To help our fellow musicians, no matter what program they use or how much experience they have, share tips, tricks, and neat things to do while making FnF tracks here! I'll start!
If you work in FL Studio, then you're able to use slide notes! Always use them to your advantage for note transitions, vibrato, or just making your vocals sound neat! Note that this doesn't apply to only voices, as you can use them with your instrumental too, as long as it's a native plugin, as Third Party plugins don't support slide notes. And I'm pretty sure some other DAWs have slide notes too, but i'm just using FL Studio as an example as it's my DAW of choice and the only DAW I know of that has slide notes.
Enough of me, what're some things YOU do to spice up your FnF tracks?
I would not only reccomend getting some good soundfonts (SGM, Perfect Drums, Shreddage cause my computer can't handle the real thing, etc) but also learning how to work synths like Sytrus, as well as learning how to use "vital" and Serum if you can. Also, there is nothing wrong with using a sample pack or 2, even if they're free. Also, yeah, slide notes definitely help.
For those who need some good varied Soundfont selections: If you need a good sounding drum soundfont, Go for the Perfect Drum Soundfont If you need a good range of instruments, Go for the Touhou soundfont If you need a good sounding guitar soundfont, Go for the Metal GTX Soundfont pack
a tip i have is apart from reversing your crash (1st image) for transitions to feel smoother you can also try reversing your kick to make it so your drums comes in much more harder (video below) this drum pattern is from a song for a mod im working on and so i dont wanna leak it too much (this goes for any kind of music apart from fnf btw and you dont have to do it in every song)
ooh ooh i got one
this one's really simple but it can be a super cool thing to add into your songs
if you're making a song for something based off of a video game, go to your browser of choice and see if that game has a soundfont! it's always super cool to hear instruments from the game in a song based on the game
you could also use sound effects from the game for things like percussion and instruments you can't find in the soundfont!
Fire_Mario_Fan's Mario Mix series does this super well!
https://youtu.be/L75oNUBG_58 for example, this song does the sound effect trick, as well as use the sm64 soundfont for both its opponent vocals and instrumental!
Here's another lil tip for y'all! When making a bassline, never use the chords as a binding for your bassline. Have it step out of the chord as it adds some variation, and doesn't blend in with the chords. You want your bass to stand out and not be overshadowed by the chords.
anyone know how to do this in ableton?
If you wanna hear a song that utilizes all the examples shown here, you can check out my song COLD, where I got all my screenshots from! You can listen to the track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDGxGGi7xSk Happy composing!