tease people with the drums okay

[Music] maybe

[Music]

hat then for the verse let's leave the piano definitely and maybe all the instruments

[Music] okay now after those eight bars we again

need some change we could also make the change after the first four bars but let's make it after eight bars so we'll introduce hat again and again on the

hook we'll have full-blown instrumental again like this okay [Music] we can make it with

[Music] Rim also if you want inside the first

you can keep one other element that is not in the second half of the verse that

will introduce some

[Music] contrast would work I think I'll just

keep it like it was before and then for the [Music] outro let's maybe just leave only the

plaque and the base because we want to because we want to ease everything out right we don't want to abruptly stop with everything like

[Music] this could sound perfectly fine

[Music] so when it comes to arranging trap beat

like this one we have here it's a tricky thing because it's vocal focused right so it will be up to the person who would be singing or wrapping over this beat to decide how long they want to be so this

is a rough arrangement for purpose so then we can get some vocals on top of this instrumental and the side for the final Arrangement if you're like hey Max I don't want to be figuring out the

proper Arrangement on my my own I want to have like a proven framework for creating best arrangements and if you want to hack your way into making arrangements like this or not even

arranging but producing overall the trick is to use a reference track having a reference track is one of the most powerful strategies to level up quickly a reference track can be any track that

you like a lot that's in the same style as the track you're making so let's say I have a track that I really like and I will drop it directly from the Explorer then let's create a new Arrangement so

we don't screw up this one this is also a handy trick I don't really use it that often but we can definitely work with this so let's mute everything okay and

just using shift and scroll up put our track at the very top first we need to make sure that this track is in the same BPM as our track if

you've taken a popular track you can just Google what's the BPM of XY Z or you can also tap the tempo so so let's play the track and open the tempo Tapper

and we'll just tap to the tempo of the sample so let's play the [Music] song This is the tempo of our track so we can just close this you can see that

the tempo also changed over here and let's play the track to check if it's right together with the metronome

[Music] you can see that all of those hits line up so we are good to go now what we'll do is first delete all of those markers

that we've previously made because now we'll be adding new markers wherever anything changes in the track so as you can see even by the way form here we

have an intro let's say just plaque okay we'll describe it like that there was some base as well but let's just go on now here we have same just more hats

right I could also write some [Music] percussion now here we have hook

definitely all drums drums base and all [Music] instruments you can see see we have a change over here as

[Music] well slight change in instruments but everything stays the

[Music] same just FL and then at the end we have all again okay this truck is actually a loop I've made previously it's not perfectly arranged I just took

it so you can check that this is how it can be done then you can just remove the song speed it up to whatever it was before over here and then just follow

your notes so intro we had just plug so we can just enable the [Music] plug with hats

[Music] [Music] right and this is how you could just go by following your notes if you go with

the technique we started with which is additive Arrangement right we copied everything muted it and then started to add in real time as we hear what we think should come you will definitely

get pretty cool results and this will also be unique to you and you will not be influenced by any other tracks and maybe Define your Unique Style the last thing when it comes to Arrangement is

using some effects like Transitions and sweep downs and sweep UPS so cool thing about playlist is those kind of effect

samples or symbols we can drag directly into our playlist so [Music] let's so let's choose one and drag it

over we can place it wherever our hook starts right so we have something like this right now [Music] sounds pretty awful because it's way too

loud to change that you remember in Channel rack we had this knob to change the volume but now you can see everything disappeared from the channel rack that's because we've added audio

into the playlist to open what we had previously for example in hats you would need to go and change the view from audio to All For example and you'll see

all of the instruments you've added yes you could change the volume in the channel rack because Channel rack contains all the files that you've brought to your project always anything

you put in whether it's through the browser directly to the playlist or an instrument or a sample directly into Channel rack it always shows it if you

put it on all so yes we can change the volume of this crash here but you can also just double click on the waveform and it will show you this sampler it has a couple of options but the most

important for for now that we are interested in is the volume you can just take it [Music]

down right now let's take some effects we can place it at the beginning of the [Music] truck and also make it way

quieter we can also use another one make it [Music] quieter you could also use those handles

over here that allow you to fade in the sample so we can place it a little bit earlier so it nicely fades in like a filter

[Music] as you can see I'm all the time using control and ALT I'm keeping my hands on control and ALT and my scroll wheel at

all times so I can quickly zoom in and zoom out and whenever I want to change where the song plays from I'm just changing it on the timeline so for today's homework I want

you to create at least one pattern in trap or ADM Style just as we created today that fits into the loop you've created on day two then play around with different samples from today's pack to

see which one fits best you need to trust your guts here then put all of them into the playlist split the patterns by Channel please color Cod it will be much less overwhelming and then

create a very simple structure using the additive Arrangement trick I showed you today where every eight or 16 bars you add different elements today we are going to take

quite a leap and learn how to make whatever you create sound professional we are getting into the fourth step of the music producer workflow which is

mixing mixing is an in-depth process that takes years to master but today I have a stepbystep framework that you can follow every time you want to make your trunck sound better I'm sure that if you

keep watching through and apply what you learn in this 7-Day course and hopefully join the mix Elite Academy where you can get me and my team to personally take you by hand you're going to get insanely

good in no time so the better your production is the less work will need to be doing while mixing to make it sound good the more elements you use in your song the more moving parts so the more

sound problems there will be to fix and the less elements naturally there will be less problems but there's a limit right if you remember from day two we want our elements to be occupying the

full frequency spectrum so we want to have a good balance between elements in our track so not too little elements to not make our song feel empty but at the

same time we don't want to over produce which is a common mistake beginners producers do feeling that they need to add more and more elements and cramping up their mix and just basically making a

big mess there are four sacred principles of mixing that I like to call the hly quad mixing formula I want you to remember it and always follow it when

you're mixing and trying to make your music s better in the first place of any mix is volume so setting the volume of every element right that can be by moving the knobs you see in the channel

Rack or the faders in the mixer track or anywhere else where you can control the volume second is Equalization every sound as you know takes up space in the frequency spectrum some sounds are low

like Basse some are high like symbols we use a tool called EQ that allows us to remove or boost specific frequencies that we want to make the mix cleaner and

make sure that each sound has its own spot in the frequency spectrum third principle is Dynamics every element especially like drums move between loud

and soft moments we use a tool called compressor to compress these Dynamics and smooth them out so it feels consistent and controlled and fourth

principle is space some sounds feel close and some feel far away we use Reverb to add depth and panning to place

sounds left or right or Center creating a Spacey stereo image of your track since yesterday we've made a trap instrumental today we'll try to mix an ADM song I tried to keep it very simple

but the process still applies to any other style you produce let's first just take a look at this project so you know what's going on in here you can see the kick clap hats shakers and fills those

are our drums this is similar what we've done yesterday we colorcoded all over our drums however instead of putting all the drums into patterns as we done

yesterday I've put them directly into the playlist this is completely up to you and up to your preference whenever I have more complicated drums like in trap music or R&B I like to build my drums

inside patterns if I have less complicated drums that just loop on repeat and repeat I like to put them directly into the playlist just as yesterday we' put the effects and

crashes but it doesn't have to be like this for example this clap I left in a pattern just so you can see that both ways are possible and also I've added a

Shaker Loop which is a common practice to add more depth into your jums as you remember yesterday we've created a simple ADM house drum Loop and added

some percussion but on top of that you can always layer it with more percussion elements like this Shaker I'll hit control on my keyboard and left click the trun to Sol it so you can

hear inside yes back if you explor it you'll find the loops section which can level up your drum Loops a little bit further then we have

a simple base pattern exactly just as we've done on the second day as you can see we have the pattern with the Basse let me solow it so you can hear

[Music] it then we have pluy arp following a simple chord pattern very very similar to what we've done on the

first day then we have a re base which is exactly the same type of sound that we use on the second [Music] day very similar and then we have a

couple effects elements that we've already touched upon on yesterday so for example this brass and crash

and then I just made a very very simple Arrangement using the technique from yesterday so I just copied everything and then deleted whatever feels right and then added just those crashes and

those additional elements because as you can see everything is completely the same in this part of the track as you can see and this part every element is

playing at once right so very very simple track it will sound very very bad because it's completely plain I have not change anything to make it similar to how it would sound for you as you

produce without any mixing [Music] [Music]

and let's take a look at this on here when everything is playing at [Music] once so very simple track We have basically all the elements that we've

already uncovered and again whatever style you produce please follow along the process is always exactly the same so first we start with volume I will

just focus on this part of the track for now so we can have all elements playing at [Music]

once and we need to balance the volumes first I always start with attenuating sounds that feel way too loud the most

important parts are always your drums and your main sound or like main lead whatever makes your track your track right so it could be Melody it could be

a vocal we want to make those element most important that's why we'll make them the loudest we definitely want our kick to play the main role first and then for us the base plays the melodic

role here we want to make those two elements stand out we don't have to necessarily boost them right away what you can do is just attenuate or lower the volume of the order stuff and that's

what I will always start with is by attenuating unnecessary elements that are too loud so for sure the strings here [Applause]

they're way too loud so let's double click and bring the volume [Music] down they are just a background element similar to this

brass if you click on the waveform it will play for you so we can just lower the volume here and also this crush is definitely way too loud stuff like this we don't really want to keep in front of the

listener so not too loud [Music] I see that this effect

also it's a little bit too [Music] loud now I think the kick needs to be brought up a little bit because it dieses out under everything and we want

it to be in the front so let's boost it a little bit [Music]

and now this is getting harder and harder because it starts to sound better and better that's why you sometimes need to just close your eyes and listen to

what bothers you in this track the [Music]

most I think the Hat now is a little bit too loud so let's take it down [Music] now we can definitely bring up the base

a little bit as you can see we have three layers of Base let's listen to how they sound similar to how we layered claps yesterday [Music]

[Music] we can bring all of those together a

little

[Music]

bit okay now we have those effects that take too much volume in our mix [Music]

if you have troubles deciding which instrument to attenuate next you can just mute those elements one by one and check how it sounds if it sounds better or worse and if the track is getting

completely empty we still need it but a little bit less or was it even not necessary to add this element right if it sounds better without the element you can definitely just remove it there's nothing wrong in adding elements and

just deciding after two hours of production that oh you don't actually need this right remember about this because the moment you add an element you get used to it you'll start to like

have feelings to this instrument so you will not want to say goodbye but yeah sometimes we need to say goodbye

[Music]

right I would take it down slightly

[Music] maybe bring up the clap or this

one or [Music] both always play around with the volume

knob and just see if it sounds better or

worse

[Music]

right I feel like we've done a pretty good job in setting up the volumes let's now get into Equalization and this is where the fun actually starts because

we'll be connecting everything to our mixer if you open your channel rack you'll see we have not connected anything yet that's why what we can do is just double click on the selector and

hit Control Plus l or go to channel options and assign selected to free mixer trucks as you can see we now have

a number next to every single Channel if we go and open the mixer you will see that now before it looked like this all the channels were gray now we even have

all of them colorcoded that's why I recommended you yesterday to color code everything because it can get messy if you don't do it and it's much more fun to produce if you don't create a huge

mess in your project here on the top you can change the view of the mixer track I will change it to large so we can easily distinguish all of those mixer tracks and can easily see those and you can

also change the order of them if you hold shift and scroll exactly the same process as you can do in your Arrangement or Channel

[Music] rack you can see every element signal going through and then it is rooted to the master you can see this line over

going down and going to the master let's focus on just one of them depending on which look you choose if you choose white you'll see all of those little buttons and if you choose for example

extra large might get hidden so just extend it you should see all of those so on the very top we have the name and the number the number never changes so we

can always know which track it is but of course the signal changes here right if we change it you can see the number changes in the channel rack on the very top we have panning so where we play the

instrument through left ear or right ear the same knob is here but those are not connected so if you change it to the left it doesn't change

here this is basically changing the panning on the channel level instead of the mixer level then you have the volume [Music]

fader it is also independent from the channel level volume as you can see it doesn't change the Channel volume that's why you can change volume here or change

the volume here I personally prefer doing it on the channel level but I know people that prefer doing it on the mixer level so this is up to you the reason why I do it like this is because when

producing I immediately change the volume of the instrument because I already have in my head the volume I would like this specific element to be at so I don't have to go and Link the

instrument to a new mixer track and then take it down it's just a quicker workflow that way we'll also use those f ERS to do fine tuning of the volume later next you'll see the track latency

button you will never use this button unless you want to do some pre-laying your instrument to play a little bit earlier without changing it in the patterns or if you're for example making

hip hop and want to like delay your hat a little bit so it feels like dragging to make kind of a swing effect right but you never use this Buton actually you might see that it's highlighted for both

main Basse and arbs that's because we are using a VST plugin for those two instruments and for all of the rest we are using samples and F just needs to

compensate so it just lets you know that hey we have 0.02 milliseconds of compensation here nothing to worry about then we have arm dis recording which

allows you to if you click arm and then choosing your input to record audio directly into Apple Studio we'll take care of that tomorrow when we'll be

covering recording and mixing vocals then we have reverse polarity button that will not be any useful for you especially if you're starting out it simply reverses the polarity of the

waveform it could be useful in moment where some of your waves of your sound are cancelling each other out we will not get into this in this course and it will not be any useful for you anytime

in the near future so don't worry about this and then we have swipe left and right chnnel which will make basically everything that was on the left ear play on the right ear so if if we put it on

all the way to the left and click the swap left and right channels it will play on the right here I've never used this pattern and then almost at the end we have stereo separation which is very

important especially in the last step of mixing when we'll be shaping the stereo image when we put it all the way to the left it separates the channels so

whatever is on the left ear makes it even more on the left ear and what's on the right even more on the right [Music]

kind of makes it sound a little bit wider we rather use this feature to maybe merge the sound that means whatever was on the left and right ear

we merge a little bit so it sounds more as it was mono you can hear the [Music]

difference stereo is when we have left and right signals for example your left and right speaker play slightly different signal so it makes the sound

stereo right so we have a little bit of the difference when it's something is mono still we have both speakers playing but they play the exact same waveform

that's why it feels like it's coming more from the front right if you have speakers and play something mono it feels like it's coming right in front of you and if we unmerge it it becomes more

more [Music] surrounding and then we have the arrow

that tells us where the channel is connected to that means it's sending the signal to the master mixer Tru meaning that whatever place here also place on

Master Tru which is obvious if we unconnected it from the master Tru we won't hear anything because our headphones are connected to the master track right like we always hear whatever

is on the master track but we missed very important space you can see this is the preview of our effect slots that we have here as you can see we have 10

effect slots each with a mute button similar to those in the arrangement View and in the channel R and if you rightclick a slot it will show you all

the effects that you have installed on your computer you can also left click and it will show you all the plugins in the list form we won't be using all of the slots we usually just be using a

couple of them and only if the element needs some fixing so if you come back to our holy quad mixing formula the first step was volume which we have already

taken care of then the step two is Equalization so in the first slot we would apply an equalizer then the third step was about Dynamics and compression

so in the second slot we would apply a compressor and the fourth step was about space so in this slot number three we would apply Reverb for example if you

remember from the beginning but all that only if the sound requires it so we never want to apply effects just for the sake of it we always have intention

behind it unless you want to experiment of course this is also a part of the creative process again if your production is well done and of course also depending on the quality of your

instruments you chose it might happen that you don't have to apply any effects at all if you've adjusted the volume right if you remember the labs instruments we used they sounded pretty

nice already if we chose a really raw recording of a piano we would need to apply some effects to make it sound better make it sound nicer we would use more of those slots apply more effects

that's why starting with great quality sounds is so important then at the end of the slots we have a simple equalizer built in we can control it by dragging our Mouse so if you'd like to quickly

apply some eqing you can do it right here but I personally never actually use this equalizer over here I prefer to have a little bit more control by using

an equalizer inside of the effects slot important thing before we start eing since it's our second step in our formula is the signal flow so we start

with whatever is in our channel so your instrument and the knobs over here the panning and volume then the signal goes

all all the way to our mixer track starting with effect slots so whatever we apply first in the effect slots we go

from top to bottom so if we apply EQ then we apply compressor the sound will first get equalized and only then compressed so we go from top to bottom

this is the signal flow then the signal hits The Equalizer that is built in into FL again I don't really use it and only after the sound travels through all of

those effect slots we start to go through the effects that we have directly on our mixer so the fader right

and the stereo merge knob all the way to the master truck and our headphones so we've got our volume right now let's start the eing process I like to start with elements that are low and focused

meaning that they are mostly present in the low frequencies in that case this will be our base so we can right click and write EQ and you will see the parametric eq2 this is the one we'll be

using when it comes to eqing now we are going to focus only on this here you can nicely see that we have sub base low mid

mids High mids presence which is just basically a part of hits and then trebles this is the whole spectrum of

human hearing so all music lies in these frequencies so sub frequencies you mostly feel rather than hear and they

are as you can see from 20 or 30 to 80 HZ if you hover your mouse and check the hint panel it will show you the exact Hertz amount let's Sol the base so I

control and left click on the [Music] base I also like to enable the heat map

so we can go to the options and heat map enable [Music]

you can clearly see where the instrument is mostly present and you can see that this area over here is very very highlighted there are many different equalizing tools this one has seven

so-called bands and you can hold and drag to boost or attenuate the specific [Music]

frequencies and scroll up or down to make this so-called Bell EQ because it I don't know looks like a bell make it narrower or wider the more narrow you

make it the more as we call it surgical you would go surgical because you're just more precise with the specific frequencies you're

[Music] boosting in today's downloads you will find an amazing infographic with tips

specific to each each frequency band and how to EQ your instruments accordingly not every instrument needs to be eqed but mainly what we do with EQ is find

problems okay so if there's some problematic frequencies that are harsh or that we basically don't want we can eliminate those every element in your

track will be occupying some of those frequencies and we usually want to clean up one element from unnecessary frequencies like this so that we create

space for the other elements or second way we can use the EQ is to sculpt the sound in a way you want it to sound for example the sub frequencies you feel and

you definitely want a lot of them in your base because in this case we have our subbase and Base plane together you can also see that our base has some of

the trebles and mids right you can hear it playing in the whole frequency spectrum also heat map shows it to you if we take down the seventh band you can

see that we create some kind of shelf right so we attenuate all the sounds that come after the band band number one does the exact same thing but from the

left and all of the bands in the middle just our normal Bell type and you can see it by looking at these logos here

you can hold your mouse over them and change how it behaves for example we can make it work as a low pass so we completely remove all the frequencies

after the band you can see [Music] that now we are leaving basically only the sub frequencies if we come back to shelf can see

that we still hear a little bit of these frequencies anyway so if you'd like to completely remove them you would choose something like High cut because we are

cutting the highs or it's also called Low pass because we would let the lows pass if You' like to sculpt [Music] it for example you don't like the

presence area of your main [Music] base you can attenuate it like this I would like maybe a little bit more troubles in this sound so we can

bring it up now the problems will start to appear when we play it together with different sounds in your track for example in this case we have a couple of layers of the

base so let's take a listen to another layer let's apply EQ also on [Music]

it you can also see that we have a ton of sub frequences in this sound to together [Music]

the problem that we have here is that we never want to layer the sub frequencies your low range of your frequency spectrum in your song is very vulnerable

for all kinds of issues we want to have an instrument playing there but we want to keep it minimal because again this area is very very sensitive so what we

need to do is choose which one of those bases we want to play the sub frequency range only one of them can play it at the same time that's why I would just

take an EQ and change the first band instead of low shelf like this into low cut so this is a low cut because we are cutting the lows or some also like to

call it high pass so we let pass the high frequencies and you can see that we start to slowly roll off the frequencies

[Music] now we just want to make sure that no other instrument plays sub not necessarily base but you can see that we roll off the frequencies pretty slow

right so we start from low mids and cut it quite slowly right so we would like to ideally cut it quicker this is what we have the steepness level for this is

this dot over here we can take it up or down it there are different shapes of the steepness we can put it to steep number four you can also change it by

right clicking on the band and changing the type from high pass low pass and order as well right so we have steep four and now we can basically roll off

the frequencies like this don't go into very very steep modes like that because the steeper you go the more artifacts and less natural your signal will sound

so we just want to slowly maybe start to roll off so when we start the sub frequencies there's no sub frequencies [Music]

playing much better we have now you can hear a lot of Base but no sap so together they now sound like [Music] that if you'd like for example this

layer to have a little bit more mids you can boost them just a little bit I would never suggest boosting anything over about 6 DB since it's much better and

you'll end up with a cleaner mix if you instead attenuate and remove move what's wrong instead of trying to boost what's good okay so sure you can boost but

don't overdo it unless it's for Creative [Music] purposes and now let's go to the bus number

three let's apply an EQ as well you can see again we have a ton of sub we don't want it in any other

instrument rather than one of them so we'll do the same process I change it to low cut by choosing it from here and to a little bit steeper

mode now let's play all of those [Music] together mixing is all about those tiny

differences and if you get your lowend right you'll have a great Foundation for the rest of your mix so when you are in the eing stage of the mixing you start with the low end since it's the most

sensitive then you go into mid frequencies and Tres so now what we've got next is our arbs seems like there are some unnecessary low frequencies there just

to be safe we can also just roughly remove them even though the meat of our ARP so the area that they focus on is somewhere here

right I can still see that some of the sub is coming through so we clean it you can see that the ARP is getting

into our low mid-range and since we want to keep it minimal you'll see that in the infographic you get in today's downloads that's why we maybe could make it a little bit

steeper keep your eye on this range then we have brass which plays in the beginning this is more kind of like a impact effect but it still might have

some subbase so in this case we don't have it that much you could clean it maybe even with just this builtin EQ inside of FL if you want just be sure so

in that case we would be just left with sculpting the sound as we want but this sample itself is already processed in a way that I like so will

not be fting it in a way then we have the strings let's see what I think is Harsh is this area in the travels when you're making changes like

this when you have your instruments soloed there is a new problem people will never be listening to your elements soloed right they will always be listening to the full mix so sometimes

even though this strings feel harsh you would for example like to attenuate some of the traveles in the mix it might sound actually really good so make sure

to always check if the changes you do especially with EQ fit the overall mix I think we just need to attenuate the overall volume of the strings and not necessarily touch any of the E

because this sound pretty nicely fills out the background then we have the Reese this guy definitely has a ton of

sub that we also want to cut so I change it to hypers and remove slightly some of the base so I I'm used to just setting

it to Steep and then changing so we can go gentle more gentle like that because this also fills out a tone of stereo space in our

[Music] mix and [Music] before if we leave it like that it will definitely be overwhelming the whole mix

especially when playing with all of those base shots we have here [Music] right then we are left with the plug again I don't think we have to do

anything here if you really want you can also make sure it doesn't have any sub let's see how all of this sounds together so

[Music] [Music] far perfect now we have our drums let's check what we can do with the EQ in our

kick you can see that definitely we have sa we never want to remove any sub from the kick drum because in a couple of moments when we get into the Dynamics we'll apply a different technique that

will take care of that problem so with the Ki drum I first of course want to choose a great sample right and then

sculpt it so sculpt the tonal balance or the frequency spectrum to make it play nicer with my track so for example if you'd like to have

more presence in your kick you would increase the Hits and The Presence area or the travels if you like a little bit more punch you

could try out increasing a little bit of the base depending of course what sample you chose Kik has its punch in this base to low mid area so if your kick sample has

a ton of punch if you boost this range you can overwhelm your mix and just make it so-called mdy a mdy mix is just when you feel like everything is fighting with each other and there's no clarity

in your mix this kick if we enable the heat map this kick already has pretty minimal amount of this low mids but if you feel like your kick is Muddy especially if

you're listening on speakers you just can attenuate this range here never ever increase the low shelf like this even though it might sound cool we rarely use

this low shelf to boost the subrange like this we usually just use a slight Bell to increase area over here and if you feel like your kick really lacks the

subbase sure you can also boost it a little bit but never go over the top like that it's much better to choose a different sample if you feel like you really need to boost this area in the

sub range also while we are on it sometimes people boost the kick too much and then their whole track is ruined just because they had applied a limiter

on their Master F Studio does that by default so when you're mixing make sure that your master truck is completely empty especially without any limiter at

the end so for the kick drum we want to just sculpt the frequencies to make it fit better in our track now we get into the claps we have three layers of claps one that's very

very short and creates this transient to make the claps cut for the mix and we have Layer Two

we can apply EQ and check that it has a little bit of this punch overall snars and claps have their punch in the lit so this layer has this

kind of you know punch so it just has body right the clap has body and then we have the third layer which is if we check more focused also on high mids and

traveles the reason why I chose three layers here is that one creates this transient right second one is a little bit pre- delayed as you can see it's off grid and

play little bit before the order claps that creates an interesting layer to the clap move out so it has some body and also is

pretty late and the third layer is just an extra one to make it fit better in the mix you don't have to layer your claps or SNS but try it out it can definitely make your drums more

interesting and have more depth so drums together for now doesn't sound perfect but in the mix it does a good job then we have the Shaker

loop it's already a pre-made Loop so I don't think there's anything to sculpt here it's pretty good sounding already then we have

hats again there's no need to EQ everything but if you feel like for example your hats have some Harish frequencies that hurt your ear you can take a bell band like that and by

boosting it a little bit and dragging it left and right you can find the highest frequency that you can later just attenuate right so let's try you can see that there's a small

Peak that we can maybe take down a little bit I like to just use this fader so I'm sure I'm in the same space let's take a listen before and after and

after right we got rid of this weird harsh Peak which might sound better or worse in the mix this is what we always need to check right I think we can just slower it a little

bit but it doesn't make a ton of difference in the hall mix then the f is just just a little sample here so you don't need to redo anything and for the

effects I usually don't apply any eing on those unless the crush effect effects have some unnecessary sub which we can

check I don't see or hear any so we can just leave it as is okay now as we fix issues within EQ and sculpted some of the sounds to make

them sound a little bit more fitting the whole mix we get into Dynamics and Dynamics will not be a big issue especially if you've got your volume

nailed and your your volume will change as you also EQ the sounds right so mixing is ever evolving process so when you change EQ of a couple of sounds they

start to get for example a bit quieter so their volume perhaps need to be boosted a little bit or you fix some issues and now you hear that for example

different elements are too loud that's why keep your eye on the volumes at all times because the volumes are the biggest factors in how you mix sounds

for example now I hear that after we fixed the issues with overlapping sub and base frequencies in the base shots

that our arbs and plug are way too loud let's listen together

[Music] so you see mixing is about managing

Focus that means whatever is the loudest most in the front is in the focus and we cannot have everything in the Focus right volume is what drives the focus

what makes an element be in focus and since Dynamics also control the volume because we'll be compressing the sound so the loudest parts are not that loud

as they are will also be managing this Focus right so compression is the next part after and compression takes the longest to learn and the longest to learn how to hear whether the sound

should be compressed or not how you can approach this is first find elements in your mix that have a very high dynamic range meaning that they kind of attack you they have huge spike in volume so

you need to tune your ears into like hearing volume which is not that easy actually for many music producers it's much easier to hear specific frequencies

rather than volume because even our ears have built in compression where they contract the muscles inside your ears to not damage your hearing also speaking of hearing please when you're producing

keep in mind the loudness and keep it a little bit lower than what you'd like it to because you can easily damage your hearing especially when listening to long periods of time so now in the

Dynamics stage of mixing we are tuning our ears to hear those spikes in volumes we definitely have our main base layers that spike in volume a lot and a kick

drum so we would need to apply compression on the base but since we have three layers on base we would need to apply a compressor on each of them to avoid doing that we need to create a

group so we need to somehow group three of those layers so they behave as one so we can just process all of them at once to do that we need to First find an

empty mixer track and you have a ton of them then to make it easy you can hold shift and scroll up to bring it closer to your base then we Mark all of those

three guys or all of your layers or instruments that you want to process together by holding left click on your mouse and control and dragging your mouse on top of them and then holding

still control very important click on the arrow on the insert so we click it and this will create so-called group or

BS as some like we call it so we have now all of those three bases going into insert number four and only then the insert number four goes back to the

master track so if we hold down alt and left click on this insert you can see that it will solo all of those layers and you can see that there's no

cable going to the master so if you solo just this channel there's no signal coming through so now let's maybe rename

this as base group and make it slightly darker and now we can compress them all together if you just have had one element that you want to compress at one time you don't have to make any groups

of course but we'll go and choose the base group and in the slot try to find a compressor right because we're looking for a compressor now the problem with this compressor we have here is that we

don't have any visual feedback to what's happening and since compression is so hard to hear right we would like something different so let's remove this plugin we can just click on the AR down

and click delete and we'll open up limiter limiter will show us some visual feedback we just need to change it from limiter mode to compressor mode and

you'll understand what's the limiter mode in a second there are two main knobs in a compressor that you need to understand

threshold and ratio only those two knobs will matter for now and for many many weeks to come you don't have to worry about any other knob in this program so

don't look at anything else [Music] okay so now we can see the way from over here and compressor works exactly like a volume fader but with a volume fader we

would take down everything right we would just lower the volume of everything we have here but compressor is like a magic volume control that

automatically works for you making the loud sounds quieter and maybe even the quiet sounds louder so everything sounds more squashed together right so the

threshold is the volume level so we Define the volume level where compressor says okay this is too loud time to step in imagine you are watching TV and if

the sounds get louder than this threshold your mom steps in and says turn that down and the ratio is your mom telling you how much to take it down or

your roommate so when we set the ratio to 2 to 1 if our sound for example exceeds the threshold by 2 DB we will

only let one decibel through if our Peak is about zero DB that you can see all here and our treshold is at around -12

we will only let 6 DB through making it much quieter let's see the [Music] difference as you can see the purple

Mark is what it was before and the white one is basically after you can see that there's no purple here so we have not touched anything other than whatever is

over the threshold so if we set the threshold to 20 to1 for every 20 DB we let only one through that means we pretty much don't let anything through

[Music] and it doesn't allow us to go further but if we could then it would be called limiting so nothing can go through above the threshold this is limiting so if I

turn down the ratio to zero you can see that there's no compression applied no purple marks and if we go back to limiter and tag the threshold

down in this case it's also called ceiling for some reason we have limiter ceiling but it just works like a threshold you can see if we set it it to here

we don't let any sound through you can see the limited threshold is over here and there's not a single peak of wide waveform coming through we rarely use limiting because it's very harsh and it

can make your instrument sound very unnatural usually already 2:1 ratio is pretty good amount of compression so if you're starting to play with compression I would suggest to set your ratio to

anywhere between two and four and just playing with the threshold to see how the sound behaves and then [Music]

you can see that we apply more compressor overall so we make the sound a little bit less Plucky right now I mentioned that we can also make the

quieter sounds louder which we can do with the gain knob this is the makeup gain that works after whatever we do here even though it's before it works

after so with makeup gain we can bring up the overall loudness of our element to whatever it was previously so that will create this squashed dynamic range

effect so for example if we attenuated the sound on average by about minus 3 DB we can take the gain up and put it to 3

DB and this will make [Music] the level meaning that the waveform will not exceed whatever it was previously but we have more squash sound so let's

compare it before and

[Music] after let me exaggerate the effect by

turning up the ratio and turning down the threshold and turning up the G [Music] you can see that the tals of the sounds

became very very audible now this is definitely too much so let's go back to what we had previously by hitting contrl and z and now let's hear it in the [Music]

mix okay we are getting there now let's get into the arbs stuff like Arps you can hear here it's pretty stable if we were to

apply a limiter on it so we can check how the away from looks you can see that we could maybe apply a little bit of

limiting because it's very uncontrolled you see some of the Peaks are coming through some of them don't so it's can disorientate The Listener because sometimes this ARP here becomes very

loud sometimes it's you know quiet that's why I like to always keep it in control it doesn't make a huge difference but stuff like this make up

for a greater track at the end then for impact effects like brust in this case it is already pretty compressed by itself as you can see the tail is very

long there's nothing for us to really compress [Music] if we were to compress it even further we would really squash it unnecessary

let's just try it for fun I can start by turning down the threshold increasing the ratio to anywhere again between two and four and playing with the threshold

[Music] further and then to make up for the difference in loudness you can boost the

gain by as you can see four about 4 DB [Music] maybe let's put the compressor to 1.5

to1 so we make a very very slight compression on the very very highest peak of this brass hit as we can see we are only controlling this part not doing

anything with the rest then for the strings technically you can see some waveform Peaks but this is an ambient backround sustained element there's

nothing to compress here the is base also sounds very compressed already because of its very long tail I like to apply even limiter just to see the

[Music] waveform there are some Peaks but not introducing any difference in the plaque however we will have something to compress

here see we have a problem here that there's so little space for us to play with the threshold right we would need to go so low and this is touching on the

gain staging concept where gain staging means that we set the proper input volume levels so that we have easy time to apply different effects on the sound

that's why we can go into our Channel rack and increase the volume here on the channel level so we can see more of the waveform and on the mixer just decrease

the volume the same amount as we just boosted it in the channel rack as you can see the waveform is higher so it will be just easier for us to set the right

threshold I've touched upon this concept because I see a lot of beginners strug with this and then overdoing the compression or not doing it at all because they set up their Channel

volumes so volumes of your instruments on the channel level too low that's an advantage of changing the volume levels on the mixer

level you remember that we talked that volume is what creates the focus and whatever something is lower in volume or also lower in Dynamics because Dynamics

is volume will get pushed more into the background of our mix and this PL is definitely not something we want in the front that's why whenever you want something more in the background like

these effects we apply [Music] compression you see that we are taking down the pluckiness of this element so

if we turn it off [Music] it's really hard to hear but it does make a difference in the mix it will not be so much in the front and leave more

Dynamics for different elements in our track now we get into our drums obviously you would think that kick is very Plucky so we could compress it

right the problem with this is that kick itself is pretty much just the transient element it's cutting through the mix the purpose of the kick drum is to cut

through the mix and create this Rhythm we don't want to overc compress our drums or sometimes not compress our drums at all because we want them to keep the groove going and you can see

that pretty much when we appli the limiter or let's say we apply some compression and increase the ratio to 2 to one you can see that we are just

basically attenuating the whole KY drum so there's no sense of just compressing the K drum alone because it's so Plucky and so short usually that you'll often

find that it's much better to just set the right volume for the king drum the same thing with our clap snars shakers and hats all of them are very very transient driven however what is a

common practice is to compress all drums together as one group we've done already the group for the base so let's repeat this process for drums so let's take an empty insert place it next next to our

drums Mark all of them by left clicking dragging over all of your drums and then keep holding control and left click on the Arrow of your empty trun now every

element is rooted to our drum group so we can rename it call it drum group and now we can Sol it by clicking alt and left

click and now let's try applying some compression it will make a difference because our kick plays together with clap place together with shakers let's increase the ceiling of

the limiter so it doesn't affect our drums but we just use compressor mode we take down the threshold a little bit and increase the ratio again to let's say 3

to [Music]

one so we compress our jums mainly trigger by the kick drum triggered meaning that costed by the kick drum because as you can see kick was the

loudest part here clap also see clap here kick clap kick clap so we made our compressor work about 6 DB so technically we could increase the gain

to 60b but I think 60b is a little bit too much so let's turn down the ratio to 2: one and make it work about 3 to 4 DB of attenuation so we are not going over

the top now we are hitting at around minus 3 DB on the compressor so we can make up the gain by let's say plus three let's do a

before and after so this is

[Music] before it might not sound like much to

you but by bringing down the differ between the very very loud kick and clap and bringing them together with the hats makes the sound of the drums more controlled and this is a magical concept

overall compression is a magical concept because it's not obvious it's very hard to understand why it works why compressor work starts in human psychology because our ears prefer

consistency sudden changes in volume are distracting and mentally exhausting believe it or not if one moment is quiet and the next one is loud your brain has

to consistently adjust your tension in your ears to keep up right with compression the sound is more consistent so your brain can relax and focus on the music or whether it's for example a

podcast focus on the message because believe it or not my voice right now as I'm speaking to you is compressed a lot imagine a friend talking softly to you

right and then suddenly yelling other than that it just keeps important sounds on top so as I said before in a mix with a lot of instruments some sounds are

more important than others right for example if your plaque volume jumps too much your vocal can be buried and fight for this attention while we want our vocal For example right to be in the

front because it's usually the most important part of a song and again as I said our ears have a natural form of compression built in when you hear very

loud sounds your ears automatically reduce their sensitivity to protect your hearing that's why it will sound better like like this and now finishing the stage of Dynamics in mixing one of the

most important parts of creating this dynamic balance in your mix is side chain compression side chain compression works exactly like a compressor

attenuating whatever exceeds the threshold but we take a different trigger for the compressor let me explain if we appli a compressor on our

base group normal compressor the trigger to this compressor is the base group right we have the sound of the bass going into the limiter we affect

Basse signal with its own signal side stream compression on the other hand is when we affect the base signal with something else this allows us to duck

elements if any other elements is playing at the same time this is especially useful applied from kick to the base group meaning that we apply a

side chain compression on the base group group and we take the kick drum as the trigger to this compressor so we'll surely apply a compressor right let's

apply another second compressor on the base group let's increase the ceiling so it's not affecting the signal in anyway and change to compressor mode now again

you all the time ignore everything else but we take a look at something new which is called side chain over here if you right click it you will see all the signals that this compressor sees so it

reads all the signals that come through this mixer track the signals that come are from the main base and the layer because we had three layers which are

connected to our base group so we need to somehow send the kick signal to this base group compressor to do that simply choose the

kick mixer track and go over to the base group or if you have just one base layer then it will be just your base track and click on the Arrow this will send the

signal together with audio to the base group so if we play it now we have the kick playing twice because we are sending it as you can see to two groups which both are connected

to the master track right so kick sound travels to the Basse group and then together with all the Basse sounds travels to the master track and also travels to the drum group and travels

all the way to the master group we don't want that we just want it once but we still want to send the signal that's why we need to take the volume down by

clicking on the knob and dragging it down so [Music] now we'll have the audio going only once to our ears and not duplicating this

sound but the signal still goes through the base group so that if we open the new compressor that we've added we'll be able to see it if we right click on the

side chain menu so let's choose the kick and now let's see what happens if we take down the threshold and increase the ratio again to something like 4 to

1 we need to enable also the drum group because the kick audio is only going to the drum group let's play now base group and the kick [Music]

together before [Music] do you hear the difference now our base

Ducks down as you can see whenever the kick is playing and you can see the kick signal with the highlighted on Blue just like that and whatever we attenuate

again the purple color now the only thing is to find the proper threshold setting I think that attenuating by about 7 to 10 DB will be perfect in that

case and now let's listen to everything we've got so far all right we have a couple of different elements that we could also attenuate whenever the kick is playing for example this re

base this ARP sound not necessarily but I think this will create more punch Dawn by the kick so what I would do personally is create a

new separate group for everything that we want to apply size chain compression to so that can be all the background elements the bass sounds definitely

because as you remember we don't want any sub Bas playing at the same time with the kick and this side chain compression method

also fights this exact issue so let's create another group I will put it in the very beginning on the insert one and let's call it side chain and now what we can do is of course remove the side

chain compression from the base group because we will apply it on the side chain so let's remove it and now everything that we want to have more punch we root to the side chain root

meaning that we take the signal and make it go first through this mixer truck and only then to the master truck so we for example arbs definitely let's make it go

through the side chain signal we can do it quickly by holding control and left clicking then strings definitely as well so let's mark them and click left click

there is let's also do [Music] it right and plug can have some punch as well and

then the base group of course this is the main reason why we've done all of this so let's add to side chain brass I don't think that we need to side chain

it because it creates this impact same with the crashes so now we need to apply compressor in the side chain group right so let's go to the slot one right click

and search for the limiter turn up the ceiling so it doesn't affect anything go to compressor mode and right click and find our kick now I see that we have not

yet sent the signal of the kick to our side chain we still have it only sent to our base group so need to unlink it from the base group and again side chain it

to the side chain you see I have this Arrow I click it you can also right click the arrow and click side chain to this track now we open up the compressor and find in the side chain menu the kick

this very important that we choose the kick here and then again increase the ratio to anything about four or we can go in that case higher it doesn't really

matter to about four

[Music] and after so big of a difference now let's

listen to everything together

[Music]

now at this point after you've done some leveling some EQ and the side train you can Circle back and check if the volumes are properly set up for everything

because now after we've cained everything we've eqed we've compressed stuff new problems will pop up especially with leveling because the levels will change a ton you could make

something a little bit too quiet or something a little bit too loud because you've misapplied the makeup gain that's why let's go quickly and adjust the volumes once again

this Reese since we citering it it creates a ton of great Ambience but it pops through the mix a little bit too much that's why I would like to make it

a little bit darker and since the high frequencies are defining the brightness of your instrument we could simply

attenuate them so we could choose a high cut so we would cut everything or High shelf both of them would work I will choose high cut and do it very very

gently just like that [Music] before and before this makes a huge difference after we've

compressed and Eed everything I hear that our Kick Drum is now a little bit too boomy means that it has a little bit too much body if you listen to it

closely well it sounds good but let me show you that if we cut the lit that again you'll see in the infographics we should keep minimal because this area is

our boxiness this is our problematic area let's see if attenuating it a little bit places our Kik closer with all the other instruments meaning that

its tonal balance meaning the frequency spectrum more fits into everything else in the mix same boxiness as we have in the Ki drum you can find problematic in your base

let's check how it would sound if we would attenuate this area over here in the [Music] [Music]

[Music] base it makes a a little bit of the difference especially if you'd be listening on speakers in untreated room depending also on your headphones a ton

of commercial headphones like to attenuate this boxiness area and create this kind of a Groove I think this way it fits a little bit better now as you can see mixing is

really an in-depth process but I hope you're learning a lot the next step is space and this is when we are creating depth of our track we use Reverb which

creates this Echo kind of sound that you would hear if you would sing in a cathedral or in a bunker right this is called Reverb so reverbs we want to

always keep in this range again you see this pattern appearing that we try to leave this area of the lows minimal and controlled since it's very vulnerable

right we could start with adding some Reverb on let's say our claps so you can see the difference it makes let's apply Reverb for some reason

instead of Reverb it's called re EB and F studio and what I want you to focus on are three knobs low cut size Decay and

two faders dry and wet every single Reverb plugin will have those knobs sometimes instead of two dry and wet faders you might see just a mix knob

just remember that a dry signal is the unprocessed one and wet is the processed one 100% mix means that the signal is

100% wet and 0% mix means that it's 100% dry we always start by increasing the size if we go all the way up or all the way

down I prefer to set the size to the highest amount and then since we don't want to apply Reverb on any low frequencies we in increase the low cut

which is the exact same thing we have in EQ just like this it works exactly the same you just cannot see it it's in the low cut knob here let's put an EQ so we

can clearly hear the difference see the stale we play and it stays a little bit if I remove the Reverb much

shorter right and we also reverberate this area over here so if we increase it to something about 700 Herz so around

here so it we would kind of like create this effect right and then we set the Decay time Decay means the length of the

Reverb for things like percussions we we are looking for a shorter Reverb could be up to 1.5 seconds or shorter depends

on what elements you are applying on I would shorten it to around 1 second and now we play with the wet knob

so if we take it down all the way there's no Reverb applied at all and if we increase it we start to apply the effect right so I would keep it minimal so let's hear it

in the mix with allra drums same thing you can also apply on hat so let's apply Reverb and do the same thing we increase the loat increase

the size and play around with Decay and wet I think we could go even shorter so the Reverb does not last too long after the next hat hits right so we have very very short

Reverb but still there you can hear that it creates the feeling like we were recording the Hat in some kind of a room the decaying time I would set to around 1

second or shorter just to create a little bit of the feeling if you're creating very short Reverb play around with size as well especially for short Decay reverbs

smaller room size can sound pretty interesting so this is without any reverbs applied feels very dry and if we enable the Reverb on the clap and

hat feels like we have more space right creating space is also about panning if you remember from what we started today's lesson with so if you have a

couple of layers of clap you can Pine one slightly left and one slightly right and here how it sounds sound if it sounds better of course panning brings a ton of

excitement to your mix and of course if you chose a sample that's already for example processed and layered you will

not need to really do any panning but you can see that left channel here is a little bit louder than the right one that means that the sample itself

has been already panned a little bit to the left or right so you need to watch out for this that's exactly why choosing better samples creates better mixes immediately because you don't have to do

things like this especially if you are a beginner later down the road you will definitely want more control so make sure you have downloaded the yesterday's pack you can still pan it a little bit

more to the right shakers we can p a little bit left just slightly like 10% and hard maybe also 10% right so it's opposing s so we are not overwhelming

only the left ear definitely a small change but overall panning your percussions specifically will create this surrounding soundscape so keep that in mind now let's go to our Plex and you

will hear that it unfortunately has already Reverb applied [Music] so I will remove it from the synthesizer

itself it's a serum synthesizer it's very very similar to vital one that we used on day two it's quite old but very very popular so whenever you'll be

watching any tutorials you'll see it coming again and again but this sound we used already had Reverb applied so if I remove it you can hear that it got very dry

same with the Arps here I can remove the Reverb from the ARP sounds so if we play them

[Music] together sounds pretty nice but if we would like to create even more space and depth we would apply Reverb right again

always increase the low cut so we don't mess up the lowest frequencies which are the more sensible and [Music] then we could make the DK a lot longer

because we are creating the soundscape right here and make it a lot more wet and before if you have a good ear you should also realize that it has some Echo

applied as well in music production we call this effect delay so let me quickly remove it from the synthesizer level just so you can see the difference and

apply it on the mixer track level so let's search for delay and go for Fruity delay 3 it's the most popular stock

delay you can see that it just basically Echoes the sound you want to look for the time the delay model and the feedback of course also wet because it's

the amount of effect applied if you change the time you can change the rate at which it delays the sound so we could for example set it at

3.0 and change it to pingpong mode so it ping pongs from left ear to right ear to enable it we would also need to pan it

to the left or right doesn't matter [Music] [Music] very nice effect and if we combine that

with [Music] Reverb so same thing with the arp we can just apply Reverb on it

[Music]

let's turn it on [Music] you can hear that it fills out the

background of our Spectrum very very nicely so just to remind you this is what we started with today [Music] [Applause]

[Music] the last thing I wanted to quickly touch upon on is automation this would be very useful if you'd like to create change

over time in your Arrangement so we have a moment in our track where base place [Music]

alone with claps and ARS you can automate every single knob inside F Studio a common automation trick is to automate the high cut so since our base

is playing alone let's apply an EQ after whatever we had in our base group right so let's just apply an EQ and create a high cut so again we

take down the band type we can make it a little bit more Steep and if you scroll down you can make this kind of so called resonance which boosts the frequencies

and then takes them down here what happens when I make this kind of movement from bottom to the [Music] top exactly like that this will be very very useful for all kinds of effects

that you'd like to automate in your song so first we need to find what knob actually affects this movement and if you move it you can see this knob that

changes the place of the so naturally you can right click and create automation clip or you can move the knob

go to tools search for last tweaked parameter and create automation clip both of these are the same so let's right click on the knob and create an

automation clip it will show up somewhere we don't know where it's over here so let's move it up and you can see that we have an automation clip we can move it up and down or

right click and create a new point so if you play around you'll quickly grasp how it's done I would like to go from somewhere around 20% because this will

be around here I will enable detou mode so we can see the EQ at all times you can see it changes right so it'll go up from here and I would like

this to finish just before the drop hits right which is aren't here so we would like to finish it on the very top and then we just like to keep it on the very top at all times so we just can move the

second Point like that so it just looks something like [Music]

this you can automate a ton of different parameters for example we have this club playing you can see it's track 15 so let's go to the track 15 and apply

Reverb and repeat the same process that we've done so we increase the low cut size and this time let's increase the Decay because we'll create a wash out effect where

[Music] [Applause] [Music] it's and before right

[Applause] but we want this effect to only be applied during this moment on the club not anywhere else that's why we can

create an automation out of this wet fader so let's set wherever we want it to be let's say here is perfect so we can

right click create automation clip find it okay um let's take it up so we have it next to our club and we want to

automate the wetness only to be here so we take it down when the drop [Music] hits now you can hear that even though

the automation clip is on the right side you can still hear the Reverb applied before the automation starts this is because of some app Studio settings that

I will show you how to disable tomorrow but a quick and common work around is to take the automation clip all the way to the start of your song and extend it and

then create the shape only in the moment you want it to be in and here we'll have about 70% [Music] [Applause]

right and it will turn off when the drop hits same thing we need to do with the base so you can take the automation clip extend it and just take it like that and

make sure it turns on only in the part that we want to so now it will work perfectly [Music] [Applause]

[Applause] [Music] your homework for today is to open up today's downloads and try to follow along the video and replicate all the

steps we've done on the project we started with you'll find also the Final Mix project file so you can deconstruct it yourself and compare it with what you've

done today you'll learn one of the most Wanted skills in music Direction which is recording and mixing professional sounding vocals just as with everything we've done so far we always want to make

sure that our starting point already sounds as good as possible so great vocals start with great singing or rapping skills and even if you're not willing to record vocals anytime soon

trust me it will just take 2 minutes and if you'll find yourself needing to record vocals in the future this is some crucial knowledge after great singing skills comes the recording quality right

and only then we have a a good material to start mixing vocals and making them sound even better quality starts with the space where you record it doesn't

have to be big space but it just needs to be quiet with no background noise no funs no air conditioners blowing air into the microphone and then we want to make sure that that sound doesn't Echo

so coming back to the acoustic treatment part we want no reverberation however this time it can even be your closet so just find any

space in your house that has little to no Echo if you don't have any space like this and don't want to do any acoustic treatment you can use something called a vocal boof it's a small cube that you

place around your microphone that isolates the sound coming from all directions or in the front now for your equipment it's best to use a specific

type of mic called a condenser microphone it's the best for vocal recording because it picks up all the little nuances in your voice Whispers Dynamics and overall it's best at

capturing how we hear human voice in real life but I also at the same time not as forgiving as the second type called dynamic microphone Dynamic mic is

great for live performances or podcasts because it's capable of picking up only the signal from the front of the mic for the quality it's not as good but you would not need to make sure that your

recording space is perfect so let's go with a condenser mic okay there are many condenser microphones that you can pick up for a good deal you'll find a few recommendations that you cannot go wrong with in today's downloads now to make

the most out of it you'll need a mic stand so you can comfortably stand when singing a pop filter to eliminate posive sounds caused by the airor hitting the mic and a spider shock mount to

eliminate any noise or vibrations coming through the sand all of them are pretty cheap most microphones come equipped with that already but there are also DIY tutorials on how to do that yourself

just don't keep the mic especially a condenser one in your hand while recording then as you know already you surely will need an audio interface and

a pair of closed back headphones that we've already covered on day one of the course so we've got the room Acoustics right no noise proper gear and now we need a proper recording technique so you

first need of course to make sure where the front of the microphone is because it can be misleading you will not believe how many people I see do it wrong then make sure the mic is at your

mouth level and about one or two fists away from it the pop filter can be anything in between and lastly during the recording try to not move your mouth

and change the distance okay microphones pick up the frequencies differently depending on the distance right and we want to keep it consistent throughout the recording it's better to be as close

to the microphone as possible if you can get no plosives now your audio interface will definitely have an LED light this is an indicator telling you if the microphone is too loud so after you

connect it try to shout into the microphone and make sure that this led is not showing any red colors if it does take down the gain knob a little bit until you don't see any red if you

forget about it the recording volume can get too high and it will cause unwanted audio clipping and it does not sound good now after we've got the setup let's get into recording as soon as you

connect the mic to the interface and your interface to the computer we need to make sure that it's connected inside options audio settings and then we'll need to choose an U driver you might

have a couple of them already like real Tech Apple Studio or se4 Al but you'll want to choose the one that has the name of your interface in it or if you don't

see it play around with ASO for all or F Studio ASO ASO is just a driver software that gets installed together with FL but if you don't see them just Google SEO

drivers and you should be able to download them from the official website after we've got this recording FL FL is very simple we just want to click on the

record button and the best for recording overall I would say is audio into the playlist as an audio clip so we can clearly see the audio inside the playlist so let's click on that and now

you'll be able to choose the ins you have on your audio interface I have two here and my microphone I know that is on the in to you can see that it's already

starting to record if you don't want to hear yourself at the same time time go to monitor external input off so now you will not hear your voice when you set it

to when armed here is the arm button so whenever you have it enabled and you hit record with the red record button

enabled it will be recording if you open Mixer which we've covered a lot yesterday you'll see that we have a new channel already linked to our voice so

if I take it here you can see that we immediately connected this playlist track into this mixer track you will see also the same buttons over here here's

the input same as you saw it on the playlist also choosing the record function you always want to keep it on external input only because if you

record with anything like post effects post EQ it will basically run the channel through the effects you have in here and then record it and we just want

to have all always a raw recording of your vocals without any effects applied also if you have issues with latency where your vocal sounds very delayed in

your headphones open up a new project and record the vocals into a new project or make sure to disable the effects as you remember from yesterday we used the

extra large view and we had those buttons that allowed us to quickly disable the effects so if you disable all of them you should have a better latency when recording now I will not be

recording my vocals but if you ever do make sure you record several takes fio does that automatically if we just keep recording and start playing you will see

that a new group pops up over here and now if I stop it and if I keep doing that we'll be adding new and new tracks right this is where also the

countdown before recording comes handy and the metronome because we want our vocals to always be rhythmically correct or if you're using a vocal sample that they are placed correctly in time with

the project make sure to always record a couple of takes even if you think that this one was perfect okay because then what you can do is use a slice tool

right here and just choose the parts that sound best for example I really liked this part and not that part so I can choose this one and I prefer this

part over this part so I can remove them or also use the mute button that we used when arranging tracks right so we can easily choose the best part of the

recording also slice tool will come handy when we will be removing noise which is a common practice with vocals especially if there is some background

noise especially with condenser microphone recordings you can use slice tool and slice your sample whenever there's a long silent part so that we

don't introduce any unnecessary noise into the recording and then just delete it then if you hover your mouse around the edge and corner of the clip you will

see this pinch hand and we can take it to ease out or ease in the samples so we don't introduce any unnecessary clicks

and artifacts to the audio now we need to actually make the recorded vocals sound professional so let's get into mixing our vocals so your recording might look something like this where you

have a couple of samples right and now overall we can put them together like this and the problem now is that since you've made a couple of takes and

you know the distance will differ your energy will also differ we want to start by automating the volume so the overall

sample has very similar loudness we can merge all of those three samples into one similarly to how we grouped the drum patterns we can do similar thing and

consol validate as we call it the audios and we can do that by hitting control or command and G and now we can see that we have it in one long sample now to

automate the volume of the sample sure as you know automation already from yesterday we could open up the sampler and again as we used previously this channel volume we could also automate

the channel volume right so now what we could do is holding shift and right click it will create a new DOT for us

at the same volume level so we can just increase the volume level over here right so we can layer them together so the overall volume is like this we don't

want to make huge differences here we just want to make it roughly okay and just take a listen phone that boy coming real soon for y my dogs up in that can

loyalty see so the new take kind of Right comes in somewhere here yeah that boy coming real soon y are my dogs up in

that can loyalty and slightly lowers like that you can change also the tension of the automation to make different shapes the problem now is that we don't actually see the waveform

changing for us and if you'd like to consolidate this you might want to group those guys together but it's not possible we would need slightly different approach okay so let's remove

this Automation and we'll get into another issue that you will get definitely when producing NL studio is that automation Clips actually kind of

still work even though you have removed them from your playlist so you can see that if I change the volume you can see

that it jumps back right and if I remove the automation it jumps back again I will show you two techniques second is a

little bit better but overall you need to First remove the automation from the play playlist and then go to the current project inside your browser so current

project and find initialized controls and then you'll see that we have this automation clip over here so we need to delete the event and now whatever we do here it stays I would

suggest you to disable the initial controls function at all because it's not really that useful in my opinion I'm not sure why it's enabled by default but to disable it we'll go to general

settings and find at the bottom initialize controls automatically so we disable it now even if we again create an automation clip out of anything

inside your project and change it right so it will go back because we have the automation clip enabled and we delete the automation

clip we will not have any similar issues okay now so ideally we would like to you know see the visual feedback of this waveform to be slightly evened out right

first thing of course you could do is make sure that you recorded the vocal sample properly but if you're working with vocalist around the world it just might not happen so if you have a couple

of takes in different samples what you can do is simply use this gain control that's in the middle of a sample and you

can maybe you know even it out slightly with other areas of your sample however this will not work in this moment of the sample where we have first some you know

Whispers like this or lower sounds dogs up in that can loyal that I you know and you get more energy out of the singer and they just start getting louder and louder right back hold up I ain't even

got that that's a huge issue because we will be applying compression and if you remember compression was applied only from a specific threshold okay this is

important because let's say if we would set the compressor threshold to work here and lower down the volume of everything that exceeds the threshold

this compressor will not work on those waveform Peaks as you can see right that's why we need this automation to be done the easiest way to do it would be with some kind of sample editor that

allows us to really dive deep into the sample and change whatever we want about it without you know creating automation clips and applying effects and stuff

like this there's a tool for that in FL Studio and we can open this by clicking on the wave form of the sample and hitting edit sample it will open Edison

this is our tool that allows us to really play around with the sample so it's pretty Advanced it has a lot of features but we just looking to automate

the volume which we do by going down and looking for these views so we have edit waveform which we have right now enabled then we have edit panning so that would

be right left and now we have here volume envelope so louder and quieter and it also works by right clicking and we can create new automations and we

just want to make this moment here a little bit louder right because we have slightly quieter moment here and going into the louder moment got you know that

right so Edison we lost it we can always open it back by going to the mixer and you'll find The Edison applied on the master track because Edison is just like

another plug-in and opens up our mixer so let's just do the same thing that we've done with the automation clip and increase the audio here and going like that right because the Peaks go like

this so our volume we need to go like that slightly again anything up to 3db of the difference so we don't overdo anything so I can see on the hint panel

we have right now 2.99 let's do it like this maybe also lower it over here because these guys are also a bit quieter right we can go back to waveform

mode so we can play the sample and zoom in into the last part we can see that this part also is very quiet young boys up in that PO they

going take your soul right so we get different energy from this part so let's also create an automation clip so we can increase the volume like that again

let's say plus 2 DB so this is crucial and maybe even we can increase it a little bit further at the very end just like that okay again this this will make a huge difference always make sure that

you do the tweaks unless you are doing a rough mix meaning that you just want to quickly get inspired and skip the nitty-gritty stuff and now you can just hover your mouse over the drag button

and drag the waveform into the playlist and can you believe it we have perfectly even sample so we now have perfectly ready input to start processing dogs up

in that can loyalty hold that ICE stand doing my part and I ain't going stop till the r got the Stars going take your soul this is the most boring part let's now get to the next step which is pitch correction there are

two ways you can go here first is by using a pitch correction plug-in mostly these are used for Styles like pop or ADM and second is by using an autotune

effect plugin mainly you'll see that in rap or during live performances right I'm sure you've heard about aut tune and how it just fixes the vocals in real

time F Studio has a pitch corrector rep built in so I'll take another vocal which is more S I swear that it's

getting to go and I have nowhere nowhere to go and now see this is exactly what I was talking about if you're recording with

different energy levels it's very important to then go again edit sample go to volume and slightly adjust the volume and now we can just drag it over

and you can see it's much better right now now okay so pitch correction we also click on the sample options and open pitch correct sample this will open

Newton as we did when building chords we first chose a scale and this is what we also need to do when using a pitch correction plugin like Newton we want to

go to edit so those scissors scale and now we need to choose the scale now this time we only have the major or minor scale so you need to of course check what's the scale of your song or what's

the the scale of your recorded vocals and if you completely have no idea what's the scale of the vocal sample even though it's usually coded you can open tune.com

analyzer and drop it in it says that we are in CP minor so we can go and choose the scale CP minor and now we can snap

to scale so it will work basically the same as we previously done inside the pan roll when making harmonies now however you can see this Orange fill right we have this orange fill and the

orange highlight this tells us where the part of this vocal should be at and we can automatically stick all of those lyrics into the correct placement by

turning up the center knob as you can see as as the center The Fill disappears and we have everything centered this Center knob as you can see only works on small chunks of the vocal and it just

tells us about the average of this part where it sits and not about the variation you can see the variation is this line going up and down we can adjust it by using this variation knob

we never go up we always first go Center up and then play with the variation whatever feels better for you swe is getting to go you also don't want to go

totally to 0% because s is getting to go it will be very very robotic if you change the transition to 0% it will be completely robotic as you can see there

will be no trans I between each of the sample if I take the transition down it just basically jumps from one note to another of course you would now need to go through the whole vocal and if some samples sound bad to you of course

change them individually Newton in the producer version of app Studio comes with trial so we can use it but it just cannot export the vocal there are some workarounds that will not get into

definitely but the more popular way of processing vocals let's delete Newton and Edison from our Master is by using an aune so there are many paid and free

autotune plugins the best free autotune is called growan 2 so let's Google it and you'll see it popup let's download the free edition we don't need the full

edition at all let's go for Windows and open the file you might see this FL Studio plug-in version and I would not suggest you use it because if you would like to open another project file from

someone else that didn't use it it would just not open I would just be using the vst3 version still you you also don't need the ax version because it's for a different Daw as well so let's leave

those two versions go next now again we go to options file settings manage plugins find installed plugins we don't need to necessarily favor it but if you

want to find plugins that you have not favored you can always go to the slot and hit more plugins it will now show you all the plugins you have installed so you don't necessarily need to have

all of them favored of course before we do that we need to assign this vocal to a mixer track as we've done already we can do that by hitting control and L right or of course

changing the like this but what I prefer instead of finding it in the channel rack just double click on the sample open the sampler and click on the track so it will assign threee mixer track

you'll see it over here and now we can work on top of it I swear it's coming through so let's apply the altitude plugin we just installed it's very simple we are just interested in this

over here which is about correction we don't need anything else so we have it enabled and now we of course need to choose the scale because if we didn't I

swear that it's getting to go it will try to stick the vocal to every single Noe possible and in an track we usually just use seven of them in an octave so

we click on this violin key and choose our scale which is minor C now let's play I swear that it's getting to go and

now we just can play around with the smooth okay the lower you go with the milliseconds the faster it will work so it will make it very very robotic if you

want to have very soft effect go to something like 20 milliseconds I swear that it's getting to go it's still audible definitely but definitely less

audible than if we go all the way down to something like 1 millisecond swe is getting to go

and I have no nowhere to go that's a great part that we can listen for and I have no nowhere to go

let's go with something like 10 milliseconds and I have Noh nowhere to go I think 10 milliseconds like this will sound pretty nice overall this is

not the best sounding autotune plugin there are some that are a little bit more professional but they also come at a cost we can definitely work with this one and learn a lot but when you're

applying something like autotune you don't really have much control over individual sounds but you always have control in time over the smoothness so

you can tweak this knob and go to tools and go to last week as we done yesterday and create an automation clip so you can then just change how much of this aune

you want to actually be applied in different parts of your song Let's just remove it it's live going right me like my exit and my heart set me in the back

side that we gr the same maybe that true it's impossible to describe the pain you put me throw out of the blow I didn't see the signs you made me realize how B

just for practice let's play with different vocals so let's apply the gron walk around right we need to of course choose the scale so let's go to the sampler and

drag it again to something like tune bat analyzer so we have a minor perfect we can choose minor a but it doesn't help

me at all so I'm going right to the bottom but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom P the B to

the floor for to be honest I don't care if I tomorrow okay we can leave it at that and now I want you to remember a simple vocal train that we call vocal

it's v o c a l the v stands for volume automation this is what we've already done after we optimize the vocal with an

EQ so similarly to what we've already done yesterday when mixing an instrumental we the Second Step was the EQ here we basically optimize and shape

the vocal so it fits best into our track then C stands for compression again we've yesterday already touched upon this concept and then a stands for

attenuate harshness so we don't want to eliminate harshness we don't want to leave it we just want to attenuate it because we sometimes want some harshness

in our vocal but not this negative and earpiercing harshness right and then L stands for layer with effects we'll be applying wet effects like Reverb or

delay we've done yesterday or some different effects we'll get into so next step we apply an equalizer parametric EQ is the one we choose and what we've done yesterday was always every time getting

rid of this area which is again most sensible we don't want anything other than our base and kick drum playing there so we choose a low cut I like to always make it a little bit steeper so

we cut everything you can choose the resonance as well so we can make it even steeper and we cut everything around

under 200 so that we don't have anything under 100 HZ okay also it's that different vocals will have different Vibes and perhaps you have really deep

vocal that might have a ton of this low mid area so we don't want to cut it too much but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the

bottle to fly then a common practice when eqing vocals is to increase the presence so area around hits and presence some people also like to just take the shelf and increase the Shelf

like that but it doesn't help me at all I'm going right to the bottom push the bottle to the floor for to be honest I don't care if I die tomorrow to be

honest I don't care see that Empty Bottle it's very common because it makes the vocal brighter and just kind of more exciting right instead of increasing the high shelf what I like to do instead is

playing around with the mids mids is where the body of your vocal is so if you want more body so more like thump of your vocal you can slightly increase this part or lower this part if you have

too much body and then if you ever need you can always increase the overall loudness of everything right because this is basically like a volume fader if it feels like that I often find myself

using this it's pretty handy so for this kind of vocal but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the bottle to the floor it's pretty

bright vocal so I would maybe just pump a little bit of the high brightness if you find that there are some frequencies that are hurting your ears and that are

harsh you can always take a small bell make it very resonant like that and scroll again that's what we've done yesterday scroll through the Spectrum to hear any dissatisfying parts but it

doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the botle to the floor for to be honest I don't care different vocals have different

resonance sounds that just might get picked up by microphone more so this is the time where you can slightly lower the volume like minus 2 to 3 DB nothing

more than that because we'll take care of the harshness so we'll be attenuating the harshness in the first step always make sure to listen also to your instrumental as you are making any

changes to make them according to how it sounds in the whole mix at this point if we try to listen to it but it doesn't

help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the botle to the floor to be honest I don't you see for now it doesn't sound

really that nice because of the high dynamic range sometimes it's very very loud sometimes it's very quiet that's why we have compression for the C in our

vocal mixing chain so let's apply fruity limiter if you have skipped yesterday's mixing day make sure to come back to it so you can understand everything about it we are going to set the ratio again

to something about 4:1 and with the threshold this time we just want to set it so that we even out all the lyrics in

the vocal so every lyric or every word in our vocal is equally audible so amplitude of the waveform is pretty much hitting the same average so let's try

that but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the bot to the floor for to be honest I don't care if I die tomorrow to be

honest I don't care see Empty Bottle yeah walk around I feel pocket get a Mega my so empty feel like no as you can

see doesn't help me at all we are hitting those parts a ton and those not at all this means that we have pretty good threshold setup but it doesn't help

me at all so I'm going right to the bottom now we can listen to it with the whole track and adjust the gain so that our vocal is the most important in our

track meaning we want to make it slightly louder than everything else so I'm going right to the bottom push the battle to the floor P you to be

honest I don't care if I die tomorrow never make huge differences immediately start with 1 DB then go to

2db and then as you can see at three .1

DB we hit pretty good volume for this vocal so it pops out in the mix but it's not overwhelming it then we attenuate

the harshness that's done usually with a dser plugin and there are many paid DSR plugins and free ones but there's also a

built-in feature inside FL Studio inside a plugin called Maximus Maximus is a multiband compressor plug in so Maximus

has kind of like three compressors one 2 three and this compressor one is only affected by those frequencies compressor 2 is only affected by those frequencies

and compressor 3 is only affected by those frequencies independently in Maximus those three bands You Can See Clearly by going to bands so we can see this is the frequency spectrum similarly

to what we have here and this is compressor one compressor two compressor three we can choose them by changing them here you also have the fourth

compressor which is called master that means it basically works like a normal compressor wood on the whole frequency spectrum right why this is important

because the harshness appears only in the specific frequency range which is around 4 to 6 Kilz 4 to 6 7 8 sometimes

10 maybe depends on your vocal of course and this Maximus plugin will allow us to only turn on the compressor for these specific frequencies in normal

compressor like the limiter plugin we set the threshold here right so you can see that the blue line goes down and we have the threshold and the ratio creates this angle right Maximus is exactly the

same basically instead of having two knobs like this we just can change this threshold by holding alt and dragging our MK so it sticks to the line this

line which basically allows whole sound through so we make the Threshold at around round this time minus about 90b so minus 90b would be here in our normal

compressor and here we just specifically set ratio so here's no ratio just as we would have it like this and 4: one looks like that so it would go with something

like this here we have probably somewhere around 4 to1 this will be very very useful tomorrow when we'll be mastering our track now inside Maximus you'll find a preset for the sing so you

don't have to set everything yourself preset means that the settings are preset for you you can left click on the presets and choose the sing narrow band or split band doesn't matter you can choose whichever sounds better for you

you can see that they differ only by taking down and working on all of the frequencies above around 3 and A2 KZ and this narrow band just works from about 2

and 1/2 to 9 and A2 each line here shows 1,000 so we have 3 4 5 6 7 8 here it shows 10 so 30 40 50

and here it shows 100 so we have 100 200 300 400 500 let's choose maybe split band and we will go to monitor so we can monitor what we are changing in the dser

but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bar see we are already a little bit affecting the S sounds which are the harsh syllables in

our vocal we can also solo it so we can only hear this band let's solo [Music] let's go down with our threshold one step down holding

alt and we can also go down with the ratio or the tension of the ratio which is called actually KN but it's not really that important for now so let's now answer so we can hear

it in the mix I'm going right to the bottom push the bottle to the floor for to be honest I don't care if I die tomorrow to be honest I don't care see

that Empty Bottle yeah now the last in our vocal mixing chain is to layer with wet effects so yesterday we applied Reverb we'll use also Reverb on vocals

again as yesterday will increase the lcut to something about 700 HZ size I like to always go slightly higher but we'll check how it sounds and with DK we

also don't want to overdo it let's hear it for now to be honest I don't see that bottle yeah walk around I feel his eny

get a Mega but my heart so empty feel like nobody around going same I'm by myself in the FI me my sem walk around I

feel eny get a Mega but my heart is still so empty feel like nobody around going same I'm by myself in the F me and

my okay I think this is pretty all right but the problem is now that we are washing out everything right you can hear that Reverb basically blurs

everything and puts everything into huge space imagine if we didn't apply the low cut this will get even worse all these

my I toid of them and if we increase the dec to 4 seconds which is pretty common default for a lot of rever plugging it will get even [Music]

[Applause] [Music] worse all these thoughts inside of my head I try to get rid of them I

try I see now that previously when I was showing you the threshold I also took the threshold up so keep in mind that some things can get screwed up during

everything you do you might mistakenly turn something off and you will forget about it always always be cautious so let's fix the

threshold of my head I try to get rid of them I try to get rid of them but it doesn't help me at

all going right the bottom P the B Flor and now you can hear how this Reverb screws everything up it doesn't sound good at all Reverb is something

that beginner producers overuse because it just blurs imperfections and for something like a vocal we want it to be clear pop kind of trap vocals or even

ADM vocals all kinds of vocals unless they are you know like backround effects we want to be clear and Audible and understandable right that's why we do the compressor and that's why with

Reverb we need to figure out a way where we can duck down the effect so it's not applied whenever our vocal is playing if you remember from yesterday this is

similar to what we've done with the base and kick where we made the base duck down lower in volume whenever the kick was playing and this is what we also can

do here so let's take a new insert and call it side chain Reverb okay and now since you already applied some Reverb let's say you've chosen the right

settings you want the right Decay which was 2 and 1/2 seconds for us everything is perfect as you want it right you can now just copy it over to this new track that we've made so we can save a little

bit of time you can very very quickly duplicate the presets between the mixer tracks by going to the drop down and dragging the safe preset as option onto

the mixer track that we want and of course now we want to delete it from the original vocal track now yesterday as you remember we were linking the tracks

together using those cables right we're licking them we can do that by choosing first the vol track and hitting the arrow up that will send the vocal and

duplicate it basically so this insert track is rooted to the master so we can hear it and then it's also rooted to the other mixer truck and we can also hear it because this track is also linked to

the master right so we kind of duplicated the volume of the vocal are these STS inside of my head we don't want that we just want wet signal here

so we just want the pure re verb being applied we don't want any dry signal because we don't want to duplicate the dry signal because it will make our

vocal twice as loud so that's what we have the dry level fader for inside the Reverb just take it down and now we can

also increase the wet all these head I to get rid of them iy to get

rid but it now you can hear only the wet effect applied now we just repeat what we've done yesterday with the side train kick to the base so we just apply a new

compressor we choose the fruity limiter go to compressor mode find the side chain menu and choose the vocal that we just linked to it now we increase the ratio to again anything like 4 to one

and slowly take down the threshold until you hear that you're really ducking down the effect these inside of my head I try

to get rid of them I try to get rid of but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the botle to the

floor to be honest I don't care you can clearly hear that the Reverb Ducks down every time the dry vocal play we can now simply control the volume or the amount

of Reverb by taking down the fader of this Reverb mixer track all these thoughts inside of my head I try to

I let's double alt click on the mixer tracks inside of my head I try to get

rid of them I try to get rid of them but it doesn't help me at all so I'm going right to the bottom push the botle to

the floor P you out to beon don't now we have proper applied effects a step for you to make the vocal feel

more modern is by using a plugin called OT it's a very popular plugin that you will see a ton of producers use if we Google Ott

plugin you'll find it in the xer records.com and you can simply download it over here or for Windows here now Ott

is a multiband compressor so it's basically exactly like Maximus but it's a oneclick solution for your multiband compressor needs and the easiest way to

explain this is simply by just listening to How it changes the sound you'll see that depth knob which is basically our mix knob mix knob just tells us how much

of the effect is being applied for vocals we go for anything between 7% to 20% let's put it at 15 all these STS

inside of my head I try to get rid of them I try to get rid of but it doesn't help me at all so I'm

going right to the bottom push the ble to the floor for to be honest I don't care if I die tomorrow be hon I don't

see bottle yeah and now in the mix walk around fers get a Mega my heart so empty

feel like nobody around going out same I'm by myself in the field me and my sem walk around I feel get a Mega by my so

empty feel like nobody around going same I'm by myself in the FI me and my all these thought inside of my head I

try to get rid of them I try to get rid of them your homework for today is whether you want to work with vocals or not download the today's pack you will

find practice acas and the practice instrumental drag them both into E Studio and try to mix the vocals following today's vocal mixing

chain if you followed along our workflow of producing a track today we are diving into mastering It's the final step before releasing Our Song think of it like giving a car its final polish

before it hits the showroom we are taking a completed mix and making sure it sounds clear balanced and loud enough on any device through phone speakers

headphones to Big Festival systems I'm going to surprise you here and say that the better the mix is before we Master it the better it will sound mastered mastering isn't about fixing issues okay

it's about putting the cherry on top we start by making sure that our Master track is completely empty we have no slots over here unless you've used some

effects that you automated throughout the truck then if you are playing with different ideas in your Arrangement just make sure you mark whatever you want to

render as your final track we can change it also later but now I will just leave it as it is because that's just my full track and we'll go to file export and

wave file so as you can see we won't be getting back to the mix anymore so if you have stuff that you want to change production or mixing wise do it before

then we set it mode to full song The Tail to Leaf reminder so if you have any Reverb Tails they will be left and the song will be a little bit longer then we

Mark of course wave the bit depth we set to 32 bit float not 16bit not 24 32bit float and of course stereo 32bit float

allows us to save much more information than 24-bit in terms of volume if the track is clipping at some points the 32-bit float will enable us to recover

everything then the resampling quality you can set to whatever amount you want at least 32 point if you used a ton of stretch samples in your track then set

it to something higher you can go with 512 but you will not hear much of the difference in usual scenarios we enable high quality for all plugins disable maximum polyphony in the miscellaneous

we just want to make sure that we enable insert effects everything else is not really that important newest version of FL has this feature where we can directly upload the track to SoundCloud which is like a YouTube for music but we

definitely don't want to do that right now so after we've done that you can hit start while it's rendering in the meantime let's talk about what we'll be doing in mastering other than the final

polishing tweaks the most important part actually is to increase the perceived loudness without pushing the track Beyond its decel limits all the digital

audio has a maximum loudness level right it has to have some kind of ceiling it is called zero dbfs so 0 DB full scale

this is the highest point audio can reach in digital systems before it Clips or distorts you can see that for example on samples right the waveform is shown

between minus infinity to 0 DB full scale so zero is our digital ceiling where audio clips when it goes out of

this Z DB FS limit we get hard clipping it's just unpleasant fuzzy sound that's why yesterday I mentioned to not allow the red LED to show up on your audio

interface because it tells you that the audio is clipping or it's very very close to clipping of course in mastering we don't really want to like hit this exact zero dbfs limit we want the

loudest parts or peaks of our waveform of our track to hit at about Min - 0.1 or minus 0.3 DB full scale to make double sure we prevent this hard

clipping right especially on different playback systems when we convert Our Song For example to MP3 file whenever you listen to anything in app Studio the

current channel here shows you the exact scale it's at so whenever you mark any channel it will just be showing the current one when you set it to master you can see that in the loudest part so

let's search for our drop it's not a dream we are not hitting zero and this is not that important when you are inside F

Studio because F Studio already Works in this 32-bit float mode so you will never hear this hard clipping scenarios even though your master or any of your

channels can basically go above the zero DB here you'll never hear the clipping until you render your track right in FL it doesn't really matter you won't hear

it so after we've rendered we can just go and open a new template and just go with an empty so we make sure there's nothing there okay so as you can see

empty we have no limiter we don't need anything in the chra because we'll be just dragging our track to FL again as a

sample and now you can see that nicely our Peaks never hit this Zer DB scale and if you can see that some of the

Peaks go above you can just take the volume of the sample down until you see that no Peaks exceed this limit now you might say that how can we go louder if

let's say our truck is hitting the highest peak right here we are basically almost already hitting zero uh DB full scale and how can we go louder to understand how we can go louder you

first need to understand that those are just our levels the volume of our track but how loud the track feels we use a measurement different than decibels

called lfs This is loudness units full scale it basically tells us how loud it feels to our ears and when mastering we'll be trying to make the track feel

louder right so as loud as we can without actually ever going Beyond this zero DB full scale limit we'll be using tools for that right and one that we've

already uncovered is compression compression makes things sound perceived louder because it reduces the difference between the loudest and quietest part of the sound right we've already done that

before a couple of times and the second tool we use is a new one we have not yet used and that is a soft Clipper soft clipping is very similar to a limiter so

a compressor with infinite ratio but compression even in form of limiting is designed to keep the natural shape of the waveform it's basically just like an

automatic volume knob and soft clipping on the other hand basically chops everything that exceeds the threshold but also rounds off the edge so it's not

unpleasant harsh and distorted like hard clipping and hard clipping you'll hear if you record a microphone too loud for example so since we'll be pushing Up the

Volume whatever your mix is if it's good it will only be better if it's bad then well let's put it that way mastering will not fix this so don't hope that

making your tracks louder will somehow make it sound magically better first in our mastering train will be an equalizer to remove the UN aable clutter that artificially increases the volume of our

track so that we can just push the volume even higher so we'll apply EQ first and again low frequencies like base sounds take up a lot more space in

the trun than high frequencies imagine them as big heavy waves that push harder on that DB limit so basically the lower

the waveforms the bigger they get right and they have more power lowering our headro so headro is basically whatever we have left until zero DB full scale so

if we have a ton of low frequencies in our track you'll not be able to push the loudness that much because if you have a ton of low end and especially this un

audable low end that is under 30 HZ I would say some people say that it's under 20 htz but anything lower than 30 HZ is basically clutter and if somebody

says differently don't listen to them so we'll want to of course remove this clutter and of course we'll take low cut filter and we've done that many times already in our course but there's a

preset already that does that for us we can choose it by clicking on presets and choosing the 30 HZ and 18 khz cut I also

like to slightly increase it so we start to really roll off the low frequencies slightly before 30 HZ and you can see this is not a big of a difference so we

can surely do something like this and place the band at 30 HZ by looking at the hint panel then those high frequencies we don't necessarily need to

lower them but I would cut everything above 18 khz because let's maybe try changing the high cut to low cut so we

can hear what we'll be actually cutting out well you will not hear it because the video you're watching is already compressed so it's basically getting rid of those frequencies anyway for us let's

put it that way they are very unpleasant to human ears and a lot of Professional Engineers will even cut at 16 khz not 18 as we've done here let's try hearing

what 16 khz cut would take out this is a common practice but you need to get used to doing stuff like this so let's just put it at 18 khz and leave it after in our mastering chain

we'll have a sculpting EQ so we'll be listening to our track and listening if some of the frequencies could get a little bit of cut a little bit of boost and basically hearing if for example you

know putting up the mids a little bit doesn't make it sound a little bit better if it doesn't then we don't do it but we never do big changes maximum 2 DB I would say the more you need to change

on the master remember the more likely you you need to actually go back to the mix and start fixing things there remember we don't want to fix things and

the master we just want to polish it

[Music]

CL it's not a dream I saw your face in front of meile close my eyes it's not a dream

[Music] for my ears I think it sounds a little

bit better when we increase the mid a little bit we could go back to the mix and you know increase the volume of the elements that lie in this area

but when we are applying this EQ on the master it also gives us a few advantages of you know basically increasing everything in this area by a couple of

DBS like in this case I'm increasing everything by 2db and it gives it more definition if you ask me [Music]

but that would be much different for your track definitely and you don't want to ever copy someone's EQ presets or EQ shapes because what works for me will

not definitely work for your specific track and I also wanted to increase a little bit of the Tres it feels like it gives it a little more this high and

Sparkle overall on the master never increase the Shelf like this unless you've done the cleaning inq of those frequency because as you remember these

frequencies are really earpiercing and we don't want to be increasing them it's better to just make a small bell at 12 or 14 khz rather than just like pushing

everything up like that okay I think that so far sounds a little bit better if something doesn't sound better after you've applied it don't apply it okay just get rid of it some Masters don't

require anything else rather than just a simple volume boost that will get into in a second at this time after applying some basic EQ there are many different

ways you can go there are some Advanced ways that include applying midside EQ some harmonic exciters and multiband stereo Imaging but since it's your first

time mastering a track will go slightly simpler way but even this way will bring you excellent results and we also don't go very very simple right now because we

will be applying multiband compression and we'll not be pushing up the loudness yet but we'll just try to create some balance in the frequency spectrum of our

track in terms of Dynamics so Dynamic tonal balance of our truck this is quite an advanced concept I would say yesterday I've touched upon a little bit

about maximum so please revise yesterday lesson if you haven't watched it yet but what we want to do is compress each

frequency range separately and there's no magic over here we just want to Simply make the compressor work very very slightly on each of the frequency

range so for now there's no specific goal I want you to achieve just we aim for a couple of DB of reduction of the Dynamics on each of the frequency

spectrum if you have your track very very quiet for example let's say your song looks something like this then please go ahead open up the sampler and

hit normalize this will bring up the highest peaks of your track to the zero DB limit but without of course exceeding it this will allow you to have much better time playing around with the

compressors so we'll start with the low end and I ask you to not look at anything else other than what I'm telling you to do because this can look complicated but most of the knobs trust

me I don't even use okay so we'll just hit lows so we'll be just processing this frequency spectrum with a compressor that we have here okay let's

Sol it so we can only hear this frequency wrange and change it to monitor so we can just monitor what's happening similarly to what we have in

fruy limiter let's change our threshold because as you can see we have this line that tells us that this is indeed our threshold and we go around I would say

couple of dots down I would say something like 70b uh lower and usually this is enough to start making the compressor work let's see of course I will be listening to the

loudest part of our track so that will be the drop your chorus or whenever the most amount of instrument play at the same time as you can see we are not really

working that much so let's bring it down a little bit more holding alt always now we are working around minus1

DB let's make it even lower and now we are starting to hit everything basically so I would maybe go one step

higher and lower the ratio so that we have about 2 to 3 DB of reduction [Music]

okay now we are making the compressor work pretty good about minus 3db of reduction and now let's go the mids we'll do the exact same thing we just

want it to work very very slightly maybe even less than what we made the low compressor work [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

you can see that I had to go higher with the ratio and lower the threshold to hit more of the sounds because for now with the threshold set up like that I was

basically hitting just those Peaks right and when I lowered it so it's quicker to start working but when it actually works it works a little bit lighter so this is how we can do it by increasing the ratio

and lowering down the threshold this is common thing what we need to do in mids and highs because usually in our mids and highs we have very very clicky

[Music] [Applause] sounds okay we just want to make it work

a couple of DBS down don't go higher than three or four DBS of reduction let's go to the highs [Music]

[Music] [Music] let's now go to our master and now we'll enable Maximus by using this solo and mute button in time so we can hear the

difference now you can hear that we actually got a little bit quieter with overall volume and punch this is because we've compressed the sound so we lowered

the highest peaks of the audio that's why we now need to go to each of the band and increase the post gain knob to match whatever we had before so if we

lowered it by minus 3db we'll match it with the post gain by plus 3db same on the midband in this case since we are just hitting those tiny Peaks I would

make up the same amount we made up in the low band maybe the this time like 2 to 2.5 DB of makeup gain and same with

our highs so it's hitting at around 3.5 I would go with something like 2.4 right not a big difference but let's hear now the before and

after close my eyes it's not a dream [Music]

this is a big difference why because everything feels glued together in terms of volume if you listen to the volume of each element for example kick it's

really punching through the whole mix right it's like attacking us and when we enabled a little compression on each of

the band no more than three or 40b and then made up with the makeup gain for the reduction we've made now this sounds

a lot more squashed and glued and juicy

[Music] now it might not be the biggest

difference we'll make today but at this point I just wanted to share with you a hack or a tip that some pros use if they're in a rush and they just don't

want to create a manual multiband compression settings and just want to quickly export the track and go to the clap and try it out what we do is instead of Maximus so I'll just disable

it we apply something we used yesterday on our vocals and this is called OT so OT is basically just like a oneclick

multiband compressor with like preset settings the depth tells us how much of the effect we actually apply and you can check the difference as well again I

will set it to about 15% so we go similarly to vocals and anything between like 7 to 20% let's hear the difference I would not use it because a

lot of people are actually used to the sound of OD and there are some tricks to only use the downward compression instead of the upward one because upward

compression actually is what makes the a sound very unique so if we disable the upward and only use the downward compression so like downward means just

we taking the sounds down [Music] right so it's a little bit software effect so if you ever want to use otd I

would suggest using it without upward and only when you want to quickly get a master done and not necessarily want to dive in into manual multiband

compression it is always better to do it manually with Maximus like that so I'll remove Ott and now the last step of our

still simple but very good mastering chain will be pushing up the loudness to its limits so we never use a limiter

when mastering because a limiter is again designed to prevent the sound from exceeding set set threshold that's the only thing they want to do they want to

just ensure that the waveform still stays As Natural as possible simple limiter like the one you'll find inside fru limiter that we use for compression

purposes it will just behave as a normal volume knob and this is not what we want definitely we can test this by just increasing the gain let's

[Music] see take a look what it's doing it's basically trying its best to not

introduce any Distortion but still make it sound you know natural and that causes this weird like automated volume kind of feeling I I don't even know how to describe this

some sounds are just getting very loud some sounds get quieter it just sounds super weird we never use a limiter that's why we also never want to use the

default Apple Studio template that is with limiter applied by default because I cannot count the amount of times I've seen beginner producers wonder why their

songs sound off just because there was a limiter applied at all times on the master and they were like you know trying to push up the kick volume and then it was basically behaving like

exactly what we just heard instead what we use is a soft Clipper or a maximizer a maximizer is kind of like a limiter but it's specifically designed to

increase the overall perceived loudness so it's basically like a mastering plugin right a maximizer is designed to increase the overall perceived nus of the truck so it's specifically created

for mastering purposes maximizer is kind of like a soft Clipper but with some extra intelligence in handling the Dynamics but they come at a cost I'm

personally yet to find a free maximizer plugin that's better than just simply using a simple soft Clipper plugin a soft Clipper is very very simple and

straightforward plugin F Studio even has one buil in there's no Advanced algorithms going on and there are also many different ones that sound maybe a little bit different available online

however threshold again we could set at minus 0.3 DB so as I said before and then simply use any gain plugin that allows us to push up the gain before the

soft Clipper right because as you remember the flow of the mixer goes like that so we first apply this EQ then this then this effect and then the soft

slipper here so in here we would need to push up the volume so that the soft Clipper actually works right because for now you can see we are not hitting the

ceiling which we set to be very very high so we could use something like a a simple limiter bring up the ceiling so we make sure it does not affect it in

any way we just use it for gain and then after the soft Clipper that we've applied here let me make it a little bit bigger we'll apply another limiter just

to see the waveform okay I just want you to see what we are doing I also increase the ceiling and you will see that we never exceed this trash hold so this I

will use to increase the gain just increasing the gain then it goes to this soft Clipper and then it goes to this view so we can just see what's going on

okay so let's do that [Music] now we're getting some

[Music] Distortion so as you can see the waveform looks totally different and it also sounds very very different let's

just for fun disable the soft Clipper so we'll disable it and just reset the ceiling so we can go back and listen to what we would have done if we just used the simple limiter

and with soft [Music]

Clipper much better now you don't actually have to use this soft Clipper here if you want to save some time I will remove all the limiters we've applied here because we will not need

them because inside Maximus we have a soft Clipper built in it is called Soft saturation because clipping is just a style of saturation we're just basically

altering the wave form of our song make sure you're not anywhere else other than Master okay we have two knobs first is called threshold we just very very slightly turn it to the left side not

right side to the left side that way we just engage the soft clipping we don't want to be applying any saturation we don't want to change the sound we just want to make sure we don't exceed Z DB

full scale so we just turn it as little as possible to the left side and then with the ceiling as you remember we want

to go to something like minus 0.3 or 0.1 I'll go with 0.3 and then don't ask me why but we'll enable linear phas linear

phas is basically a little bit more advanced way of processing sound that is usually used when mastering it's quite important to enable it during the

mastering phase okay so we go down but as little as we can so something like 0% and the ceiling we set to minus 0.3

enable the linear face and then we use the post gain knob to increase the loudness until we hear audible Distortion so we slowly increase the

post gain and when you hear that your song is getting distorted you take it down by about5 or 1 dbel that way you can make sure you're not distorting the

sound at

[Music] all now we hear Distortion so we take it

down so I would say something about 6.8 DB in our case is a perfect loudness ceiling we can go to and if you remember what I

was talking about in the baning in the beginning you remember that we had a way to measure how loud our track is so let's go to Google and search for lfs

meter and you'll find aulin loudness meter this is a pre VST can download it for free and you can see some of the

plugins will come in exact form like that they will have folders instead of a simple execution file what we want to do is go and choose the vst3 or vst2 I like

to take both in that case I will start with vst3 open the 64-bit because I'm on this version of and I will copy it by hitting contrl and c and then we'll open

app studio file setting again manage plugins and here you'll see the directories of vst3 path that you can just paste the

plugin to so I'll choose uh common files vst3 and paste it over here as you can see I've already have a couple of plugins and now we can go and find installed plugins and you can see that

we have it here so now at the end of our mastering chain we can just find it and put it in and we'll be looking at the integrated vol again listening to the loudest part of

the [Music] track okay as you can see we are hitting about - 6.7 which is way more than

enough and I would suggest you target something around Min - 8 - 7 it's all right and I now also brought down the

gain knob to 60b instead of 6.8 so we also got a little bit more of Headroom you can reset it by clicking this button and listen

again close my eyes it's not a dream now minus 7.2 is still more than we need but it sounds good I don't hear any audible Distortion other than the one

that's naturally inside the lead of course the problem that we have here is the true Peak Max this is a problem when we'll be exporting our trucks to an MP3

file this means that if we export our track to an MP3 file we could get some Digital hard clipping slight clipping but still it will be there that's why

we've enabled the linear phase however we have not enabled it in the fru parametric eqs that we applied earlier this is something I don't want you to

forget about because fru parametric EQ doesn't enabled by default especially when mastering enable the linear phas in the EQ and also the high quality mode

also of course in the OT EQ as well so let's go now [Music] again close my it's not a

dream now this is much better of course than 0.5 above the Zer DB full scale ceiling that's why we can just go .1 low

lower on the saturation ceiling or point two lower so just to be safe we are now half a deel lower on our soft Clipper

inside Maximus so now let's check now as you can see we are below the ceiling we are also hitting excellent lfs some people also like to go to Min

-.1 dbel on the ceiling if you want to

-.1 dbel on the ceiling if you want to make double Shore you will not get any true Peak issues and again TR Peck is something you don't have to worry about

too much but it can cause your track to hard clip when converted to an MP3 file for example when you'll be listening on your phone or in your car you just might

wonder hey why is you know my truck distorting or something this is the reason okay so I get it this was some serious technical knowledge but I hope that it was not too overwhelming now we

can mark the full song Some people also like to delay the start by something like 100 milliseconds can be perfectly fine and then at the end we can use this

Fade Out function on the sample for example out TR finishes quite abruptly so we can just make it slightly longer like that if you want you can disable

the loudness meter we go to export wave file and this time we enable the 24bit version of the wave file because

this is the most popular one when it comes to releasing music online then you'll also might want to use the MP3 version which is basically a stripped down wave file and basically a format

that is mostly shared online always make sure to set the bit ratees to the highest amount at this point when we are exporting to MP3 we have also option to

enable dering dithering adds an audible noise to your file that helps with some quantization algorithms you don't have to worry about this just let's turn it

on we enable Master effects of course and start at this point we have a mastered track and this is the time to hit different speakers go listen to your

track on different headphones on laptops in different cars on Bluetooth mono speakers try everywhere and find if there are some audible issues with the

track your homework for today is to take the Final Mix you have in today's downloads and follow the mastering process we've done today