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

Applying gates and expanders

To the right of the ENVELOPE section in Fruity Limiter, we can see the NOISE GATE section:

Figure 6.5 – Noise Gate

Gates and expanders are useful tools for music producers and can be used in a wide variety of situations. They can be used independently from the rest of the controls in Fruity Limiter.

To understand gating, let's compare it to simple compression. Simple compression works by reducing the loudest parts of a sound above a threshold level. Gates and expanders do the opposite. Expanders reduce the parts of a sound below a threshold level. Gates completely remove the audio below the threshold (don't allow anything through the gate). Expanders reduce the audio below the threshold, but don't eliminate it completely. From here on in we will refer to examples using gates, but the same overall concept is used with expanders too.

Why would you want to use a gate? Imagine you had a dialog recording in...