Saturday, May 14, 2011

Dubstep TuTorial!

Hello all! Today I bring you a dubstep tutorial for Fl studio 10.

Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in south London, United Kingdom. Its overall sound has been described as "tightly coiled productions with overwhelming bass lines and reverberant drum patterns, clipped samples, and occasional vocals."

I have taking some of the best video tutorials I could find, and broke them all down for a in depth explanation on how to create dubstep.


1) The Beat

  • It's pretty common to use two different sounding kick drums because two different frequencies mix better then just one.
  • Use two different snares for a louder and nicer "Pop" sounding hit.
  • It is important to use 3-4 different kind of high-hats.
  • Tempo= 140 Bpm. This is the standard tempo of any dubstep song.
  • Make sure to add a bunch of sound fx and vocal samples. Remember Dubstep is unorthidox!










2) The Bass

The bass is the most important part of dubstep. Without a good dirty bass line, you don't have a good dubstep song. Useful plugins to make the bass line are Massive, Blue, V-Station, etc.. Ohmicide is a great distortion plugin to add as well.

  • In this example we will use 3x Osc, a plugin that already comes with Fl studio. 
  • To get that "Wub Wub" Sound in Dubstep we most first go into the plugin itself and click on the instrument properties cut, then mess with the LFO. (The frequency of your bass sound.)
  •  The next step is setting the amt all the way up and setting the speed of the LFO in steps so that it is in sync with your tempo.
  • Messing with the filter in the instrument properties can help you find a better sound as well.
  • A side note: If you are using different bass plugins, it is important to detune, change octave, and use uni-voice to get that dubby sounding bass.









So with this knowledge you can create a basic dubstep melody, and mold it into a song. Thanks for reading!

17 comments:

  1. Very nice tutorial, I make dubstep beats myself but I use reason to do so, anyway keep up the good work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wish I had the ear to make a good beat. I don't think I'm musical like that. :/

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've never figured out how to used FL Studio :(. I wish I could, this sounds pretty cool.

    ReplyDelete
  4. i just started listening to dubstep, not sure if i can already try making it :D

    ReplyDelete
  5. Great tutorial dude, really looks like you know your stuff. Plus the sexy accent really adds for some easy listening! lol =D

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well-made tut! I only ever created hip-hop songs in FL so this might be interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Just recently got into dubstep, although I've never really thought of making my own. My brother on the other hand...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Wow, never been a fan of dubstep, but actually a very interesting article.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Nice post, gotta try it soon!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Nice tut, I rember reading about a lot of this stuff when I was learning.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Nice tutorial! This will be helpful, I'm doing music for a video game and I want it to have some dubstep influence.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Just did this at a house party with some lame vocal samples for dance music that we found and it actually turned out to be pretty entertaining! Thanks for the guide.

    ReplyDelete