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FL Studio Drum Guide
FL Studio Drum Guide
The following are common snare patterns you can use in your song. If
you lower your BPM it may not sound right but anything above 100 should
sound fine.
Part 3: Hi Hats
This part is going to cover closed hi hats specifically since they add a
great amount of texture and direction to your songs. Open hats on the other
hand tend to be used as a percussion which I'll get into later.
If you turn on your favourite hip hop, pop, or RnB song I bet you'll hear
a lot of dancing hi hats, especially if it's newer. Older tracks tend to have live
drums while today it's mostly computerized. I'm going to show you how to
make awesome hi hat patterns, rolls and make them more realistic
To make the most basic hi hat pattern, simply right click your sample
on the channel rack and select “Fill each 2 steps”. It should look like this:
Some songs just have this and no variation because less is more
sometimes. If you're into hip hop, I recommend listening to 'Mask Off' by
Future for an example of this. It was produced by Metro Boomin but has a
surprisingly simple beat for a huge hit.
Many songs you hear nowadays feature a 2 step hi hat along with rolls.
These rolls are very easy to make in FL Studio and can add a lot of bounce to
your tracks. To begin, make sure you have a 2 step pattern laid out like above
and enter the piano roll.
Hold control+L and this will extend all of the notes. You may have to
drag the very last note manually to make it into neat blocks.
Now this is where the power of FL Studio steps in as usual. Holding the
control key, select one of the hi hat notes and press alt+U. The chopper tool
should be opened in your window. Dragging the time multiplicator knob to
the left will create tighter and tighter rolls. It's very common to use rolls of 2,
4(like below) or 8.
Before anything our bass drums needs to be in the proper key or they
will sound off. To figure out what key a bass sample is in, right click the
waveform and select “Edit”. This will open the stock Edison plugin. It has a
lot of useful functions including detecting BPM, slicing, equalizing and more.
The one we want to use is “Detect pitch regions”. This will display what key
the sample is in and in my case, it's C2.
With this new information, you can now change the root note of your
sample from the miscellaneous functions tab. Find the key that Edison gave
you and right click it. It should be highlighted blue afterwards.
A good rule of thumb is that your bassline should follow the notes of
your harmonics. I did this in the following example with ghost notes enabled.
I begin on the root note of the melody I laid out and place the bass notes in
similar spots.
Part 5: Percussion
Since I personally focus on making hip hop production, percussion is a
very important element. The drums are always in the forefront and leading
the track. Once you practice making enough drum patterns, placing
percussion becomes natural to you. Percussion includes instruments such as:
Snares.
Rimshots.
Hi hats.
Bongos.
Chants.
Cymbals/Rides/Crashes.
Triangles.
Shakers.
Claps.
One of the best ways to teach you how to use percussion properly in FL
Studio is with examples. The following are patterns you should recreate in a
new project to hear how they sound. They are quite common in modern
music and you will be able to implement them into your own tracks.
If I were to build a kick pattern, throw some hihats in along with a
melody, this would sound great. You should try to avoid elements
overlapping though some times it actually sounds good. For example you
traditionally wouldn't want your kick and snare to be hitting at the same time
because you lose that bounce. When creating patterns on the channel rack,
also be on the look out to see if it's stacking with another instrument.
You'll notice a lot of percussion tends to be placed on the third marker
of each step on the channel rack. Above, the snare and rimshot are an
example of this. Placing them in those positions adds more bounce and
rhythm.
Putting it all Together
Making bangin' drum patterns isn't that hard once you get the basic
patterns down. Pair that with some good mixing and your drums will never
sound better. I recommend that you try implementing the drum patterns and
tips in this book on future tracks. Experiment, switch up the samples and
you'll learn from experience.