Preparing to record
Let’s suppose that you have a song you’ve been working on in FL Studio, and you’d like to record your vocals on top of it.
Obviously, for this to work, you need a microphone plugged into your
soundcard. If you’re using a built in soundcard, you may need to go into
the Windows Volume Control and make sure Microphone is selected under
your recording settings.
Next, make sure you’re using ASIO drivers – see the box at the bottom of this article for more info.
Latency is key when recording audio – you need to set it as low as you
possibly can without causing a million under runs. This is because you
will want to be listening back to yourself while you sing, and if your
buffer length is set higher than about 512 samples (12ms), you’ll hear a
noticeable delay between when you sing into the mic and when that audio
arrives in your headphones. It’s weird and it’ll throw you off.
Tuning Up the ASIO Driver
Figure 1 - ASIO settings
Click
Options > Audio Settings
(or hit F10, it’s faster), and have a look at your ASIO Properties. In
figure 1, you’ll notice the buffer size is currently set to 512 (barely
acceptable), and at this rate we’ve had only 8 underruns since the
project opened. This is OK.
Underruns occur when the ASIO performance is pushed too far, and they
result in audible glitching if they happen during playback. Getting some
underruns while you fiddle with system settings is normal, but what
we’re aiming for here is to tune things as close to the edge as possible
without getting underruns while we’re working later.
You need to set your buffer size to as small as you can get it without the underruns count spinning up like a fan. Click the
Show ASIO panel button to open your sound card’s panel, and lower the buffer size.
Figure 2: Better ASIO properties
Now, the act of lowering the buffer size will in and of itself cause underruns. So
expect a bigger number when you get back out of the ASIO panel.
What is crucial is that the number
shouldn’t still be going up
like a demented odometer as you look at it. If it is, you’ve gone too
small – go back and increase your buffer size. Increasing underruns
means audible glitching during playback.
In my case, I was able to get it down to 128 samples (3ms). My underruns
now sit at 66, but they’re stable – not going up further. If you play
your song back and you can hear glitching, go back and increase your
buffer size.
If your song is big and complex with lots of plugins, you might do
better to mix it down (export it) to a single wav file and start a new
project based on that mixdown. That way, the computer won’t have to
handle running all your soft synths and plugins while simultaneously
trying to operate under extreme low latency settings.
When you’re done recording, you can always import the new audio into the
original project. A lot of professionals use this trick when their
arrangements get out of hand, or when they use too many instances of
Sytrus at once.
Mic Check One Two
When you’re happy with your latency settings, we’re ready to begin.
Open the FL Mixer (the shortcut is F9), and choose an empty, unused
channel.
Figure 3: The disk button
The
first thing we need to do is specify a name for the audio we’re going
to record. Now, down at the bottom of each mixer channel is a grey icon
that looks like an old style disk from back in the day. Click it.
Figure 4: A boring Save window
A
standard Windows file saving dialogue window pops up letting you
specify the base name of the recording you’re about to make. By default,
it’ll put the resulting wav files in FL’s default folder for
recordings, but for your sanity it’s probably best to choose the folder
that the rest of your song is living in.
Give the recording a name and click
Save.
Figure 5: Select an input from the IN dropdown box
IMPORTANT:
for
this next step, either switch to headphones (recommended) or turn your
speakers right down. We’re about to enable the microphone, and it’s
quite possible to cause a feedback loop that can blow out your cones.
Under NO CIRCUMSTANCES should you ever point the mic at one of your
monitor speakers.
Next, we need to specify where we’re recording from: which sound card input FL Studio should be listening to.
Keeping our record channel selected, look in the top right of the mixer,
where the Insert effects are. There’s a dropdown box labelled
IN. Drop it down and select your microphone input from the list of options available.
Since a microphone is a mono recording source, I’ve chosen a mono
(single channel) input. This is important because there’s no point
recording mono audio into a stereo wav file. Of course it works, but
it’s a waste of space.
As soon as you’ve chosen your input, you should be able to hear yourself in your headphones or over the speakers. I
strongly recommend
switching to headphone monitoring at this point to avoid feedback
loops, but also because you don’t want the backtrack of your song to
appear in the vocal recording.
If you want to turn the microphone off again, select
(none) from the
IN dropdown box list.
Note:
you can also add some insert effects such as
Reverb to the channel if you’d like to hear effects on your voice while
recording. This is lots of fun, but be warned that the effect will be
hard recorded into the wav file along with your voice. You won’t be able
to remove it later. Not a good idea.
Figure 6: Click Record
We
can now begin recording. Clear your throat, sip something strong,
whatever you need to do. When you’re ready, click the record button.
Figure 7: What would you like to do today?
Now, a
Recording dialogue window pops up asking you what and how you’d like to record. What you choose here depends on your personal style.
The default option is to record into an Edison instance. The upside of
doing this is that you can perform edits on the resulting audio right
away, and when you’re done editing, you can insert the audio into the
playlist as a clip by pressing
SHIFT-C.
It’s an advanced method of working, but you’ll probably want to hear the
recording in context straight away. So I suggest selecting
Audio, into the playlist as an audio clip.
As soon as you’ve made your choice, recording begins.
You’ll be able to hear the track in your headphones, and you’ll be able
to hear yourself sing … or rap or whatever.
When you’re done, click Stop. Also, click the Record button again to deactivate record mode, or you’ll just start recording new clips every time you press Play.
A new audio clip will have been inserted into the playlist containing your recording. You can now safely add effects to it.
And you’re done!
An Afterword
The method I’ve described above (ie selecting
Audio, into the playlist as an audio clip) provides the most instant gratification. You get where you’re going fast, and you can instantly hear if it’s working or not.
It isn’t, however, the most
efficient method of working. This is because every time you record, you get a new audio clip.
ASIO drivers
ASIO drivers enable very low latency usage of an audio interface. If
you’re just starting to learn this stuff, latency is the delay between
moving a knob on screen and hearing the effect of what you’ve done. It’s
the delay between hitting a key on your keyboard and and hearing the
note come out of your speakers.
ASIO drivers make it possible to do these things in real time with
almost no discernible delay. If you’re using a dedicated audio
interface, it’s 99% likely that you’ll already have ASIO drivers
installed.
If, however, you’re using whatever soundcard came inside your PC or laptop, you may need to install a generic ASIO driver.
I recommend ASIO4All, a fantastic driver that makes music possible for millions of laptop users around the world.
Very few of us are fantastic performers. Your may in fact suck. And
if you’re recording straight to clips, you can quickly wind up with like
100 different clips, all of which suck.
This is why recording to Edison is technically better, even though it’s
more fiddly: because you can toss the recording without ever saving it
or inserting it into the project, both of which happen automatically
with the process described above.
Having said that, and despite the fact that I love FL Studio dearly, I
don’t recommend using it for serious vocal recording sessions. It’s
totally possible, but it’s a pain.
The way that Cubase and Logic work (dedicated audio track) is by far
inferior in terms of flexibility, but they are (in my humble opinion)
much faster for this specific purpose.
My own process is:
- compose in FL Studio, and export to WAV
- import WAV into Cubase and record vocals
- edit vocals in Cubase, and export them to WAV
- import the WAV back into FL Studio as a clip, and finish the mix
Your mileage may vary.
I’m seeing lot of people asking how to install VST plugins into FL Studio so here’s a short guide showing you how to do it.
Now,
usually VST plugins (most of the free ones at least) comes either
zipped (or rar packed) package of files (.DLL file(s)) which you have to
unzip or unrar to your VSTplugins folder. You need a ZIP / RAR
extractor such as 7-Zip or IZArc for this.
If
the plugin has its own installer (.exe file), follow the instructions
given during the installation. Usually it asks the location of your
VSTplugin folder.
After
that, go to the Channels -> Add one -> More… and a box with a
list of plugins will appear. At the Bottom of the box you’ll see
a’Refresh’ button: click on it and choose ‘Fast scan (recommended)’ from
the menu:
After scanning you should see your newly installed plugin in the plugin list (in red color):
that is it.
