Today, we showed you guys everything that you need to know when it comes to using Slice ex in FL studio and we showed you guys some of the basic functions and sex as well, some advanced tips. I've never seen anyone cover on YouTube. So if you guys are trying to get better at sampling. I'm going to show you everything that you need to know when it comes to using slice X to make better beats.

It's the first of some basic functions of slice X when making your chops.

So what I'd recommend doing first is highlighting the entire sample and then clicking M on your keyboard and then enter to make your marker.

And then slowly dragging the highlighted portion across. Click M again, hit enter. This, to me, is the most efficient way of making your chops using slice X. Now, if you want to delete a chop just right, click on the marker name and hit delete. If you want to delete a bunch at once, just highlight whatever area that you want to clear out. Hit, control, shift and delete. And there you go. If you want to undo any action, just click this button here.

If you have a huge sample and you only want to work with a portion of it, what I'd recommend doing is highlighting the part that you want to use and hitting control-delete.

Inversely if you want to get rid of a portion that you don't want, just highlight it and hit delete as well. There is an auto slicing function right here.

If you take this button and right click it, you can choose which option you want to go with. So if you want to do dull auto slicing or if you want to move to medium, but as you can see, it's not that great sometimes as well. What I'd recommend doing is clicking the Autodump button off. So what this does is let's say, for example, I make my own pattern here. And at the last second, I want to make a slight adjustment.

Let's say I want to increase the amount of time in this slice. You'll see a completely erase what you've created and just put the original Chop's back in. So it's a good idea to turn this function off. If you want to change the pitch of the sample, there is this function up here.

Unfortunately, it also stretches your sample out.

If I pitch the sample data, it's also going to make the sample longer. And the advanced section of this video, I'm going to show you a way you can avoid that as well. If you use a MIDI keyboard, depending on how hard you hit the key, the volume is going to change. So I'm gonna hit it lightly here.

And if I hit it hard, so turn that off.

Go to the drop down menu here and click the link velocity, the volume, so that every time you hit a key, no matter how hard it's going to stay at the same volume, it's enough for some advanced tips. Let's say, for example, this is a chop arrangement that I came up with.

So you guys can see, even though I made my chops at the different note changes and they're pretty much on time, unfortunately, the timing of the sample is all over the place. Some of the notes don't play long enough. Some are too short. So this is when time stretching is a very useful tool. So, for example, I'm going to take the first slice here. And what I wanted to do is play all the way to the end of the bar here.

Now, the way to do this is to take your cursor and put it to the exact part of where you want the sample to end. And if you look at the top here, we can see this is at four point two, one seconds.

Now, if you're going to slice X and highlight the top that we want to adjust and we hit Alt-T, this is going to bring up the time structure function. So first off, you want to make sure that the time structure multiplier is set to one hundred percent right here. And you want to make sure the pitch course is also at zero. And you guys can see the length of this note is three thousand eight hundred seventy two milliseconds or in other words, three point eight seven seconds.

And how long we want the sample to be is four point two, one seconds. So all we have to do now is type in how long we want the sample to last. So here I'm going to type in four to one zero, which is four point two, one seconds converted into milliseconds. All you got to do is multiply by a thousand.

And if I hit, accept now we can see this change slightly and now if I play it.

It's the perfect length now. Now, let's say, for example, I want to take this huge long chop here and I wanted to cut it down to this length for whatever reason. What I do is drag this all the way to the front, take your cursor and put it at the end of the note again, based on however long you want it. We look at the top here. This says one point five, seven seconds, click Alt-T.

So the length of this before was four point one one one seconds. Let's convert this to one point five, seven seconds, which would be one thousand five hundred and seventy milliseconds, hit accept you guys can see just completely shrunk down. And now that entire portion of that entire chop is going to play for this exact length that I put here.

Again, this is how long it was before and then after I made my adjustment. You guys can see it only last this long, which is exactly what I wanted. Let's say you have a drum loop that's at a different tempo from the beat that you're making and you make your chops. And this is how it sounds.

You guys can hear it's not very fluid. There are gaps in between the chops and it just doesn't sound as cohesive. One of the functions in Slicex that's really useful is to click the drop down menu up here and close the loop half of regions. So let's hear how it sounds now.

So it sounds a lot more cohesive as long as the note is playing and it's held down, what it's doing is taking the second half of each of our slices and playing it over and over again.

If you have Clicks because your sample isn't chopped perfectly well on the zero crossing, what I'd recommend doing is highlighting the entire thing, going into the tools and click, click and all the regions and also doing the exact same thing and clicking declick out all the regions. Conversely, what you can do is just click this magnet button here. What this does is it snaps to zero crossing. So whenever I move this around, you guys can see sort of jumps around.

Now, it doesn't completely smoothly go wherever I want it. So it's making sure that wherever I end up putting this marker, it's not going to have a click or a pop. If you guys want to change the pitch of the sample, what I'd recommend doing is highlighting whatever section that you want. Let's say I want to take the entire thing, for example, and again, just hitting Alt-T. It's going to take you back to the time stretcher and using the pitch course up here.

So what this is going to do, unlike this function up here, is it's not going to stretch your sample. All it's going to do is change the pitch and leave the overall time and the length of each of the samples alone. Another really useful function in Slice X is the articulator portion up here. So as you guys can see in the region settings, we can choose each and every single one of the slices that we've made. We can choose out which dictates which channel this one particular slice will be routed to.

For example, if I choose one and if I were to change this to two cut lets you create a cut group.

So, for example, if I put this to one and I went to marker two and I put that to one as well, and if I played them on top of each other, what's going to happen is they're going to cut each other off.

And if I didn't have them on, they just play over top of each other.

If you want to quickly take all of your stops and send them to the same cut group, you can just go into regions and select all cut groups two click one, for example.

And now every single one of the regions is going to have the same cut group.

The obsession here, we can control the panning of a particular slice as well as the overall volume. There is a filter region over here so you can control the cut off frequency.

If we were to turn this on and as being sent to Articulator one, which is exactly what selected right now, this controls the cut off frequency.

This one is the resonance.

The speed knob here also lets you change the pitch of a sample as well, or the start knobs here are pretty useless.

They just let you change different parts of the sample you want to start in, not something that you'd ever use. Now, this part of Slice X over here is really useful and something that you should learn how to use. So this is useful because you can completely reshape our samples however you want. So starting off, if I have my drums here and I come up with my own pattern for my drum loop.

You guys can hear the sound very fluid, because as long as the note is being held down, we're getting that static sound so just completely abruptly ends and it just doesn't feel fluid and natural. And that's where this function comes in and is super useful. So first off, what I recommend doing is clicking the dropdown button here, hit open state file and select volume ADSR.

So this opens up a simple ADSR function.

And now what I'm going to do is completely reshape this in order to match how a drum would actually look.

So now I can take all of my slices and completely reshape the volume. That's exactly what we're doing here. We have the volume highlighted and we chose an envelope. So now every single chop is going to match. This pattern of volume is going to start off very loud and then slowly taper off.

It sounds a lot more natural now, additionally, what you can do is the exact same thing with planning and frequency cut off, I'm not sure exactly why you would want to if you want to get super experimental, but just to keep it very functional and focus in on things that are actually useful for beat making. We'll just leave it at that. Additionally, if you want to be a little bit more precise with the shape of your envelope, you can click the pencil button here and draw in whatever shape that you want to go back on to my sample.

And I draw on something crazy like this, for example.

So you guys can see just match this exact shape.

It played loud and then it ducked down and then loud again and then it ducked down again. So this allows you to get a little bit crazy if you want. But again, if you can do something a little bit more natural, you can go in and draw whatever shape that you want.

If you want to get super experimental and if you're going to use these functions, another useful tool is if you click here again and you choose smooth up, this is going to take whatever shape that you created and just help you adjust it around if you want. Also, a sampling technique that here a lot of is what people like to play all of their chops in reverse to do that. Just highlight whatever portion that you want to get out and then left and everything is going to be reversed.

Now, finally, if you have a chop in your sample that you don't like, let's say, for instance, I don't like the snare and I want to replace it. So I need to do is pick whatever sample you want to replace it with. Let's say I take this snare, you drag it into slice X and you make sure the cursor is on top of the name and now completely replace this chop. And there you have it, guys, those are some of the main functions when it comes to slice X, the ones that are most important if you're a beat maker, I find using the time stretching correctly as well as using the adsr really unlocks just how powerful Slice X can be.

And making sure you understand how to use them is definitely going to help you improve with your sampling techniques and help you make better beats.

You found this video helpful. Please do like subscribe to all that fun stuff. If there is a function in here that I didn't cover that you really like, please let me know the comments down below. Again, the download link to my free drum kit is available in the discussion box below and I'll see you guys next Tuesday.