Here’s a simple way to make effective Drum and Bass drums using only 5 elements.

1. Kick
2. Snare
3. Hi Hat Closed
4. Hi Hat Open
5. Break

A break is a complete sample of another drum kit with kick, snare and hats playing in time. This will help to compliment your individual samples. Turn down the volume so that your kick and snare stand out over the break.

 Make a simple pattern such as the one below and select samples which fit together well.

Route all of the 5 element above, into their own seperate mixer tracks.

Now route all of the elements through a drum master channel and add effects to this channel. This will help to make everything sit together better. A distortion plugin such as TK-3 Band Distort will help to make your drums sound dirty just the way we like ‘em! Check my Distortion Demo in Fruity  to download the distortion plugin. Click here to download the Fruity project file.

 This is the result…

And here’s what it sounds like without the break….

The other day when I was flicking through my FL Bible I came across this amazing feature: How to automate a VST to an external controller!

1: Open your favourite VST plugin by right clicking an existing instrument in the Step Sequencer, scrolling down to Insert and selecting the plugin from the menu (For this example I am using NI Pro-53).

2: Go to the Browser window. Click on Current project, then Generators and finally on Fruity wrapper.

What you see is the entire list of midi variables for the VST plugin! Yep that’s right, you can now automate any of the controls on the VST through Fruity Loops. Just right click on any of the Midi Control Knobs. Lets choose MIDI CC#1 (Modulation wheel) as an example.Right click on Midi CC#7 (Main volume) and then left click Create automation clip.

The automation clip appears in the playlist. Try making a simple modulation sweep while playing a note in the step sequencer. Below you can see the VST playing a single note while the modulation of the NI Pro-53 instrument is automated to sweep from 0% to 100%.

Well that’s how it’s done, 3rd party VST’s just became a whole lot more powerful! Now go and tweak the hell outta your favourite VST.

If you need help with Fruity Loops here are a couple ideas:

View the online version of the Fruity Loops manual here… Fruity Loops 7 Reference Manual,

I bought myself a copy of the FL Studio Bible last year. It’s quite a helpful book with 362 pages explaining basically everything about Fruity Loops. There is even a section in the back of the Bible with interviews from producers, who actually use Fruity Loops to make a living! It is really great to know that there are people out there who make a living using Fruity Loops.

So far I have made absolutely no money using Fruity Loops. Still, the thought of sitting at home in my bedroom studio making beats and selling them is what keeps me going!

This is the list of producers who use FL Studio as their central music creation tool. All of these artists are interviewed in the Fruity Loops Bible and what they have to say is really interesting. You can download tunes by these artists on the Fruity Loops website in the power users section. Some of the well known artists who use Fruity Loops (known as power users in The FL Bible) include:

Mike Oldfield
9th Wonder
Seismic Crew
Mark Tinley
Meg Hentges
Peter (Skaven) Hajba
DeadMau5
Toby Emerson
Ripley+Jenson
Doug Lazy
Steve Duda

A couple of other artists who I know have used Fruity Loops (or FL effects) in their tunes are:

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t achieve something. Especially if they say that FL Studio is just a toy. I am sick of people saying such things. This program has unlimited capabilities

Just made a batch of cider on monday, using juice from our apples trees. It’s still fermenting away in the kitchen and bubbling so much that their is apple stuff creeeping into the air lock!

I posted the recipe below. The only thing is that I added a shitload more suger so that I get the highest alcohol content possible. Im hoping for around 14% alcohol concentration. Of course cider of this concentration will taste like absolute shite, but I’m going to distill the brew (using my 5 litre pot still) and create an apple spirit. Drink and get shitfaced! I will post up my results. Basically all you need to make this brew is apple juice, sugar and wine yeast.

Simple Cider (to make 4.5l) by Peter Laycock.

A very easily made dry cider which is slightly acidic to the taste and can easily be adapted/modified as required, I find adding the petals of an aromatic, fully opened rose, picked on a good sunny day, can be added around day 4, giving a little subtlety to the bouquet and flavour.

Ingredients:-

4l Apple juice (Supermarket type, no added chemicals or sugar & avoid anything with “drink” in the name)
50g sugar (see Notes below)
5g (1tsp) Pectic enzyme
2.5g (1/2 tsp) yeast nutrient **
Wine yeast (white Champagne is best but any will do, even red)

1) Pour 1l of apple juice into a demijohn, add the sugar after dissolving in a small amount of warmed water (250ml or less), add the pectic enzyme, yeast (** nutrient need not be added as the juice should contain sufficient).
2) After 1 day add 1l apple juice, repeat on days 3 & 4. All the juice could be added on day 1 but this gradual process possibly gives more flavour. (See AWARD WINING WINES by Bill Smith - Nexus Special Interests, for further information.)
3) On the last day make up to about 4.7l (this allows for wastage).
4) Rack when finished.
5) Bottle in plastic “pop” bottles with 1 rounded tsp sugar per 500ml & keep warm for a few days for the bottles to get “fat” with the secondary fermentation.
6) Store somewhere cool for at least a month before trying.

Notes:- This cider would typically have an O.G. of around 1040 and a F.G. of 1000, giving about 5.8% ABV (including the priming sugar) and 0.74% acidity. For a less acidic cider the apple juice can be reduced to 3l and the sugar increased to 150g.
Stronger versions can be produce by adding extra sugar during stage 1, each extra 50g of sugar provides about 0.5% alcohol but do not sacrifice quality for alcoholic strength!

I usually make cider at the same time as I make a wine, just re-hydrate the wine yeast in a small amount of water as per the Manufacturers instructions, add an equal quantity of apple juice after 15min and again 1hr later, this working yeast can then be equally divided between the wine & the cider, preferably after a further 30min to an hour (not at all critical).

How to make money online

Try googling “How to make money online” and see how many god damn site’s are out there about how to make money online. The fact is that not just anyone can make money online. I am living proof. Over the past year I have made about $10 using google adsense and a couple of dollars here and their using various other methods of advertising.

If I said I didn’t start The Fruit Tree.info for money I would be lying. My main goal was to share useful tips about making music but now that I have kind of progressed to a level where it’s way too boring for me to simply just write tutorials especially when it costs me time and money (more than I make) to do so. Ok so I have gathered a little crowd of people who enjoy my tutorials but it is simply not inspiring me enough to continue to simply write tutorials. It’s like doing maths homework, it’s ok for a while but then it just seems so pointless that it’s not worth wasting your time on!

It almost seems to me that in order to make money on the internet you need to start a “How to make money on the internet” site. Trust me I’m not going turn The Fruit Tree into another one of these trashy site’s which brag (and probably lie) about monthly pay checks and “how I earnt $1000 in my first month of starting my website and how you can do it”. But what I am going to do with this site is use it as a place where I can share some inspiring life experiences and ideas with anyone who cares to read.

So keep an eye out for my next post “How I made $10 in a year by starting my own website”. Now that is simply a hot topic that I am sure everyone will be hanging out to read! Ha ha ha.

Pendulum are back with a new album “In Silico”. You can listen to the tracks from their new album on their website. Definately check them out, and get a copy of their album as soon as you can! It’s definately worth it.

Pendulum are a Drum and Bass act originally from Perth in Western Australia. A few years ago they moved to the U.K. to continue producing mind blowing Drum and Bass tunes.
Last month they toured as “Pendulum Live”. I managed to catch them at HQ in Adelaide, South Australia. Yep that’s right they played their tunes live. There is nothing quite like live DnB acts. Sure it’s one thing to see a  DJ mixing his tracks on stage, but when you have the 5 members of Pendulum on stage jumping around with guitars and doing live drums, synths and vocals it’s bloody amazing!

If that makes any sense! Learn how to cut long samples when another sample is triggered.

There’s more to the channel settings other than levels adjustment. Check out the cut/ cut by feature.

This is used to cut a note when another note is triggered. Very handy for percussion for example: when a drummer hits an open hi hat followed by a closed hi hat, the open hi hat is cut by the closed hi hat. This is because the sounds are coming from the same cymbal.

To imitate this in FL Studio:

1. Take an open hi hat and a closed hi hat and load them into the sampler.

2. Create a simple pattern: open hi hat on 1,3,5,7 and closed hi hat on 2,4,6,8.

3. Click on the open hi hat and select cut ‘1’, cut by ‘2’. Click on the closed hi hat and select cut ‘2’, cut by ‘1’. Press play and you have each of the samples cutting each other. (If you cannot hear a difference load in a sample with a longer release time.)

This technique can be applied to any sample to cut another sample and create interesting effects.Also when you click ‘cut itself’ the sample will be cut when the next note is triggered.

Celmony Melodyne is a program which can seperate polyphonic material into individual notes. Think of it like a MIDI file but instead your can get into a wav file and vary the pitch and timing of individual notes in a chord. So you could take a single guitar riff for example and create varyiations out of this guitar riff to make an entire guitar track for a song. What’s more amazing is that after varying the notes and creating an entirely different riff, it sounds just as if it was played on a guitar. This opens up a whole new world for computer musicians!

Take this guitar track below for example, its a wav file consiting of chords.

Now open this in Melodyne and can see the individual notes in the chord!!!

Enough said, check out this video preview from the creator himself.
http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

(Also many thanks to Ben from Sydney for showing me this program!)

If you haven’t found tried it yet hit CTRL + F8 in FL Studio 8. This will bring up a window which visually displays all of the effects and generators. This is really helpfull if your more of a visual person and hate having to read text to choose your generators or effects.

Click the image below to see it in full size…

Once the desired effect or generator has been selected, you can drag it from this screen and drop it into FL Studio wherever you want it.

Well i’m not sure about you, but I think this feature is great!

>Fruity Limiter
>Synth Maker Generator
>Slicex

Synth Maker Generator
Synth Maker Generator is an application where all the synths, effects and dashboards can be modified to ones likings. There are so many default effects and generators to choose from . So much power contained within one single channel! Think of it like a digital sketch pad where you start with say a simple sine wave, link the sine wave through effects and then output it into a normal FL channel.

It’s an awesome drag and drop invironment where you can basically link aything to anything. You can basically create whatever synth you like and then save it to disk. Synth Maker Generator puts you in control of designing synths, now everyone can be a synth programmer!

Synth Maker Generator reminds me of Propellor Heads Reason, where you join all of the cables just like connecting up old anolog gear 20 years ago! You can build synths how you like them, just like in Reaktor. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) is much nicer and it’s a lot easier to understand. Check out a flash preview of all of the default presets that come standard with FL Studio 8 here.

Here is a large photo with a few of Synth Maker Generator preset’s shown.
http://www.flstudio.com/images/ThomasWebersPlugsInFLSynthm.jpg

Of course if you get bored with the default presets just hit the download  tab and you have access to hundreds more presets all for free.

Slicex
For those of you who love sampling, this little sweetie has more knobs and buttons than you need. Remember the Fruity Slicer? Slicex is like a mash up of the Fruity Slicer and Fruity Edison! So what does that mean? Well you can paste your audio clips straight into Slicex and modify any part of the wave just like in Fruity Edison. Hit the slice button and slice the sample into pieces. Now chop and change the play order of the sample to your content. Now if you suddenly decide you want to change part of the wave, such as add some reverd to one part of the sample, just highlight that part of the wave in Slicex and apply the reverb. No more cutting and pasting audio clips around as you can tweak it to perfection all within Slicex.

Slicex: take out the “lic” and your left with S***ex! This plugin is just as good.

FL Studio 8 you will like it, love it and maybe (if it wasn’t a computer program) you could you could marry it! But one thing is for certain, you will spend more time with FL Studio 8 than with your friends, girlfriend or wife. (For those girls reading just swap the genders in that last sentance!)

Click here to get the free and fully functional FL Studio 7 demo now. (FL Studio 8 for the moment is only available to registered users in the form of Release Candidate 2. Just log into to your “MyFLStudio” and download. It’s pretty damn stable though I haven’t had any problems as yet!)

So you convinced that FL Studio is the program for you? Then why not check out my 10% off FL Studio 8 offer get in quick as they are raising the price of FL Studio 8 (when it is properly released) from $150 to $200 for producer edition.

To take advantage of this special offer all you have to do is go to the FL Studio shop and select your product. The discount applies to all of Image Line’s product. You choose what you want to buy. Follow this link to save 10% off everything! 

Which version should you buy?

FL Studio XXL - consists of FL Studio Producer bundled with Drum Synth Live, Sim Synth Live, DX10, Sytrus, Video Player, Direct Wave, Soundfont Player.

FL Studio Producer Edition - this is simply FL Studio with all standard effects and generators excepet the ones listed above.

I recommend going for the Producer Edition if your budget is a little tight. You can always buy the bundled generators at a later date if needed. Using my special offer you can get FL Studio Producer Edition for US$135 that’s a saving of US$14 using the 10% discount link.

I also have inside information that the Producer Edition will be going up to US$200 to tie in with the release of FL Studio 8. So if you get in quick and buy FL Studio 7 today for US$135, you will be able to download FL Studio 8 when it comes out as registered FL Studio owners get lifetime free updates!. How good is that!

As a registered user you get access to

Sick of the dull green look of FL Studio? Well it’s easy enough to modify all of the graphics and come up with an entirely new look FL Studio. Personalise the colour scheme to your liking and who knows it may even change the way you make music!

The hard way to pimp your Fruity Loops layout involves going into the Image Line folder and recreating all of the graphics by yourself. If your not that much into computer drawing, than the easy way is to download skins made by other people.

For a guide to skinning FL Stuido yourself read: Skinning FL: THE GUIDE

For FL Studio 7 skins (why haven’t you got FL8 yet?) read through this topic: The Skin Tank

For FL Studio 8 skins (there isn’t too many just yet) check out: Laid Back and Blue

Note: You must be a member of The Flipside Forum first before you can download the skins, but why wouldn’t you be? This is the best FL Studio I have come across yet!

If you have ever had any problems opening a .flp file than you could try out the FL Studio diagnostic tool. This clever little tool enables you to fix FL Studio problems as well as corrupted FL Studio files.

Have you ever downloaded someone else’s tune to collab on and they have a VST that you don’t have? FL Studio can sometimes break forcing you to CTRL+ALT+DEL and shutdown the program.

When this happened to me I was stuck for ideas and gave up opening the file. When I found out about the diagnostic tool, I downloaded it straight away. All you have to do is choose “Fix a FL Studio file that can’t be loaded anymore” then select the .flp that you are having problems with (if the .flp file is within a .zip folder you must first unzip the project). The diasgnostic tool reads in all of the presets that the project uses and lets you disable the ones that may be causing issues. Third party VST’s are displayed as “Fruity Wrapper” so all you need to do is select the Fruity Wrappers and resave the file as a new name. So there you have it, your final option if all else fails!

Download the diagnostic tool here

Sytrus is one of those synths that sound so good by itself and has that many presets that you don’t even need to learn how to use it. If you have been using sytrus than you will know how mad some of the presets sound. Many of the presets alone sound like a complete tune just by themselves! It seems as though sytrus is capable of making any sound you are after. I must admit that I’ve never actually started from scratch and made my own preset with sytrus, however I am willing to learn.

 So if I don’t know how to use it, than how am I going to write a tutorial about it? Well I’m going to cheat and post a link to the FL Studio site. There are two videos here; one introductory and another which goes deeper into sytrus.

http://support.image-line.com/videotutorials/

Note: Type sytrus into the search box. You will have to log in with your FL Studio user name and password in order to view the videos.

A vocoder is a type of sound effect that can turn the human voice into a robot sounding like metallic voice (just like those robots on star wars). They were first developed as a way of disguising the human voice and have subsequently made their way into many modern songs.

The vocoder basically consists of two parts; 1. The Carrier Wave (usually a human voice) and 2. The Modulator (usually an electronic sound generator). For a full explanation and technical description go here.

If your like me and don’t really care about the technical side of things, than just grab a microphone and start recording your voice. Record some lyrics into FL Studio and set these as the carrier wave of your vocoder. Now fire up any generator and use this as the modulator. There you have it some really excellent robotic sounding vocals for your next tune. Vocoders are also great thing to use when you can’t sing properly. Just put your recording through a vocoder and the pitch will be based on the modulator and should sound in tune!

I’ve made this new song Anto - Journey to The Future. If you have a listen you will hear some vocals that I added to the tune that go like this ”ah ah ah ooo, ah ah ah ooo, ah ah ah oooo, yea ah ah ooo”.So how did I do this? Well, the vocals are actually a cut up version of  me singing “oooooh yeeeeaaaah”. You can listen to the original piece that I recorded right here. (Sorry about the off key bit!)

To get the “ah ah ah ooo, ah ah ah ooo, ah ah ah oooo, yea ah ah ooo” effect (listen here), the sample has been added into The Fruity Slicer.

To do this open up an instance of The Fruity Slicer, hit the folder icon which says “sample” when you mouse over and choose ”load sample”. The sample of your choice is loaded in and cut up into parts by The Fruity Slicer. As default, the Slicer will arrange all of the pieces so that when you hit play you hear the original sample that you loaded. You can see what the original sample looks like in the piano roll below.

To mix the sample up, all you have to do is open up the piano roll. Now change the positions of the notes and even the length of the notes untill you come up with something catchy and exciting! This is what the modified version looks like in the piano roll. You can see how I have shortened the notes and re-arraged them to play at different times.

Ok this is straight from the fl studio blog….

and this is from the image-line forums….

This is the second part in my guide to making a dual boot sytem with Windows XP and Windows XP. If you would like to read Part 1 go here Speed Up Your Music Production Part 1.

What you will need

1. If you want to make a dual boot system, the first thing I can recommend is going out and buying a new hard drive with the intention to use the new hard drive just for music production. (Or if you have a spare drive already in your system then create a new partition at the beginning of the drive using Partition Magic.)

2. You will also need another copy of Window XP which shouldn’t be too hard to find these days as everyone is upgrading to Vista.

How to partition your drive

1. The first thing you should do is install your new HDD. Start up your PC into your existing version of Windows XP and install your new Windows XP disk. Choose to install Windows XP and make sure that the destination disk is your new hard drive. 

2. Set up your partitions in the Windows XP install. You will gain benefits making partitions smaller than 25% of the disks total capacity. Make the first partition at the very beginning of the disk 10gb. This 10gb partition should be enough to fit Windows XP, your music sequencer and various VST’s.

3.The outer regions of a hard disk are the fastest. When the hard disk drive spins it needs less rotations to read/write for the same amount of data, when compared with the inner regions of the disk. As a result we do not want to use all of this space up just for Windows XP.

4. The next partition on the disk should be reserved for your audio projects. Make this as big or small as you like depending on how large your songs may become. (Remember you can always move older projects out of this partition if it becomes too full).

5. All of the left over space is used for sample storage and whatever else you like. So that’s it really, just create two partitions, the first for system data and the second one for audio projects.

Install your second copy of Windows XP

1. Install Windows XP onto the partition named system. Your computer may reboot during the installation several times. Once the final steps of the installation have been completed, your computer will boot into you new copy of Windows XP.

2. Use the new copy of windows for music production only, and use your other copy for everything else. The freed up processor power can now be used for layering more samples and adding more effects to your tunes. It is really amazing how much different this has made to my system. Some of my tunes that came close to maxing out my PC on the old install of Windows XP do not even come close to maxing out on the fresh install of Windows XP.

3. The next time you turn on your computer you will be prompted as to which version of Windows XP you would like to load. Just select the appropriate version and that’s the one that will be loaded. Have fun with this!

If your interested in speeding up your sequencer and have the hard drive space available, I highly recommend making a dual boot system. In doing so you will be able to optimise your hard drive to perform at it’s best while tweaking your latest CPU intensive tune.

I am a Windows XP user and have been running the same install for about 3 years now. Over the years my operating system has managed to become a clutter of games, programs, music sequencers, samples, and just general crap! Over the weekend I came up with an idea that if I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP, I wouldn’t need to go out and buy a complete new system. (Three years of installing programs generally results in a slower operating system due to unnecesary background programs eg. virus’s, monitoring programs ect. ect.).

The problem with installing a fresh copy of Windows XP is that I would have to go through and install every little program all over again and that would take days. But on the other hand my fresh install of Windows XP would mean that I would reap the benefits from my FL Studio projects and other audio software running at full throttle. I was weighing up the two options when the light bulb suddenly clicked!!!

The absolute No.1 tip I can give you is to set up a dual boot system. This may sound insane and stupid but it’s exactly what I did over the weekend and the results are amazing. That’s right I now have a dual boot system of Windows XP and wait for it… Windows XP!

My first Windows XP install is 3 years old and cluttered up with programs and my second Windows XP is three days old and runs like a wildfire on a windy day heading up a hill. (The fresh install runs lightning fast!) You too can reap the benefits by installing another fresh copy of Windows XP.

If you would like a step by step guide as to how to go about dual booting your PC, you will have to wait untill tommorrow as I haven’t finished writing it yet. If your hanging out for the next part to this guide, just sign up to the The Fruit Tree RSS feed and get the post delivered straight to your RSS reader as soon I post it up! (If you don’t have an RSS reader you can get one here.)