Studio Time

this video will show you how to sync any sampleto the project tempo in fl studio. there’s a couple of different ways to dothis, depending on the sample and what you are trying to achieve. so keep on watching, and i’ll show you howto do it, right after this. (intro playing) if you are just starting out with fl studioyou probably, know that you can easily drag and drop samples into the playlist. however, they will not always be in the correcttempo. samples can generally be placed into two categories:first, there’s the static samples like kicks,

claps, hats, and so on. because these kinds of samples are staticoneshots, the tempo doesn’t really matter. the other kind is the rhythmic ones. this could be a drum loop, a vocal or a guitarpart for example. because they contain a groove, they will haveto be synchronized to the project. the first thing i’m going to do is to draga kick into the project and make it a typical four to the floor pattern, so we have somethingto relate to. i’ll set the project tempo to 128 bpm. now, let’s find a drum loop and import itinto the project as well.

i will deliberately choose one that has adifferent tempo to make sure it will be out of sync. you can clearly hear that they are not insync. one kick hits before the other, and you canalso see it at the end here. there’s a distinct gap.. there’s a few ways to deal with this. if you left click on the sample’s upperleft corner, a menu will appear. what’s interesting for us in this exampleis the “detect tempo” and “fit to tempo” options seen here.

if you click detect tempo, it will attemptto figure out the tempo and display the detected tempo to you. you’ll get a few options here as you cansee. i recommend you go with 100-200 for the mostpart. unless you have a 60 bpm project or somethinglike that. just choose what seems right based on yourproject tempo. it has now detected the tempo. you can now choose to use this tempo, or cancel. it doesn’t always work a 100%, some timesit may detect a 130 bpm sample as 129,975.

in cases like that, it’s clear that theright tempo is probably supposed to be 130. next, let’s explore the “fit to tempo”option. left click on the upper left corner again,and choose “fit to tempo” this time. the same menu will appear. some times, a sample’s bpm will be embeddedin the sample itself. in that case, it will say “embedded” behindthe tempo here. in that case, just click on the button andyou’re done. but this sample doesn’t have this informationembedded. instead, it’s guessing that the sample is130 bpm, which is actually right.

as long as we know that, we could just clickthat button and be done. but it won’t always be right, so let’scontinue. bellow, we have the detection bpm range buttons. bellow that again, we have the “type inbpm” and “type in beat” buttons. if you know for sure what the tempo is, youcan click these buttons, and type in the bpm manually. for the sake of this tutorial, i’ll chooseto run one of the detection algorithms, so i’ll click the 100 to 200 button again. as you can hear, it’s now in the right tempo.

both kicks are synchronized. let’s try this again with a guitar sample. i’ll deliberately choose a sample that hasthe wrong tempo. a lot of times, especially in high qualitysample packs, everything is usually labeled very well. samples will typically contain both the keyand the tempo in the description of the sample, or the tempo will be embedded in the fileitself. that’s not always the case though, so let’scontinue. again, we can clearly hear that this doesnot sound right at all.

the guitar is way to fast! so let’s left click on the upper left cornerof the guitar sample, and do the same thing as we did the last time. now, it’s in perfect sync. the last thing i want to show you is how todo this manually. this is especially useful for vocals and othersamples that have a more dynamic tempo that change over time. some parts of the sample may be in sync, whileothers are not. i’ll delete the guitar loop and import anotherone.

if i grab the end of the clip and drag, butit will just shorten it. in order to manually stretch the sample, weneed to click this little button up here. this will enable stretch mode. now, any audio sample you drag will be stretchedinstead. it didn’t snap perfectly, so i’ll pressthe “alt” key on my keyboard while i drag, this will enable fine tuning. try to remember that, always hold the altkey when you want to fine tune something. ;) let’s say you’re editing some vocals.

you can imagine how useful it can be to beable to manually stretch. for example if you want to do a remix, andthe tempo of the vocal varies a lot. fl studio doesn’t have audio warping theway ableton does, but you can chop up the sample and manually stretch it instead toachieve the same thing. don’t forget to turn off the audio stretchingwhen you’re done. this button is very small so it’s easy toforget.  last but not least i want to quickly showyou a few important settings in the sampler. double click on the sample to bring up thesampler.

because this sample is stretched, you’llnotice that the time setting has been altered due to our stretching. you should pay attention to this setting here,where it says “mode”. there is a few different stretching algorithmsavailable to you. they all affect the sound in a different way. the default setting is “resample”. this means that as you make a sample shorteror longer, the pitch will increase, or decrease. this is not always desirable. to avoid this, we can choose one of the stretchingalgorithms to maintain the pitch of the sample,

even if it is stretched, like so. this is especially useful for vocals and instrumentslike the guitar we just experimented with. if you want to be able to adjust the tempoof the entire project without having to adjust every single sample, once you’ve got everythingsynced up, you can go to tools, macros and select “switch realtime stretching for allaudio clips” you can now adjust the global tempo and everythingwill stay in sync. there you go. now you know how to get samples in sync withyour projects. speaking of samples, i recommend you checkout my video on how to organize samples in

fl studio. this video will teach you how to work smarterand faster when it comes to samples. it’s a great workflow tip that is guaranteedto save you a lot of time in the long run. you can find the link to the video in thedescription bellow

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