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
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
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.
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
Figure 4: A boring Save window
Give the recording a name and click Save.
Figure 5: Select an input from the IN dropdown box
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
Figure 7: What would you like to do today?
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!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.
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.
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
