If you can do that then that’s great otherwise an amateur way is to click on any random notes on the piano, avoid the black notes (the one with ‘#’ in their name), and you might end up with something good. Piano roll is the place where you convert the tone, which is in your mind, to actual notes in the piano. The icon marked ‘3’ hides/unhides the piano roll. Rather, right click on any one instrument and click on ‘Piano roll’. In front of every instrument you’ll see small rectagular boxes, which you can click to make some beats but do not go this way unless it really works for you.
Of course, you’re free to use any other one too, but these many instruments are at least required. At the very bottom in channel rack, you’ll see a ‘plus’ sign, click it and choose ‘GMS’ which works as a synthesizer. Put them all in the channel rack by drag-and-drop method. For a decent song, use at least one kick, snare, hat, 808 and cymbals. So, here’s the deal, think of a tone, open up FL Studio, from the library on the left, which can be hidden/unhidden from the button marked ‘4’, choose all the instruments at once that you want to use and place them in the channel rack. The icon marked ‘2’ brings up the channel rack, which is the place where you place all your instruments that you want to use. The icon marked ‘1’ hides/unhides the palette. The blue box in the center is the main area where stuff happens, everything goes in here, and I call it the palette.Ĭoming to the red box on the top, it is probably the most used area. The pink box on the left is just a file browser and useful as it contains all the instruments (mostly under Packs). It also allows you to control the grid size of the palette, which generally becomes useful when the song is about to have a drop. You can set it to painting, muting, slicing or selecting a pattern. The yellow box basically controls ‘what your mouse would do on click?’. The orange-colored-refresh-button lets you choose the play mode, which means, whether you want to play the whole song that you’ve made or just a pattern. The green box is pretty essential as it allows you to play and stop the song. Starting from the top-left corner, the purple box is basically a kind of status bar that tells you the name of various icons and numerical values of settings which have knob like interface. I’ve highlighted some essential controls with the help of colored boxes as you can see in the image.
The FL Studio 12 is not a very complex software to learn Things like reverb, distortion and various other effects on the sound are produced via the plugins that we’ll discuss later.
You might not actually notice but there are a lot of things that go into a song, such as Drums, Percussion, Chords, Melody, Bass and any other stuff that you might wish to put up. So, varying and repeated pattern come together to form your song.
Every melody/beat that you think is put on a pattern and then you take this (and many other) patterns on the main palette (blur colored box in the image).
The basic unit is a ‘pattern’ which is pretty much like the basic beats for your song. Before that, have a little idea on how electronic music is made in general. Open up FL Studio 12 and its first look might bewilder you but unlike any other complex software, it is pretty easy to learn.
And the third thing that we require is software, in the market a lot of them are available and for this tutorial I’ve chosen FL Studio, probably because a lot of people seem to be using it and you can get your free trial copy from image-line. That’s why you must get a good pair of studio headphones (Sony MDR-7506 are quite famous) as they are the closest to reproducing the actual song without powering up the bass and beats. Second thing is, your song would be heard on various speaker setups and you want it to sound the same everywhere. There are three things that we require, firstly a good laptop with a decent CPU and as much RAM as possible. So I can tell you two things right now, making an EDM track doesn’t require any physical instruments or heavy investment and the other thing is, I’d give you a million bucks if you could make a button that could generate music on its own.
Right now, we’ll look at how to make music which is a central thing for any EDM. Things get tricky only when you want to include custom lyrics in your tracks, for that you indeed require a studio or at least a good mic which won’t come for less than 10K. As a matter of fact, you can make tracks like ‘Animals’ in your home, right now. Apparently, both of these popular opinions have misguided a lot of people and might have even broken some dreams (especially if you took advice from ‘Sharma Ji’). There are two opinions about making Electronic Dance Music, a.k.a EDM, half the population believes that all you need to do is to press a button on your computer while the other half believes that it requires heavy investment on instruments, studio and maybe some luck.