FL Studio is one of the most popular digital audio workstations that is used for producing rap and hip hop beats. It is used by industry professionals and beginners alike, and it is a great tool for many purposes. For many producers, including myself, it was our first experience working in a music production software, aside from maybe Garage Band, a simplified D.A.W. that comes with Mac computers.
FL Studio is very versatile, meaning there are many things that can be done, correctly and incorrectly. In this post, I will be bringing to light three mistakes that are frequently made by producers when using FL Studio.
Infamously, the Fruity Limiter is known to be the cause for lower quality mixes in beginner beats. Since it is enabled by default, it is frequently overlooked. This stock plugin acts as a limiter and compresses certain frequencies in the mix, contributing to lower volume levels and random ducking when different sounds clash.
Fruity Limiter itself is not a bad tool and can be manipulated to work properly, but the default preset on it does not work well with rap beats. Instead of using it, create a new preset with the Fruity Soft Clipper, a different limiter that comes with FL Studio. This way, upon startup of the software, the Fruity Soft Clipper, a limiter with a much better default preset for beats, will replace the Fruity Limiter.
Not Saving Frequently
One of the biggest mistakes beginners and pros make is not saving their projects frequently while working. FL Studio is known to be prone to crashing, and losing a project file that you were working on can be heartbreaking.
FL Studio actually autosaves every so often, and if you know this, you can navigate to the file folders with FL Studio files and retrieve the projects. This is surprisingly a function that many aren't aware of.
Despite the existence of the autosave, it is much easier to just periodically save to ensure the availability of the most recent version of the project file.
Not Speeding Up Workflow
Although FL Studio is designed in a way that streamlines the process of making beats, there are still many ways to make your workflow even faster. FL Studio has many keyboard shortcuts to speed up different parts of the process, such as Ctrl+B to duplicate selections, various key combinations to switch to different tools faster, and other methods of speeding up various actions. This can improve your rate of productivity as you will be getting things done faster.
Additionally, FL Studio allows various means of organization. Sound samples that you have downloaded can be placed in different folders and these paths can be customized to your liking. For example, I like to organize my drum kits by creator so I can find the sounds that I am looking for easily.
If you like to use similar patterns in many of your beats, with hi hats for example, you can use midis that can be dropped into the piano roll which will tell the software to create certain patterns.
As mentioned earlier, FL Studio startup presets can also be created. If you like to use certain plugins in each beat, you can make a preset which will cause FL Studio to load them with every new project file.
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