Book Image

The Music Producer's Ultimate Guide to FL Studio 20

By : Joshua Au-Yeung
Book Image

The Music Producer's Ultimate Guide to FL Studio 20

By: Joshua Au-Yeung

Overview of this book

FL Studio is a cutting-edge software music production environment and an extremely powerful and easy-to-use tool for creating music. This book will give you everything you need to produce music with FL Studio like a professional. You'll begin by exploring FL Studio 20's vast array of tools, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks for creating music. You'll then learn how to set up your studio environment, create a beat, compose a melody and chord progression, mix sounds with effects, and export songs. As you advance, you'll find out how to use tools such as the Piano roll, mixer console, audio envelopes, types of compression, equalizers, vocoders, vocal chops, and tools for increasing stereo width. The book introduces you to mixing best practices, and shows you how to master your songs. Along the way, you'll explore glitch effects and create your own instruments and custom-designed effect chains. You'll also cover ZGameEditor Visualizer, a tool used for creating reactive visuals for your songs. Finally, you'll learn how to register, sell, and promote your music. By the end of this FL Studio book, you'll be able to utilize cutting-edge tools to fuel your creative ideas, mix music effectively, and publish your songs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1:Getting Up and Running with FL Studio
6
Section 2:Music Production Fundamentals
12
Section 3:Postproduction and Publishing Your Music

Composing great chord progressions

A chord is when three or more notes are played simultaneously. A chord progression is a sequence of chords that sound good together and have a sense of movement throughout.

Understanding how to build a strong chord progression from scratch is one of the most valuable skills a composer can develop. It's the foundational building block of songs. It's usually the first thing that gets created, and it sets the rules for all instruments and vocals that follow. If you hear a song whose melody isn't very interesting, usually a subpar chord progression is the culprit.

Let's compose a chord progression:

  1. Create a new music pattern.
  2. Load up an instrument that can play multiple notes at once, such as the FL Keys instrument.
  3. Add notes in the Piano roll by left-clicking in the blue grid and creating a pattern such as the one shown in the following screenshot:

    Figure 3.16 – Adding notes

    I've chosen the A minor...