Maturing my process in FL Studio

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When a classmate showed me how he made trance in FL Studio some 15 years ago, I knew immediately that I wanted to do that. I then proceeded to produce by trial and error for many, many years, trying out trance, dubstep, glitch hop, electro and random other stuff to finally arrive at minimal/progressive house. Throughout that time, my way of working in FL evolved and grew with me. I always felt that producing with FL was somehow inferior to other DAWs because of sentiment on the internet. Where I would first use the step sequencer to put down a rigid beat, then write a chord progression with 3xOsc and then slowly add elements to finally arrive at not much of anything. But when I started to really jam with my experience of the software, it became apparant to me that the software isn't that much of a factor, it's how comfortable you are working with it. I now have a tried-and-tested way to start and finish a track: Step 1 - basic beat Open a secondary arrangement, and drag samples from the sample library straight onto the playlist. I now really take the time to manually construct a 4-bar beat. Kick just goes on every beat and then a quieter one on the last half beat. I'll often layer kicks from various interesting tracks into a nice full one. Clap goes on every second beat, but on a sort of random interval, I layer on another clap and add a reversed clap to some of the claps too. I now set the Snap to None. Closed hats get a rhythm based on improvisation and the personality of the hat. Make several closed hats interact in a playful way. Bit of variation in volume between the hits. Then a tight open hat just on the offbeat, nothing too special. Select a few percs to accent the swing of the beat. Step 2 - prepare for variations I select the 4-bar beat arrangement and make a few copies 4 bars apart to save the manual setup. Then consolidate every drum track separately for the 4-bar arrangement so that I have 4-bar wavs of: - kick - clap - closed hats - open hats - percs Step 3 - pioneering the actual track Copy the 4-bar wavs to the main arrangement. Assign each of the tracks to a mixer channel and lock the channel on the arrangement tracks so that any automation clips are automatically grouped to their audio. Step 4 - drum bus Route the 5 drum channels to a separate drum bus channel, which then routes to the master. I load in my trusted drum bus mixer channel preset with kHs Gate and Decapitator and maybe some subtle FabFilter Pro-Q. Also put a Pro-Q on every drum channel to finetune the sound. Closed hats often get a delay and a Shaperbox effect to my liking. I also add a bunch of effects on the drum bus, although I know I probably shouldn't. Step 5 - add bassline At this point I whip out u-he Hive and get my very neutral but powerful bass. Choose the key that I'm feeling right now and write the rhythm in the piano to fit with the swing of the beat I just prepared. Often times a single key is enough to start with. I might go with a chord progression later, but I tend to just start jamming with arps and stuff from the bass. Compression sidechain to the kick. Step 6 - start jamming I get my Microfreak synthesizer and scroll through the wondrous collection of sound it has, press the key I chose for the bass and just start experimenting with the various parameters and record this over a stretch of like 3 minutes. Alternately, I open up u-he Hive again and find a nice arp to get a vibe started. In case of Microfreak: record the session and dump a whole lot of BEAM Haze and Shaperbox on it, sidechain it to the kick. Some FabFilter Volcano filtering, bandpass, lowpass or highpass depending on the feel of the sound and the tension I want to create. In case of u-he Hive: automate most of the major parameters it gives: decay, release, cutoff and any other interesting ones. Evolve them throughout the track, in context with tensions. Step 7 - expand Most of the time I repeat above steps to fill in spaces left for mid-basses, high arps or a key melody. Often multiple pads as well. Make sure the beat stays on the forefront. Step 8 - structure You need to get nitty-gritty on the transitions. A few tricks that have helped me are to let a drop not go from nothing to the full package in 1 beat, but let the elements sort of stumble over each other. Let the clap come in one beat earlier, or the hats a bit later or whatever. Make it feel like 'oh yeah and here's the clap' or whatever. Give it personality. Ask yourself, do I need all the elements currently present in this section? What happens when I take one out? Does it create a tension when I slowly filter this sound in? Step 9 - endless tweaking I always tend to tweak so many things, and then one thing leads to another, and one element sticks out where it shouldn't. Dynamic EQing and matching the kick and the bass (in Pro-Q) tends to give interesting results. BEAM Haze and BEAM Filter are amazing tools. As well as SpaceBlender, which can reverb-stretch any sound into infinity, and then you have a whole atmosphere born from one little sound, cementing the personality of a track. Slap an Ozone 11 Balanced Master on there. Step 10 - stems Render the track out with separated mixer tracks. Open up a new project, set the same BPM and load in the tracks on their own mixer channel again. I again route the drum tracks into a drum bus, and the drum bus with the aforementioned effects gets its own separate channel too. This is where you get to really give depth to your drums. As well as all the other tracks, you can give them so much depth and effects when working with stems, as your pc will have a bunch of processing power available again. And now just keep tweaking the volume and EQ of all the tracks until you're satisfied. Make some cuts to where it matters to make the structure more interesting. The linked track was made with this method.

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Comments

Thönis

Orbital Architect

Apr 05, 2026 • 03:41 PM

Really nice and interesting to hear about your workflow. I especially liked what you said about how the software itself isn’t that much of a factor, it’s more about how comfortable you are using it. That’s something I completely agree with, and I think it’s one of those things you only truly understand through experience. I also started out with FL Studio and used it for years, but about two years ago I decided to switch to Ableton Live. For me, it felt a bit clearer in terms of layout. I can quickly see all the effects on my tracks, which helps me keep a better overview of my projects. That said, I’m fully aware this comes down to personal preference, and you can achieve the same results in both DAWs. I do like to switch between them every now and then though. It actually helps boost my creativity to change things up from time to time.

Vertell

New Orbit

Apr 06, 2026 • 08:59 AM

I've had to really soldier on through the inferiority complex of people always saying how you need to use Ableton to get the most out of your music production. And I have tried but I form habits very deeply and I just couldn't make the switch from software that had been feeling like home for years.