You spend your entire life trying not to stutter, and then you start making music…In FL Studio there are several methods to creating this popular effect, and I will be going over four of them.

Method 1: Piano roll

In this case I’ll be using a hihat sample to create a build up you hear a lot in electronic music.  You can do this same effect with a snare or kick drum.

First lay down some 8th notes in the piano roll on C5.  Open up the “chopper” (alt-u, or under piano roll tools) and chop the 8th notes to 16th notes.

Now that we have our 16th notes adjust the velocity of the notes to start very soft, and build evenly to the max velocity.  An easy way to do this is by right clicking and holding on the velocity of the first note where you want it, and then dragging all the way to the last notes velocity, giving you an even straight “line”.  This is basically all there is to this effect.

Another method technique with stuttering is to stutter only one or two notes in a measure.  Here I am using the same sample and I have my 8th notes across the piano roll.  All I need to do is select one note (hold ctrl on the keyboard and drag).  Once my note is selected, I then just open my chopper again (alt-u), and chop the note into 32nds (or whatever you want).

Now here is the part to make it sound right.  When ever you add notes, and they overlap (especially if they are the same) it will make everything louder.  So to compensate for this you want to stagger the velocity of the 32nd notes.

So as you can imagine there are a million different things you can do in the piano roll and with the chopper.

Method 2: Playlist

In this section I took a sample that I wanted to use and “painted” it into the playlist(this is a guitar sample from one of the songs that come with FLS).  Once it is painted you will see a little icon in the top left of the sample box.  When that is clicked the sample options will appear and under the Region section there is a Chop option.  This will display option specific to chopping!

The main options we are concerned with are obviously beat shuffle, Stutter 1, 2, and 3.  Beat shuffle with chop the sample into beats, (4 in this case) and then shuffle all the beats around to create a random sound kinda effect. The other 3 stutters are preset chop rhythms that I have done in the image above on the first 3 samples. This is really a very easy method to get the stutter effect you want.

If you want a more custom stutter though your going to have to break out the chop tool, and set the snap to NONE!

Method 3: Slicex

This method uses a VST called Slicex which is build into the FLS shell.  So when you are in the browser browsing samples, you can right click on the sample and select “open in new Slicex channel”.  This will create a new channel in the step sequencer with a piano roll.  Slicex has taken the sample and chopped it according to tempo and hits.  Where the stuttering comes in is when you select “dump score to piano roll” you have a option to stutter.  You can select which regions in Slicex you would like to apply this effect.

Another option you have in Slicex for stuttering is to create your own smaller regions within the sample, and assign the regions to specific notes, which can be controlled using midi input.

Method 4: Gross Beat

The last method I’m going to go over is Image Line’s Gross Beat (link above to demo).  This is a very awesome tool to do anything relating to time and patterns.  There is a stutter preset section that comes with Gross Beat (GB).  You will mainly be concerned with the top green section that controls the time.  

Experiment with all the different beats, while your loop is looping to hear each effectv.  Once you have something you like you will most likely want to automate this pattern.  Right click on the patterns and select “Create Automation Clip”.  This will create a automation clip/channel in the step sequencer which can be controlled in the playlist editor.  GB doesn’t react exactly the same way as other automations.  To help right click on one of the points in the automtion and select “hold”.  This will make the lines all 90 degree angles.  You will once again have to experiment to find the right % which correlates with the pattern in GB you want.

Secret Method 5: Beat It

If all this does not make any sense, or is a little over your head then you can always do the last resort to get your song to stutter…give your computer a good “whack” ‘; p (please dear God don’t really do it!)

The post Different Methods To Stutter, Chop, and Glitch appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.

If you didn’t already know, IK Multimedia‘s infamous guitar modeling VST Amplitube is now free.

The current version of the amplifier and effect simulation software includes a fleet of more than 250 models.

24 of them can be found in the free version AmpliTube Free, which offers all functions without restrictions.

Once you have installed it, you can buy more “Gear” directly from the plug-in or the standalone version with the help of the “Custom Shop”.

AmpliTube Free includes a chromatic digital tuner, 9 pedals, 4 amps, 5 speakers, 3 microphones and 2 rack effects.

Of course, there are about five or so different versions and the free version is only the most basic version.

AmpliTube 3 works as standalone and as a plug-in in all popular formats in 32- and 64-bit mode.

But here are a few presets that can help beef up your guitar sound.

Most of these are modeled after a specific artist/sound but can be a good start for your own sound.

Amplitube Download

P.S. You will need a program that can open a .rar to use these, I would suggest 7zip.

The post 13 Free Presets For Amplitube appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.

Sometimes you need a lead part to use as a transition or as maybe a “solo” type part.  An easy way to do this is by using the chords or bass-line your song structure already incorporates, and turning it into a run to help spice things up.

In my example I used a basic C major chord triad, and added a few octaves (4 total) by copying and pasting.  The more octaves you add the greater distance in pitch between the top and the bottom note.

After you have the chords set the way you like the next step is to use the Cut Tool, and start at the top left, and drag down diagonally.  This is probably the “hardest” part of this tutorial.  You have to draw a diagonal, but you can draw any angle you want, the degree of the angle you draw determines the length of the notes.  The length of the line you draw determines how many notes are cute.

Here I drew a line from top to bottom across the length of one quarter note.

After you cut everything exactly the way you want it there is a tool you can use called Legato/Articulate. I’m not going to go into all the little switches and knobs in the Articulate tool (you’ll just have to experiment!), as I mainly use the Quick Legato option as its does exactly what you need here on the fly.

As you will see the Quick Legato tool shortens the length of all the notes (or only the ones selected) so everything doesn’t run together when its played.

If you look in the picture above you should notice I have selected the original chord structure except for the first note. You generally want to delete and notes that play at the same time, especially more that two or three notes that play at once.  So scan through and delete any notes you don’t want.

The last step is to use the Quantize tool.  What this tool does is aligns the notes to the cells so that everything sounds on time (it can do more than this but this is the basic premise, and what we will use it for).  After this you can fine tune any notes manually to get the desired sound you want, and you then you should be good.

One thing to note is that you generally want to use a lead/key type sound.  You probably wouldn’t want to use a pad with this riff.  I hope this tutorial was helpful, and please leave comments or feedback below.

-TheSpanningTree

The post How To Create Quick Lead Runs In FL Studio appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.