FL Studio 21 is a powerful digital audio workstation (DAW) software that provides you with a complete software music production environment. It's a complete solution for producing high-quality music, instruments, recordings, and more. The program comes with a variety of tools and plug-ins to help you create professional virtual instruments such as bass, guitar, piano, and more. It allows creating songs and loops using a mixer, equalizer, integrated instruments, and more.
FL Studio 21 Producer Edition features advanced tools and native plug-ins to create, record, edit, arrange, mix and master professional-quality music. It allows you to compose and record music without real instruments such as drums, piano, guitar, bass and other instruments. Additionally, the program offers additional samples and instruments, mixers, effects, filters and many other tools that one can download from the Internet.
FL Studio-FL 21 Mac-Installation package: https://souurl.cn/eW2mHz
FL Studio-FL 21 Win-Installation package: https://souurl.cn/0tjCE2
Does electronic music arrangement require music theory? The answer is yes, music theory will definitely be used in arranging music. What are the steps for arranging electronic music? The following will explain the steps of writing electronic music in detail.
1. Does electronic music arrangement require music theory?
Electronic music arrangement requires a certain foundation of music theory. In fact, it is not just writing electronic music, as long as it is arranging, no matter what style it is, you need to have a certain foundation of music theory. Relatively speaking, writing electronic music requires us to master relatively little music theory knowledge. Styles such as pop and classical require excellent musical literacy. So what music theory literacy is needed to write electronic music?
1. Knowledge about musical notes
It includes the note name and roll call distinction of the notes, the duration of the notes, rhythm patterns and beat patterns, etc. The relevant knowledge of notes is mainly used to write MIDI notes in the piano window when we arrange music.
2. Interval relationship and chord knowledge
It is impossible to arrange music using only a single note. As long as there is more than one note, we need to arrange it according to certain rules based on the interval relationship of the notes. The chord knowledge that everyone needs to master includes: the formation of basic major and minor triads, knowledge of chord inversions, the formation of advanced chords, etc.
2. Electronic music arrangement steps
Electronic music and pop music are very different, mainly reflected in the arrangement structure. Pop music takes the human voice as the main body, and various musical instruments serve the human voice, while electronic music focuses on the bass drum and synthesizer sounds.
Electronic music is drum rhythm-driven music, so the steps in arrangement are usually: drum set, bass, harmonic texture, and melody.
1. Drum set
The first step is to arrange the rhythm of the drum set and lay a basic rhythm pattern. FL Studio is very convenient for arranging drum sets. We can use the built-in drum sequencer to write in Pattern. Press the keyboard shortcut "F6" to bring up the Pattern window, as shown in the figure below.
Figure 1: Drum sequencer
Every four small blocks of the sequencer represent one beat. We can drag the required percussion samples directly into the Pattern and then use the sequencer to play the drum rhythm directly, which is very convenient.
2、Chord
My personal arrangement step is to determine the rhythm and then write the chord structure in the second step, which is Chord. Chord is usually a chord texture played by a synthesizer sound. It plays a role in filling the mid- and high-frequency bands in electronic music. After determining the chords, on the one hand, we can determine the mode and tonality of the arranged song, and on the other hand, it is also conducive to the compilation of melody, atmospheric timbre and other parts.
Figure 2: 6415 chord trend
Here are some common chord directions recommended for you: 456, 6415, 4536251. These chords are commonly used in electronic music and can be used by beginners.
3. Melody
After we have chords, it will be very easy for us to write melody. When writing melody, try to use the inner tones of the chord. When you need to use the outer tones of the chord, you can consider the relationship between three and five tones, so that the melody written in this way will generally not be unpleasant to listen to. We can also break chord progressions into pieces and develop a melody by breaking up the chords.
Figure 3: Melody
4. Bass
Bass in electronic music does not require complicated arrangements. Just use the root of the chord and then cut out the rhythm you want. The focus of Bass is on timbre selection. Bass timbres in electronic music are very diverse, such as Sub Bass, Rezze Bass, Growl Bass, Riddim Bass, etc.
3. How to use sampling in electronic music arrangement
When writing electronic music, in addition to the elements written in the above steps, a large number of sampled sounds are also used. So how to use sampling?
1. Directly pull into the playlist to use
This method is relatively common. For example, Riser sound effects, FX sound effects or white noise samples are all used directly by dragging them into the playlist. After FL Studio version 21, the function of directly adjusting sampling parameters on the playlist has been updated.
Figure 4: Embedded sample envelope modulation
As shown in the picture above, we can directly control the fade in and out of the sample by manipulating its volume envelope with the mouse, and we can also gain or attenuate the sample level.
Figure 5: Transition envelope
When two samples have overlapping areas, FL Studio will automatically set up Crossfade to transition between samples, so you no longer have to worry about the "fight" between the end of the sample and the beginning of the sample.
2. Create by sampling sounds
In addition to dragging samples directly into the playlist, you can also drag them into Pattern and use them as instruments.
Figure 6: Drag sample into Pattern
We can directly open the piano window and use this sampled tone to write melody or other MIDI content, but before using samples to write, we must pay attention to adjusting the envelope of the sample.
Figure 7: Sampling column
We click on sampling to enter the sampling bar, and then click on the selected icon in the picture above to enter the envelope modulation module.
Figure 8: Sampling envelope graph
Then draw the Envelope according to the shape shown in the picture above. This step is designed to make our sampled sound sound instantaneously when the keys are pressed. Stop immediately when you release the key to avoid conflicts at the end of the note.