What this book covers

Section I: Getting Up and Running with FL Studio

Chapter 1, Getting Started with FL Studio, introduces you to FL Studio. Here we’ll discuss a brief history of music production, the musician career path, and overall process of song creation you’ll discover throughout this book. You’ll end the chapter by creating your first song and learning how to export music out of FL Studio.

Chapter 2, Exploring the Browser, Playlist, and Channel Rack, helps you learn about the main features in the browser, playlist, and channel rack. These, along with the piano roll and mixer, are the core tools of FL Studio.

Chapter 3, Composing with the Piano Roll, helps you understand how the piano roll adds melody notes, arranges them, adjusts the inflection of notes, and easily moves notes between instruments. You’ll learn tips for creating excellent chord progressions from scratch. Once you know how to use the piano roll, you’ll be able to compose melodies for any instrument.

Chapter 4, Routing to the Mixer and Applying Automation, gets you familiar with the process of how audio is passed around the mixer in order to apply effects to your music. We’ll explore methods of automating effects and how to freeze audio.

Section II: Music Production Fundamentals

Chapter 5, Sound Design and Audio Envelopes, lays the foundation of how sound works. We’ll learn what it is, how it’s manipulated, and how instruments create sounds. We’ll learn how to use Mod X and Mod Y as another method of applying automation.

Chapter 6, Compression, Sidechaining, Limiting, and Equalization, teaches you mixing techniques with compressors and equalizers. We’ll explore the Fruity Limiter and Fruity Parametric EQ 2 plugins.

Chapter 7, Stereo Width (Panning, Reverb, Delay, Chorus, and Flangers) and Distortion, explores tools to increase stereo width. We’ll explore the Reeverb 2, Fruity Convolver, Luxeverb, Fruity Delay 3, Fruity Chorus, Vintage Chorus and Fruity Flanger, Fruity Phaser, Vintage Phaser, and Distructor plugins.

Chapter 8, Recording Live Audio and Vocal Processing, discusses the setup and preparation you need before recording. We’ll learn how to record into FL Studio, how to mix your vocals, and best practices for applying effects to vocals. We’ll explore microphones, record audio with Edison and pitch correct with the Newtone plugin. We’ll learn how to retime audio samples with the Newtime plugin.

Chapter 9, Vocoders and Vocal Chops, teaches you about special effects that can be used on vocals. We’ll discuss how to create vocal harmonies and how to use vocoders to modulate your vocals with an instrument. We’ll explore the Pitcher, Vocodex, and Slicex plugins.

Chapter 10, Creating Your Own Instruments and Effects, teaches you how to create glitch effects with sounds, transform samples into playable instruments, and create custom instruments and effect chains that can be reused in any project. We’ll explore the Gross Beat, DirectWave, and Patcher plugins. We’ll learn how to use the advanced arpeggiator called VFX Sequencer inside Patcher.

Chapter 11, Intermediate Mixing Topics and Sound Design Plugin Effects, introduces you to FL Studio’s sound design plugins. We’ll explore Pitch Shifter, adjusting frequencies with Frequency Shifter, stretching audio waves with Fruity Granulizer, and delay effects with Multiband Delay. We’ll learn multiband processing with Frequency splitter.

Section III: Postproduction and Publishing Your Music

Chapter 12, Mastering Fundamentals, helps you understand the mastering process. This will help your music get to production-level quality and be ready for distribution. We’ll explore using the Maximus plugin to master your music.

Chapter 13, Marketing, Content Creation, Getting Fans, and Going Viral, will help you learn about developing your brand, marketing/promoting yourself, getting booked for music gigs, developing a show, suggestions for musicians using YouTube and TikTok, and tips for creating visuals for your music. We’ll explore using the ZGameEditor Visualizer plugin to create reactive visuals.

Chapter 14, Publishing and Selling Music Online, helps you understand how you can release your music online to the world and collect royalty revenue.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/zyMHh.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system.”

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”