today i'm going to share some features and tools inside fl studio that generally help me work a bit faster and get more out of the software so let's waste no time and just get right into it one of the things i like about these style of videos is they sometimes introduce you to some topics that you may not have heard of and then you can go on and do further study about whatever interests you but if you have seen any of these topics before simply use the chapter markers to skip ahead so the first one is very simple and that's just using the f keys so for instance f7 we'll pull open the piano roll f6 will open up the channel rack you'll see me using a lot of these in the video but the best way to use them is to simply just press all the f keys on your keyboard and see what they do this is a very quick one anyone who's worked with audio will know that when you start chopping it up it starts sounding pretty choppy because the audio stops right away sometimes there's a click or a pop if you open the sample up go to de-clicking mode choose one of the modes here smooth or crossfade and it will smoothly fade the audio away which helps with background noise but it also prevents any clicks and pops and it will sound an awful lot more natural here's an easy way to find the midi notes of any audio sample in this window here right click edit in pitch corrector it will open up in new tone don't worry about what it looks like simply select this send to piano roll so now i'm going to select a synthesizer send this to the piano roll and you can see right here if i press f7 all the midi notes have opened up in the piano roll instead of playing back as audio these midi notes will trigger this synthesizer now this sometimes needs some fine tuning so i have another detailed video linked here and in the description to help you get the best out of it this technique can be a real life saver so picture this you're just playing on your favorite synthesizer and whatever you played you liked it but you weren't recording and i know for some people you put the metronome on you hit record and everything falls to pieces it happens to the best of us the good thing is fl studio is recording all the time in the background whatever midi notes you're playing if you go up to tools score logger dump score log to selected pattern let's just say the last two minutes whatever i was playing has just been added in to the piano roll here let's take a listen [Music] sure it might need a little bit of tidying up i might still want to quantize it or not but it's all there so if you did happen to play something legendary some beautiful melody and you can't even remember what you did because you were just in the moment enjoying the music the good thing is fl studios got your back and if i look back in the score logger it's recording everything for the last 30 minutes so that's pretty amazing some plugins are known for being very heavy on the cpu usage and this is true for very powerful synthesizers so if your cpu is struggling but maybe you have a good amount of ram or disk space it might be a good idea to right click on the instrument and create a direct wave instrument this effectively samples this plug-in breaking it up into different zones playing the keys recording back all the audio and then packaging up into an instrument you can play so it takes the load off the cpu and more onto the ram and you can choose how many notes to sample how many velocity layers and it automates the whole process for you it's really neat i have another tutorial showing how to get the most out of it you basically just start it samples out the instrument and then creates a direct wave sampled instrument for you which is just here you'll often want to layer sounds in your productions and this could be layering super saws or something as simple as a top and low section for the bass and often this is as simple as having two or three different instruments in the channel rack selecting one pressing ctrl c selecting the other and control v to copy and paste those notes down however if i now press f7 to go into the piano roll if i want to make a change to one of the patterns i'm going to now have to select the other instrument press f7 again and make the change manually because they're not going to change together they're two separate patterns this is fine when it's just one or two notes but if you're stacking up lots of different layers like super saws or wanting to test out lots of different melodies and chords this becomes very tedious with these patterns cleared i'm going to press the plus here to get the layer plug-in so just here layer i'm going to hold shift and scroll just to move that to the top and i'm going to select it and we're going to use this layering option here set children so that we can just have one piano roll play some notes here and it's going to trigger both these patterns at the same
time all i have to do is select any of the instruments or channels that i want to link to it so that's just going to be a right click to select those two press set children and now any note i play here is going to play them together so now if i paste my midi into this layer [Music] it's going to play that top and low bass together so this is maybe a very simple example i like to use this when i haven't quite decided which sounds i want to use or i'm using lots of different instruments playing the same chords and i'm not quite sure exactly what chords and melodies i want it makes it much easier to control all of them with one layer following on from that last point you can group channels here to stay organized so just a right click select the channels you want to group press alt and g and then give it a name so this will be my base group if i go back to all i can make another selection just for the drums that's a right click to select and deselect these alt g drums probably doesn't seem necessary when you only have so few channels but i'm sure we've all been in a situation where we have you know almost hundreds of channels here and it can be good to know which channels are contributing to which sounds in your project just keeps things nice and organized often when creating music our projects can become a little bit too large and we end up with a lot of duplicated channels and ideas which never made it to the final project it can be really tedious to clean out all of these channels but you need to if you want to keep the project running smooth so there's two tools i'm going to show you for this and they're both located up here in tools macros the first is select unused channels so if you give that a left click it just takes a moment and then it will show you all the channels in your project which don't have any associated note or sort of piano roll data and then you can choose what you want to do with those it's highlighted them you can choose to delete them or simply leave them there the other is tools macros purge unused audio clips this does something similar if an audio clip isn't on the playlist or doesn't have any note data associated with it it's going to delete it from your project which should dramatically reduce the project size and you can see that i have far fewer channels in the channel rack since we're looking at the macros anyway i'm going to go back in tools macros and the last one is switch smart disable for all plugins and this is another way to dramatically cut down on the cpu load of your project you can also check out my cpu optimization video which have linked in a card at the top of the video there if you're interested in making your projects run even more smoothly the default way of displaying audio clips in fl studio often confuses users about whether it's a mono or a stereo track you can hear for instance this piano is stereo with a wide and sort of rich sound stage but it just looks like a single track here to change this we can select the pattern with a double left click right click here and select multi-channel waveform view you'll notice now you can see the left and right channels of the audio and if i zoom in you can in fact see that they are quite different from each other this won't change the sound of the project in any way but i know that it helps some users visualize the left right center and stereo information this is one of my favorites and i use it all the time it can remove noise hiss electric static noise from any sample or recording first i need to select an empty mixer track and open up the edison so shortcut that's control and e once the edison's open all i have to do is drag in my sample let's take a listen to quickly remove the noise from the whole sample simply left click and drag to select an area that only has that noise right click up here on this brush icon then select the whole sample you could drag it out or you could press ctrl a and then left click on the brush icon make sure that the denoise tool is activated you don't need these two down here pull the amount down and then just hit accept let's take a listen and before often this is a very simple tool to use but there are a few nuances so i have a short video tutorial linked here which shows exactly what all the dials do and explains how to get the most out of it if you're maybe denoising a guitar or a vocal or something a little bit more complicated you will have noticed that fl studio has all these windows and you can open and close anything and customize it but this can become very frustrating when you're working with a plugin and it won't seem to sit on top of anything else so you have to keep closing and opening other windows it doesn't have to be this way simply right click up here select detached on any plugin and now it will appear on top of the other windows in fl studio so you don't need to keep opening and closing the mixer just gives you a little bit more space to work with but we can go one step further if i go up to options general settings down in the miscellaneous tab we can go to detach all plugins this just means that whenever you open a new plugin it will automatically sit on top of all the other windows which is the way i like it because when i'm working on a plugin i want it in focus then i close it and i'm back to working in the rest of the project some of these next tips help me out an awful lot when mixing so say you've got some main vocals you've got an effects chain you like and you'd like to copy some of it over onto the background vocals instead of loading all the plugins and starting from scratch let's say i have some compressor settings that i'd like to copy across to the next one all we have to do is just left click here go to save preset click and drag and just drop it on to the other channel and it just copies across the whole preset you can also select the entire mixer track here left click file save mixer track as and then just copy and paste the entire one over but you'll notice that it's changed the name and it also doesn't uh copy across the routing so the routing will be just the same as it was before i prefer simply copying over one plugin at a time i think that helps me dial in the settings a little bit better because you don't want to process everything the same but you know if you've got lots of tracks of guitar sometimes starting with similar eq and compression settings can just speed up the mixing process and a lot of mixing is about speed this one's great for people who like mixing with some analyzer plugins loaded up so instead of loading them on the track that you need them or on the master there's a channel called current which should be just beside your master channel here it might be docked to the right hand side if you select this current channel and load the analyzers there then whichever channel you select that audio will be run through these plugins so i wouldn't recommend it for effect plugins but for instance if i just want to look at purely the vocal channels that's just the vocals going through these two plugins now if i click master the entire song is now going through here the idea here is that you only have to load the plugins once you can just quickly check one channel at a time i don't do a lot of mixing with my eyes but i know it's pretty important when you're working on headphones just to be able to check the low end and because you're only loading those plugins once instead of multiple instances across your project it means that you're going to free up a little bit more of your cpu's resources for the actual music and not just the plugins and while we're talking about mixing another great feature of the mixer on fl studio something that i don't use enough of and people always tell me i should use it more is this equalizer down here it's great for just small boosts and cuts removing a little bit of the low end it's actually a pretty good three band equalizer and every single mixer channel has one so i'm just affecting the vocals there maybe i want to affect the instruments add a little bit more top end you've got to be quite careful with it because it's quite sensitive it's almost certainly going to use less cpu than loading a dedicated equalizer plugin and sometimes of course you need those specialist plugins and you need many more types of filter curves sometimes you just need to make a very subtle change and this is really all you need automation clips are so powerful and they do so much to bring your mix to life but as you know sometimes they can be a little bit fiddly to work with while i do of course have a full tutorial dedicated to automation there's two features that i think are a little bit hidden or often cause people problems and one is having the slide feature enabled up here so without slide you can just drag one point nice and simple slide enabled it will now slide all the other points along which is probably not what you want to do most of the time so i find more often than not that's quite a problem the second is if you want to keep all the points the same but just move them up or down you can access this here a left click articulator tools scale levels now a lot of these are also very cool as well but i find scale levels is one of the most useful and then use the offset tool to just scale everything up or down a little bit this next one is not so much a workflow tip but if you press f11 to pull open the song info and you add the song name and the artist name here then if you export it this metadata will be attached to the file so if you play it back on a different media system say you're playing it from your phone or a cd if anyone still uses those it will show your artist name and the song name and while that's not going to help anything sound better i think it looks a little bit more professional so those are some of my favorite tools and features of fl studio but if you have any favorites or there's any tips or tricks you know please leave them in a comment down below so that me and others can learn from it so thank you very much for watching i hope to see you in the next video and bye for now you
