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

Using the Piano roll

The Piano roll is the tool for composing melodies. The Piano roll is essentially a piano with a timeline. On the y axis, note pitches are shown, and on the x axis, time is divided into a grid of beats and smaller increments of beats. Notes are displayed as horizontal bars, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.1 – Piano roll

Let's talk about what the Piano roll is great at. The Piano roll is really good at taking a melody and mapping out the exact timing. It's easy to generate chords and experiment with notes that complement your melody. It's also really good at comparing the timing of notes to other instruments actively playing within the same pattern and jumping between instruments. We'll explore these in detail throughout the chapter.

If you need help with coming up with melody ideas, here are a few quick suggestions. I like to have a physical instrument nearby that I can use to experiment with...