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S1E30 – The Evolving Template

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With the release of my new book called “FL Studio Ultimate Template Creation Guide“, I wanted to reveal some best practices I’ve discovered over the years.

The biggest point I’m wanting to get across to you is to be MINDFUL of your actions behind this template.

Yes, templates can save you time, but you have to be careful as they can also hinder your workflow and performance as a producer!

HEADS UP.. I RELEASED MY PREMIUM FL STUDIO TEMPLATE!

Premium FL Studio Template by GratuiTous
FL Studio Templates Workflow

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S1E30 – The Evolving Template

  1. Hey, this is Gratuitous. Welcome to Music Production Made Simple, the show that
  2. focuses on best practices about music production, which is based on FL Studio.
  3. If you're wanting to become the best producer you could be, subscribe and listen
  4. weekly. You can also check out my courses, which teach you the principles and basics
  5. of music production, they'll get you up and running quickly.
  6. In addition, I also have books on Amazon and tons of music on Spotify.
  7. Always feel free to hit me up at Hi at itsgratuitous.com.
  8. So let's get into the episode.
  9. Alright, what's up everybody? Welcome to episode number 30.
  10. That's a pretty big number. I actually turned 30 this year as well.
  11. In this episode, I want to talk to you guys about a template and how powerful a
  12. template is. Again, I just released that book on Amazon about a template.
  13. It's called FL Studio Ultimate Template Creation Guide.
  14. And I just want to walk you through the actual process of my own template and how
  15. it's evolved over the years and you know the good decisions versus the bad
  16. decisions. Before we get into that actual topic, I want to talk a little bit about
  17. MIDI keyboards. So I was actually talking to someone who purchased one of my
  18. courses, one of my FL Studio courses, and then I saw that they purchased the piano
  19. course, so I just reached out to them.
  20. We were talking about MIDI keyboards just kind of quickly, and it just reminded me
  21. to share this with you. So I have a MIDI keyboard that I've owned for about eight
  22. years. Okay. It's a MAudio Axiom 49 second generation.
  23. And this keyboard, like this MIDI keyboard, has been amazing, especially for the
  24. price ratio for the amount of features.
  25. But the biggest thing I like about it is it's semi weighted keys, right?
  26. So a while back I recommended to you that the best MIDI keyboard for FL Studio
  27. is the MAudio Oxygen, like you're either a 49 key or a 61 key.
  28. The reason why I say that is because it integrates so well with FL Studio.
  29. it's not super expensive, and it has all the features you need, right?
  30. The only downside to that MIDI keyboard is that the keys aren't semi-weighted.
  31. And when you play a MIDI keyboard with semi-weighted keys, and then you go back to a
  32. cheaper keyboard with the kind of more plasticky kind of keys.
  33. go back to It I honestly
  34. cannot that cheap feeling. It's like you know, I've already experienced how good
  35. these semi-weighted keys are. So, with that said, I've had this MIDI keyboard for
  36. about eight years, and it's just starting to get old.
  37. So, like some of the buttons, like I have to push them a little extra hard for them
  38. to work. For example, the octave up and octave down, and it's kind of annoying
  39. because you know, if I'm in the middle of teaching, you know, in a course, and you
  40. know, let's say we're talking about the MIDI keyboard and I try to go up and down an
  41. octave, it's like sometimes I have to stop and edit that part out because my down
  42. octave is kind of stuck. And I've even taken apart this MIDI keyboard.
  43. I was like looking, I was like, is there something that I can fix with it?
  44. I took it apart, I put it back together, and it was working great.
  45. And then again, over time it's this the lower octave button stops working, so it's
  46. really annoying. In addition, the transport buttons, okay.
  47. So that's like your play, your stop, your record, and loop.
  48. Some of those are starting to kind of get hard to push and stuff too.
  49. So it's just kind of annoying.
  50. So I was on the hunt for the best MIDI keyboard for FL Studio with the features that
  51. I look for. And what I look for is semi-weighted keys, okay.
  52. I also look for the transport buttons.
  53. Again, that's the stop, the play, the record.
  54. And the biggest one is like the actual loop button, okay?
  55. Because for my workflow inside of FL Studio, you you can go from playlist to pattern
  56. mode, right? And having that button, the loop mode, which switches in between those
  57. is so important for my own workflow.
  58. If I'm listening to that drum loop, and then now I want to go back to the whole
  59. song, it's just a nice thing for workflow.
  60. And a lot of MIDI keyboards actually don't have all these features together.
  61. Now, one of the MIDI keyboards I purchased was the Novation Launch Key 49, the
  62. second version. And that was a great MIDI keyboard.,
  63. that Except you know, I thought I really didn't mind the cheap keys.
  64. was You
  65. know, I like, Do you know what?
  66. I want a new MIDI keyboard, all the buttons work.
  67. Yeah, the keys aren't semi-weighted.
  68. I was like, let's try it out. So I ordered it on Amazon.
  69. It got here, and as soon as I started playing, I was like, Do you know what?
  70. No, I cannot play with these cheap keys.
  71. but all the features were great on that Novation Launch key, okay.
  72. and then I was like looking, I was like, you know, because MIDI keyboards can get
  73. really expensive. Like you're talking like $800 for a MIDI keyboard, and I really
  74. truly do not believe a MIDI keyboard should have that high of a price tag, you know,
  75. unless you're looking for like that kind of exotic car of in a sense of the most
  76. expensive MIDI keyboard, right?
  77. But for us as producers, we need the most simple MIDI keyboard, okay?
  78. Like you need you know, nice feeling keys, these transport buttons, and that's
  79. honestly all you need. Like for drum pads, I would recommend buying an actual drum
  80. pad, you know, that you would just plug in USB separate, so it has its own MIDI
  81. controller. Because first of all, you're probably gonna get better quality, you're
  82. you know, you're gonna get more knobs, it's gonna be more integrated for that
  83. purpose. What's happening is all these like you know, developers that are creating
  84. these MIDI keyboards, they're just trying to jam pack all these features in, and
  85. then you're paying for them, right?
  86. Like, for example, manual sliders is such a silly thing to have on MIDI keyboards
  87. because if you actually want to try and mix with them, it's impossible because if
  88. when to go to the next bank of sounds, the faders are not in the same position,
  89. right? Okay, so the next one I got was the native instruments A Series 49
  90. key, and this one with like the keys were amazing feeling, and then on all of a
  91. sudden I started realizing that the transport buttons do not work properly inside of
  92. FL Studio, it's something that in their new version compared to their old version,
  93. they changed something where now it doesn't integrate with FL Studio's transport
  94. buttons. And that was probably the hardest one to return because it was such a
  95. quality keyboard, like in a sense of the keys.
  96. This again, that's the native instruments A Series 49, but it does not integrate
  97. with FL Studio. So if you use FL Studio, I wouldn't recommend it.
  98. So really I'm still back to recommending the MAudio Oxygen 49.
  99. That is why I'm still on this very first MIDI keyboard I had.
  100. Again, I've had it for like eight, nine years.
  101. Just some of the buttons are kind of getting hard to press.
  102. I just wanted to share that with you because again, so the features I look for in a
  103. MIDI keyboard, you know, it's very hard to find a nice MIDI keyboard at that price
  104. range in that you know three to four hundred dollars max range.
  105. you're, you know, if you want what I'm asking for, like it was like seven, eight
  106. hundred dollars. And so there is actually a little market there for you developers
  107. who create these, you know, keyboards.
  108. All we want is, or at least all I want is nice semi-weighted keys and the transport
  109. buttons, your octaves, your pitch bend, your mod wheel.
  110. the knobs are pretty handy as well.
  111. but again, drum pads are not necessary and sliders are not necessary either.
  112. Okay, so that was a little process I went through for about like a month.
  113. I was just like ordering a keyboard and then I was trying it out and I'd return it,
  114. and then I did, yeah. So I'm still, you know, it still brought me back to the actual
  115. first MIDI keyboard I bought. So it's pretty crazy, right?
  116. But it's important that, you know, if you're first starting up, you want to buy the
  117. equipment that is gonna last you because you know, I've been producing for a long
  118. time, and I could easily go buy another MIDI keyboard, but it's kind of hard to
  119. actually find a product that suits me and my workflow with FL Studio.
  120. Okay, so again, my whole inspiration behind the book called FL Studio Ultimate
  121. Template Creation Guide is to teach you how to use a template to speed you up
  122. to produce your music. And in addition, I also teach you that this is not just to do
  123. with music production, this is for any industry that you're involved in.
  124. A template is so amazing because it saves you all those tedious tasks.
  125. It allows you to really open up your project and start working rather than open up
  126. the project and set up all these little things, and then it's really easy to get
  127. distracted. You might you know watch something on YouTube and you don't even get to
  128. making music, right? So by creating this template, it kind of avoids all that.
  129. So you know, you sit down, you're ready to work, start making music, right?
  130. Now, when I first created this template, I had all these you know huge
  131. ideas, and I thought that if I was gonna set it up a certain way, that it would save
  132. me even more time, right? But what was happening was because I opened up all these
  133. different plugins and stuff within this project, I had subgroups, I had sends going
  134. on, I color-coded like the mixer, everything was like organized.
  135. But the thing was it was organized for that particular kind of song or even like
  136. those types of songs. But if I was just gonna go and create like a little beat with
  137. maybe five, six instruments, my template had all this unnecessary stuff, which made
  138. the project slower to load, it put more you know stress on the CPU unnecessarily.
  139. and the funny thing is that first of all, inspired the book and inspired this
  140. podcast was because from time to time I'm working on my beat tape just in the
  141. background because I want to release my ninth beat tapes by Gratuitous.
  142. And if you don't know, you guys can check out my beat tapes, they're on Spotify.
  143. I have eight of them. It's just a good reference point, you know, so you can listen
  144. to my music towards kind of what I'm talking about.
  145. So I was working on my newest beat tape, and sometimes what I do is I go through the
  146. catalog of my old beats, you know, and these could be from six, seven years ago,
  147. right? And you open it up, you know, I'll look at the project, and I'm just like,
  148. oh, like it's just like this is man, I that's the way I worked like eight years ago.
  149. And like now it's like, you know, I have a very fast, fluid process, very minimal.
  150. And you know, going back to the old project, just my old style of working and then
  151. coming nowadays. again, I've just learned a lot about what I want in a template that
  152. really benefits me. Okay. So the first tip I want to give you is you want to create
  153. this template to be minimal, okay?
  154. You want it to help you, but not slow you down.
  155. Because things that may seem that they're gonna help you now, like once you get into
  156. like the mixing stage or once you get to like the mastering stage, you may realize
  157. that, oh, you know, that's kind of annoying setting it up, you know, in a certain
  158. way, okay. So, my first tip to you is you want to keep it minimal.
  159. And I guess the second tip is you have to realize that every producer works in a
  160. different way. So just because I'm telling you to set up a template a certain way
  161. doesn't mean it's gonna flow for you and your workflow.
  162. but I've just set my template up in such a way that you know I know it's gonna
  163. benefit my mixing, it's gonna benefit my mastering, it's just gonna make the process
  164. easier, okay. So, for example, let's just talk about the mastering chain.
  165. So, on the master bus, I always have a certain amount of plugins on there.
  166. That doesn't mean I I'm going to be using them, even though I usually do, but I have
  167. them always open because it just saves me from having to open those plugins every
  168. time. Because how I work with FL Studio is I actually like to mix and master inside
  169. of the same project, and this is is probably frowned upon within the industry
  170. because best practice within the industry to mix the song.
  171. You export it as your 24 bit wave, and then they would master all your songs inside
  172. of one project so that they can easily compare levels, they can do nice fade ins and
  173. fade outs. But on this mastering chain, how I have it set up is I have a single band
  174. compressor, a multi band compressor, I have a clipper on there, I have my limiter,
  175. and I also have a meter. And nowadays with LUFS, okay, so it's really important that
  176. you do have a loudness meter. Okay.
  177. So again, back in the day, actually, way back, like all along throughout audio,
  178. there has been so many different techniques to measure audio, you know, from RMS to
  179. VU meters, and there's there's actually tons if you look up all this the different
  180. measurements for measuring the loudness of audio.
  181. And this is pretty much like the next change though.
  182. Is this gonna stay LUFS? Like, you know, is it or is it just gonna be like kind of
  183. like a 10-year little stint? or is it is this gonna be like you know the way it is?
  184. Because what's interesting about LUFS is it actually takes into the frequencies and
  185. how these frequencies, you know, how our how our ears hear them and how our ears
  186. hear loudness. So this is probably the most interesting way to measure audio.
  187. but anyways, so this loudness meter is the very, very last plugin I have on my
  188. mastering chain, okay? And I actually have them set up in order.
  189. So I actually have the single band compressor, the multi band compressor, the
  190. clipper, and it's by T Rex. That's the classic clipper that is by far my favorite
  191. clipper. it's worth the money.
  192. I think it's like a hundred bucks.
  193. I have my limiter, and then I also have the loudness meter.
  194. So your meter is always the very, very last plug-in, and then you're gonna have your
  195. limiter after that. Here's actually a really good example of like a good decision
  196. you can be doing inside your templates.
  197. Okay, so over the years with mastering, the actual threshold, the actual output
  198. level has changed so much.. It's gone from minus 01 dB, it went to minus
  199. 0.3 dB, and then now it's at actually at minus one.
  200. Okay. And the whole reason for this is when you actually render your song into MP3.
  201. Now that's a lossy format. So what happens is it actually removes frequencies and
  202. content from the song. And through that process of when you're actually rendering
  203. your MP3, there's certain areas of your song where you know it wouldn't be weird to
  204. see like you know, two or three dB boosts in certain areas.
  205. And by setting that ceiling, that output on the limiter to minus one, it just helps
  206. reduce the chance of that. Now, an example of a bad decision is setting things up
  207. where they're actually gonna slow you down later, okay.
  208. And the thing is it's hard to know what's gonna slow you down until you actually get
  209. to that point in the project because you may not remember or you may realize that
  210. you work a certain way. And this is what happens, you know, that five, six years
  211. down the road that all of a sudden you, you know, you might pick up new habits or
  212. you might learn a certain technique that you have introduced into your workflow that
  213. you didn't work with when you first started, right?
  214. For example, on your mixer, you know, let's say you want an EQ and a compressor on
  215. every single insert. And the thing is, it's like for myself, my tracks vary, but it
  216. can be anywhere from maybe let's say 12 inserts all the way up to like 30, 40.
  217. so it varies on each song, right?
  218. But the thing is, most of my songs are not that 40-50 inserts, which is you know,
  219. that's a lot of inserts, and that's a lot of processing that your computer has to
  220. do. And so if you have an EQ and a compressor on every single one, you know, your
  221. template is kind of stuck in this kind of hard way.
  222. A good example to remedy that is what you could do is maybe create one blank insert
  223. which has that EQ and compressor, and if you want it on another insert, you can just
  224. right click, you go to file, and you just click and drag on save mix or state as,
  225. and you can drop that onto another insert.
  226. What I'm trying to say is you don't want to set up a template where you open up all
  227. these different plugins that you know you feel that you're kind of almost restricted
  228. to use because when you kind of get lazy with a template in the sense of like you
  229. you're trying to use the template to do everything for you, it can again hinder you
  230. from creativity from trying new things, right?
  231. So you want to set this template up so that it's super minimal and it benefits your
  232. workflow. So, for example, for myself, again, I have my master bus set up for me so
  233. that once my production is done, you know, once I've created a beat, once I've mixed
  234. it, once I've arranged it. Now I'm into the mastering stage.
  235. I'm ready to master like right away, right?
  236. the next thing is I actually have sends.
  237. So I actually have sends where I I color code them.
  238. I have like two reverbs as sends, I have a delay, a stereo separation send, a
  239. distortion send, and a parallel compression send.
  240. Now, you might ask, okay, well, what's a send, right?
  241. Now, if you don't know what a send is, you know, it's just because you're so new.
  242. But as you start to get acquainted with music production, you'll realize that okay,
  243. these sends are very, very powerful.
  244. And instead of creating these basic ones that you're using all the time, it's like
  245. there's no need to really have to do that manually.
  246. So I add that into my template.
  247. And you know, ascend is just a parallel path for your audio to flow, and it's really
  248. powerful because you can affect these these sends, these parallel tracks differently
  249. from the original signal. So if you want to compress it super hard, and then what
  250. you do is you just kind of bring that volume just underneath the original signal,
  251. and this is what a a lot of the professional producers and engineers do to help
  252. thicken up sounds or to apply certain effect that is beneficial but not over
  253. dramatic, right? Instead of actually applying the effect directly onto the sound,
  254. you can send everything to a send and you can process it, you know, however you you
  255. want. So that's a really cool pro tip.
  256. Okay, so there's a lot of interesting points inside of this book.
  257. I highly suggest you guys check it out.
  258. Again, it's called FL Studio Ultimate Template Creation Guide.
  259. I will leave the link in the show notes here.
  260. Okay, guys, thanks so much for checking out this episode.
  261. Again, think about a template from a good decision versus bad decision mindset.
  262. And if you don't know what that is, just try to be mindful in your actions, okay.
  263. Think about if I do this now, is it gonna harm me in the future?
  264. Okay, you think about you know the VSTs you're using, the plugins you're using.
  265. You know, yes, it's cool to have a huge array, a huge assortment of these different
  266. tools. But the thing is, what I've discovered over the years is I really for the
  267. most part, I found my favorite tools that I like to use.
  268. Yes, I have variety, but I do not have this huge assortment that I've spent tons of
  269. money on that you know, pretty much takes so much space, hard drive space.
  270. I try to keep things really minimal and I try to be very selective in the sounds I
  271. use because I know that they're high quality and it's easy for me to recreate and
  272. make new kind of sounds out of them so that I don't sound stale and stuff like that.
  273. Okay. So if you guys want to learn FL Studio, please come to the website it's
  274. gratuitous.com forward slash fludio.
  275. Okay, you guys can enter in your email and I will be in contact with you.
  276. I'm gonna start preparing you know, all these different offers for you guys so that
  277. you guys can learn FL Studio with best practices.
  278. My courses have helped so many people.
  279. Honestly, when I get you know your five-star reviews and when I get feedback behind
  280. that review. of you know, such positive information from you guys, it is honestly so
  281. rewarding There's kind of all these different stages as a music producer, and I want
  282. to get you guys there. You know, I have courses on FL Studio Beginners, right?
  283. I have one for FL Studio Intermediate.
  284. I also have one for music theory and also how to play the piano from a beatmaker's
  285. perspective. Okay, because again, if you're trying to learn the piano from a
  286. classical piano player's perspective, I'm telling you that you're doing it wrong and
  287. you want to learn from a producer's standpoint of how we actually use this actual
  288. keyboard inside of our beats, right?
  289. Okay, I'll talk to you guys in the next episode.
  290. Thanks for checking out the episode.
  291. If you had any questions, visit it'sgratuitous.com slash podcast, select an episode
  292. and submit your question at the bottom of the page to the contact form.
  293. If you'd like to take my FL Studio courses, see my current studio and podcasting
  294. gear, read my books or are interested in lessons.
  295. Visit the link it'sgratuitous.com slash learning.
  296. That page will redirect you to more info and resources.
  297. I hope the best with your productions.
  298. I'm gratuitous, and I'll see you in the next
  299. episode.
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