ZenoDiac wrote:
YES teach me.
I wanna mix 2 songs together - so I need the BPM to be the same first. what do?
Okay, I'll hijack the thread. First, pick your song; for the sake of simplicity, I suggest using a song with a distinct beat to practice. Drag and drop it into the playlist (F5) and zoom in as far as you can go. It should look something like this:
Now, we need to remove the silence. Get the pencil tool and click and drag the left side of the track so that only the very peak of the waveform remains. If your song has a long intro that lacks a distinctive beat, feel free to cut it all out now since you can add it back in later after timing. Anyway, ensure that you cut everything up to the peak, including the small waves that often appear before it.
This is wrong.
This is right (actually slightly early, but can be fine-tuned easily later). When cropping, hold alt to disable the snap and allow you to cut precisely instead of rhythmically. After doing that, drag the track all the way to the left like so and you've just completed the equivalent of timing the offset.
As for the BPM, turn on the metronome (alt+M) and, well, listen and adjust it accordingly. If you can't hear the metronome properly, double click the track and lower the volume in the sample window as necessary. The vast majority of songs use whole number BPMs, so you probably won't have to use decimal places. You can use the waveform as a guide to how close the BPM is if you're having trouble doing it by ear. For example:
The BPM is set too slow here.
The BPM is set too fast here. When the BPM is too low, the waves will peak before the bar, but they will peak after the bar if the BPM is too fast. Simple enough. Ballpark the BPM first, then listen to the beginning of the track and determine if it is too fast or too slow and adjust accordingly. Always stop the track and go back to the start when changing BPMs or else you won't have a decent frame of reference. Once you're fairly sure of your timing, seek through the track to ensure that the metronome is in time throughout.
And you're done! After that, write down the BPM, mute the track, drop your second song in and repeat the above steps to time it. After you've done that, you're ready to match them. Now, assuming the tracks are different BPMs, you have to pick which one to be sped up or slowed down to match the other. For my example, my second track is 117 BPM, while my first is 119 and I am going to speed up the second to 119. Open up the sample window of the track you want to change and adjust and right click the time knob.
It's this guy here. Select autodetect from the dropdown menu. Now, since we are not using the autodetect feature, click "Type in (BPM)" (fourth from the bottom I believe) and enter the sample's original tempo. Click accept and it will shift to the project BPM (the one at the top of FL Studio). By default, this will also affect the pitch of the sample. If you don't want this to happen, click on Resample and change it to a stretching method like pro default.
One last thing, after stretching and timing the songs, you should move them forward on the playlist by a bar and drag some of the stuff prior to the beat to prevent it from coming in suddenly and being all weird and artifacted. You can remove any actual silence later.
Once your songs are matched like this, you can use the alt dragging method you did before to alter their position in case they are slightly early or late aside from the BPM. That's pretty much all there is to basic timing in FL. Also, FL Studio hasn't been called Fruity Loops for 10 years now, just saying.
