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Join Date: 10 Mar 2007 |  All newbies using FL read this now. More advanced souls are welcome to learn as well -
04-04-2007, 11:32 AM
I decided to share a little bit of wisdom to help get things flowing in the right direction before you go through allllllllllllll the hell a lot of us go through on our journey. This is intended for all fruity loops users to learn from as well, not just beginners, so please stick around.
What I want to jump right into is how to make your beats sound crispy and radio quality. This is something a lot of people spend sooooooo much money getting all this stuff to use in order to do it, which is all very capable of it, but don't know how to use it or what things mean when they're looking at it. FL is very well capable of making the song sound beautiful without any extra plug-ins, though you could really get in there and do some serious shit with the waves bundles. The samples are OK, but it is always more preferred to find your own drums, instruments, loops, clips, etc. to work with regardless to what's being used to create the music.
The first thing I want to touch on is EQing, there are two types. Creative EQing, and Natural EQing. Creative EQing is using effects to warp a sound into something totally different. Natural EQing is making a sound occur in the same scientific manner sound happens. So you would use creative EQing to create a totally different sound, while you would go over it and use Natural EQing to make it occur as it would if something were really standing there in front of you making that noise somehow. I'll go more into that later when you understand a few things first.
There are a few rules of thumb to EQing, but then there are no rules, so I'm not gonna dwell on them, I'm just going to take you through a method of mine to help you get a better understanding of the different functions and process of creating good sounding music in FL Studio 6. Open up the program just to glance at what I'm talking about throughout this essay. When we start off making beats, there are lots of things we don't know, and therefor don't consider as we start opening all this shit in all these tracks and running things into the same tracks that shouldn't be on the same track and everything else. So we end up creating a huge mess, usually not keeping track of what's what and can't figure out how to turn that damn clap down. Another common problem is it will be too bassy and distort out once burned to a CD. We turn stuff down, then it sounds ridiculously off balance, and sometimes still somehow sounds distorted.
We notice the meter turns red in FL and eventually learn that means it is clipping, which is going over 0 decibels, or DB. There are all types of things we don't know that keeps us from fixing it. Look at an audio file as an empty atmosphere, the sound on that file is the solid mass that floats in the empty space. When it is made into a wave, that empty space and that sound melt together as one solid thing you could look at as a piece of glass. Where the sound is on the glass is colored, while the empty space is clear, just like the window you look out of. I know it's a bizarre comparison but bare with me as I explain.
So every drum, movie sample, piano sample, etc, you open, is like a piece of clear glass with a stained glass design on it. When you have all of these open in a beat, they have to all play past each others empty space that is now clear glass. Say in a beat you got the claps playing pretty low, the hats, shakers, and cymbals playing right under them, then the kick way up in front of them, when a piano in between, and I'm talking volume wise. The cymbals have to burst through the glass of the claps, pianos, and snares to get to the front where the listener is. When you turn them up so you can hear them better, it distorts everything out and sounds too scratchy, but you can't hear them when they're low. Different sounds occur at different frequencies.
Look at a song as a 3D atmosphere, Panning is left and right, volume is front and back, frequency is up and down. A bass naturally plays at a low range of 20hz-200hz if it's a deep bass. Snares are normally 100hz-200hz, while hi hats, cymbals, snares, and other higher pitch noises range from 5000hz-12000hz. So even though that cymbal is at an 8000hz range, because it is an audio file, it drags with it a low 20hz range, which is the clear glass. This is the inaudible shit you don't hear but hear the effect it has on other sounds without knowing that's whats causing it. It has the same effect on the bass as it would have if someone bust you in the back of the head with a big ass piece of glass.
So what you have to do is cut the colored part out of the clear part so that there's nothing standing in the way of anything else. This is done by EQing. if you have fruity loops open go ahead and open a bass sound, run it to channel 1 on the mixer, and open up the EQUO Equalizer. If you just click a square just to hear the sound play you will see the EQUO light up when the note is played. That is the frequency width of the sound, you'll see some go up higher than others. That means the sound is more present at that height. The numbers go 20hz, 40hz, 80hz, 320hz, on up to 10.24k. Look at 20hz as the ground you stand on, while 10.24k is the top of a building. In order to cut the shape out, you have to cut frequencies. The bass may show activity up to 2.56k, but it's dominance isn't present up there, it's presence is lower. If you click on the little dot in the equo and drag all the little bars down from the frequency width of 10.24k on down to 80hz, you will notice the bass sounds more isolated from the file. What you're doing is turing down the volume on those particular levels of the sound the same as you turn down the sound as a whole with the volume control. You can even turn levels up, like boosting the 40hz range. Different basses sound better at different heights, some sound better at a lower 20hz, which are some of my favorites. Boosting and cutting levels in a rounded shape is what they refer to as a Curve. This makes the sound have a verticle roundness.
Laterally it still stretches all the way from the left to the right, covering the whole distance, which still doesn't leave too much space for everything to get through, you can imagine the shape of that sound like a big pipe coming out of the left wall and going all the way across into the right wall. All the sounds have this effect now. Another thing too, everything is centered and coming from the same direction. Even when you have a sound panned, you may hear it to the right, but it's like someone cut the pipe off at that point, more than it is the sound commng from that area. You want to make your sound into an individual body in a particular place in the mix. Yeah it's panned to the left, but how far to the left is it? This is where natural EQ comes in.
To make the sound really have an individual body in the mix you have to use a delay. When I say individual body, look at the sounds as individual people really playing that sound. For example if you have the hi hats, cymbals, crashes and claps all pretty much right next to each other at a range of 1.28k-10.24k at -24 DB, they need to be like actual people standing next to each other, not pipes running through each other at the same time, it's a weird imagery, but it's what is done with the sound when we leave them as is.
Open the fruity delay bank. In the first column that says IN, you will see a knob that says pan. This controls the original sound going into the delay, a couple columns over is a section that says feedback. There is another pan knob in there which is where the delay plays. There are also little sliders. One of them says time. This is how soon after the original sound is made the delay will play. The trick with the delay is the human ear can't hear fast enough to distinguish sounds playing less than around 30 milliseconds apart. So both sounds at once are perceived as one sound. This method is called fattening.
Fattening is how you turn your sound from a pipe running wall to wall, to a free floating balloon. To perform this technique in the fruity delay bank turn the pan knob in the IN column %65 to the left, then in the feedback column turn the pan knob %65 to the right. Take the time slider down between 0:04 and 0:16, the tempo makes a difference in how fast or slow the delay time will need to be set, there's a whole formula behind it but we'll get into that some other time, just use your ear for now. You may want to select oversample at the top and adjust the wet and feedback knobs to take some of the clangy metal sound out of it. But you will eventually hear a fatter bass than what you opened. It sounds the same, but more present and warmer. You should do all your sounds like this to get them as separate entities throughout the song. You may have a trumpet that you set %14 right in the IN column and %25 left in the feedback column. You may place things side by side, like a hi hat and shaker. The hi hat may be %45L %52L, and the shaker at %55L and%62L.
After doing that, click the plug in the upper right hand corner of the EQUO, select save preset, give it a name and save it. Then open that preset in another EQUO in slot 3 after the Fruity delay bank. This gives the sound its shape back by cutting away the clear glass created by the delay. This method should be used on every element of the beat. Now that you got an understanding of how to isolate the frequency of a sound and place it in a 3D stereo environment, lets go a little deeper.
When making a beat, you should set what I call reference points. A reference point is the decibel a sound is hitting at with the mixer set at %100. If you select a sound and send it to a channel in the mixer and observe it's volume you will see the meter jumping next to a certain number. If you turn the volume knob next to the square on the sequencer where you have the sample open, you will see the meter hitting higher and lower as you turn it up or down. This is how you set the reference levels.
What I usually do is solo everything out and make them hit at a certain DB. For example, I'll have the kicks and snares and bass hitting at -6 DB, sometimes I'll push the bass down to -7 DB if it's too strong, and note the whole time this is adjusting the knob to the left of the instrument channel while the mixer fader is still at %100. Pianos I'll put in at -8, crashes at -12, etc. It all depends on how transparent or solid you want you sound. If you opened the same hi hat twice in fruity loops, making one hit on the first square and the second on the ninth, you would hear the same sound obviously, but if you turned the knob on one to level it at -6 DB, and the other at -12 DB, then on the mixer adjusted it until they were both hitting at -24 DB, you'll notice the last one you referenced lower to -12 is more present than the first one you put to -6DB. They sound the same in volume, but the one you referenced higher is more see through, so to say, than the other one because it had to be pushed down further in order to get there. While the one at -12 was closer originally so it lost less density being pushed back. This can be utilized to help things flow warmer and through each other better in the mix.
While cutting away the clear glass, as I called it earlier, you should have the fader at %100 the whole time and adjusting the channel knob to keep it level at whatever reference point you choose for it, after that is done level it out in the mix accordingly with the fader. After paying with this for a while you'll get over the awe strickeness of having clean sounding beats and want them to be a little fuller and more dynamic. This is where I start to come into a problem with fruity loops because I like to really get in there with it and they only got 4 send channels, but they do suit pretty well. The send channels can be used kind of like BUS channels. You can send all your low bass sounds to send 1, your punchy kick, snare, stick hits, etc, to send2, and so on. Then you can open another EQUO in each send and cut out the inaudible unnecessary frequencies. This groups together different sounds to make them really feel like a group in the direction you have them set.
There are lots of possibilities with this type of combining to get good clear sounds, but seeing that loops only has four you have to work with the space you got. A way to make everything sound a little warmer is to give a slight reverb to every instrument, not too much,just barely a little, just so the sound travels a little like it would in a real live performance. Then over the EQUO in the send channels add a small touch of reverb as well. The key isn't to make your music sound like something coming out of the speakers, but to make it sound like that situation is in the listener's atmosphere and the speakers are the paintbrushes that make the picture in their living room. Once again, DO NOT go too overboard with the reverb in this part, it's just an accent effect to make the sound feel more real by giving the beat more of a sense of space and depth. then on the master channel add a compressor and limiter if needed to make sure it's hitting at 0 DB, and you got a clean track.
With all this in mind, try to keep your beats organized in a manner that makes all of this easy to manipulate. Sometimes in hi hat channels you may use the c5, e5, and a4 sounds to give an up and down type of feel with them. After doing this, you might want to make a separate channel for each different key you played for that instrument so you can home in on the frequency of that pitch to help bring out the bouncy vibe you're going for. This is all I"m gonna drop for now, I'll let yall play with that for a little while, can't eat too much at once, lol.
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All newbies using FL read this now. More advanced souls are welcome to learn as well
