How to Make Beats With Only FL Studio Stock Plugins

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

The FL Studio stock plugins beats usually start with can feel like a demo version, especially when the tutorials you watch load a $200 synth and a reverb that costs even more. So the shopping list grows, and the beat never gets made.

What makes a bedroom beat sound like a studio one is how you use your plugins, not what they cost. Below you’ll see which stock plugins come in your edition, a stock-only way to build and mix a beat, and five tricks from a Mix Elite video that make bedroom beats sound studio-quality. Every one of them uses plugins you already own.

Can you make good beats with FL Studio stock plugins?

Yes. FL Studio comes with enough instruments and effects to finish a full track. In Mix Elite’s free 4.5-hour FL Studio course, the EQ, compression, reverb, delay and most of the mastering are done with FL Studio’s own plugins. Paid plugins can save time or give you a certain sound, but they can’t fix a weak idea or a bad balance.

Max, the founder of Mix Elite, is honest that your sounds matter more than your plugin list. The rule he teaches is gold in equals gold out, and the same course installs two free instruments on day 2 to get better sounds faster. You don’t have to, though. Stock sounds are fine to start with.

So stock plugins are enough to learn on, practice with and finish songs. When you want more sounds later, our list of the best free trap VSTs covers the free instruments worth adding.

The FL Studio stock plugins beats actually need, by edition

For melodies, start with FLEX and FL Keys, which come in every edition. For drums, use FPC or the stock samples in the Browser’s Packs folder. To mix, Fruity Parametric EQ 2, Fruity Limiter and Fruity Reeverb 2 cover most jobs, and Producer Edition adds Sytrus, Kepler and Maximus.

FL Studio comes in four editions: Fruity, Producer, Signature Bundle and All Plugins. Here’s where the plugins a beat needs live, taken from Image-Line’s own edition comparison. The free trial includes every one of them with no time limit, but it can’t reopen a project after you close it.

These come in every edition:

• Chords and melodies: FLEX, FL Keys, 3x Osc and GMS.
• Drums: FPC, Channel Sampler and Fruity Kick.
• EQ: Fruity Parametric EQ 2.
• Compression: Fruity Limiter and Fruity Compressor.
• Reverb and delay: Fruity Reeverb 2 and Fruity Delay 3.
• Distortion and loudness: Fruity WaveShaper, Fruity Soft Clipper and Soundgoodizer.
• Movement and routing: Fruity Peak Controller, Patcher and Fruity Balance.

The bigger editions add these:

• Producer and up: Sytrus and Kepler for bigger synths, plus Maximus for multiband compression.
• Signature Bundle and up: Gross Beat for chops and stutters.
• All Plugins only: Harmor and Transistor Bass for more synths.

One more difference matters for beats. Putting audio clips in the Playlist and recording audio both start at Producer Edition. That’s also the edition Mix Elite’s free course tells beginners to buy, because it gives you everything you’ll need without paying for extras you won’t use yet.

How to make a beat in FL Studio with only stock plugins, step by step

Set the tempo, write chords and a melody on FLEX or FL Keys, program drums from the stock samples, add an 808 that follows your chords’ root notes, arrange the loop into a full song, then mix with Fruity Parametric EQ 2, Fruity Limiter and Fruity Reeverb 2. Every step uses plugins that come with FL Studio.

1. Set the tempo. Trap usually sits around 140 BPM.
2. Load FLEX or FL Keys and write your chords and melody in the Piano roll.
3. Program drums with stock samples from the Browser’s Packs folder, or with FPC.
4. Add an 808 that plays the root note of each chord.
5. Copy the loop out to about 2 minutes and mute parts to build an intro, hook, verse and outro.
6. Mix with the Holy Quad: volume, EQ, compression and space.
7. Master with stock plugins and export. Our FL Studio mastering guide has the full stock chain.

This is the stock-only version of the workflow from Mix Elite’s free course. Our guide to making your first beat from scratch walks through every click, so the steps below focus on which stock plugin does each job.

Mix Elite’s free 4.5-hour FL Studio course walks through that whole workflow on video, from the first chords to the final export.

Load a stock instrument for chords and melody

Click the + at the bottom of the Channel Rack. FL Studio’s own instruments are grouped by type: FLEX sits under Synth classic (1), the drum plugins like FPC sit under Drum (2), and FL Keys, a stock piano, is under Misc (3). The list in the screenshot also shows a few extra plugins, like Serum, which you won’t have.

FLEX is the quickest place to start. Click its name in the Channel Rack to open it, pick a pack (1), then click through the presets (2) while you play a few keys. Keep in mind that FLEX is a synthesizer, so its sounds are built from waveforms rather than recorded from real instruments.

Program drums and an 808 with stock sounds

For drums, open the Browser on the left, switch it to All and open Packs, where FL Studio keeps its own drum samples. Drag a kick, a clap or snare and a hi-hat onto the Channel Rack. A trap starting point is simple. Put a hi-hat on every second step, a snare on beat 3 and a kick on beat 1, over at least two bars. Set the tempo to about 140 BPM, the usual speed for trap.

An 808 is a bass played from a sample. Drag an 808 sample into the Channel Rack. FLEX can play one too: the copy in the course lists a Mobile Tuned 808 Bass pack. Then open the Piano roll and play the root note of each chord, landing your 808 notes with the kick. To make the stock drum sounds hit harder, our guide to hard-hitting drums in FL Studio shows layering, swing and drum bus processing step by step.

Arrange the loop into a full beat

An 8-bar loop isn’t a beat yet. Copy it in the Playlist until it runs about 2 minutes, then use the mute tool to switch parts off. Mix Elite’s free course calls this additive arrangement: start the intro with just the main sounds, bring in one new element every four or eight bars, and hit the hook with everything.

In the course’s trap example, the intro, the hook and the verse each run 16 bars, and the outro eases out with only a couple of sounds left. Add a time marker for each section (Playlist options, then Time markers) so you can see the song’s shape at a glance.

How to mix a beat with FL Studio stock plugins

Mix with the Holy Quad, Mix Elite’s mixing formula: volume, EQ, dynamics (compression) and space (reverb, delay and panning). Start with volume. A good balance solves half your problems before you load a single plugin.

Next, give every sound its own mixer track. Select all your channels and press Ctrl + L, and FL Studio routes each one to a free mixer track. Right-click an empty effect slot to see every effect you have. Keep the same order every time. Slot 1 gets an EQ like Fruity Parametric EQ 2 (1). Slot 2 gets a compressor like Fruity Limiter in COMP mode (2). Slot 3 gets a reverb like Fruity Reeverb 2 (3).

Only fill a slot when the sound needs it. “We never want to apply effects just for the sake of it. We always have intention behind it,” Max says. These stock-plugin rules from the course keep a beat clean:

• Cut more than you boost. In Fruity Parametric EQ 2, never boost more than about 6 dB, and cut what’s wrong instead.
• Let one sound own the sub. Your 808 or bass gets the deepest lows. Low-cut the other bass layers.
• Compress groups, not single drum hits. Short drum hits are better set with the fader, then compressed together on a drum bus. Our guide to mixing drums shows how to set one up.
• Keep the master empty while you mix. FL Studio’s default template puts a limiter on the master, and the course warns it can ruin a beginner’s mix.

How do you make stock synth presets sound rich instead of thin?

Give each sound more voices and more layers, then keep it clear. Double a chord’s root note an octave lower, add voices, detune and stereo width in a stock synth like GMS, and layer a second sound for the mids. Let only one sound own the sub, and duck the reverb so it doesn’t smear.

A thin preset is usually one plain sound doing a job meant for three. These stock moves come from Mix Elite’s tutorials:

• Double the root an octave lower. In the Piano roll, hold Ctrl + Shift and click each chord’s root note, then hold Shift and drag them down to copy them an octave lower. The chord sounds fuller at once.
• Add voices, detune and width. More voices with a little detune turn one note into several slightly different copies, which is what makes a synth sound wide. For a stock Reese bass, a Mix Elite short sets GMS to more voices, stereo at about 60% and detune at about 40%.
• Add a touch of pitch drift. Old analog synths drift slightly out of tune, which is part of their warmth. Mix Elite’s videos copy it with a Patcher preset called Humanizer on the synth’s mixer track, or with a slow LFO gently moving the pitch inside the synth.
• Layer, but give the sub to one sound. Stack a second sound for the mids or the top, and low-cut every layer except one. Two sounds fighting over the deepest lows turn the beat to mud.
• Use pulse width modulation in Kepler. Kepler comes with Producer Edition and up. Slowly changing the width of its pulse wave makes a sound fatter and keeps it from sounding static.

Then give the bigger sound some space without washing it out. That’s exactly what the next five tricks do.

5 stock-plugin tricks that make bedroom beats sound studio-quality

Most of these tricks use a stock plugin many producers never open: Fruity Peak Controller. It follows how loud a sound is and turns that into a signal that can move any knob in your project. The video below uses it, along with Patcher, to make five kinds of reverb sound clean and expensive:

1. Duck the reverb whenever the 808 plays

Reverb on a melody sample can push the whole beat into the background and take the power out of your 808. The fix is to let the 808 turn that reverb down every time it plays.

Add Fruity Peak Controller to the 808’s mixer track and turn VOL (1) and TENSION (2) up a little. VOL sets how hard the 808 pushes the reverb down, and DECAY (3) sets how quickly the reverb comes back after each 808 note.

Link the reverb to the 808

1. Open the Fruity Reeverb 2 on your melody’s mixer track, right-click its WET fader and choose Link to controller.
2. Under Internal controller, pick the 808’s Peak ctrl – Peak (1).
3. Open Mapping formula and choose Inverted (2), then click Accept.

Inverted flips the link, so the louder the 808 gets, the quieter the reverb gets. The reverb switches off while the 808 plays, and the 808 jumps back to the front of the beat.

2. Put reverb on the 808 (but not on its low end)

This one breaks a rule. Max says: “The rule of thumb of every music producer is to not put reverb on bass. We’re going to break that rule just right now.” The secret is Patcher. It’s a stock plugin that holds a whole chain of plugins in one mixer slot. Inside it, you split the 808 into three bands and only let the top two near the reverb.

1. Add Patcher to the 808’s mixer track. Right-click inside its map and add Maximus three times, each one fed from From FL Studio.
2. Give each Maximus its own band: select LOW in one, MID in the next and HIGH in the last. Click SOLO in each, so every copy only lets its own band through.
3. Run the high band (1) through Fruity WaveShaper for some distortion, then into Fruity Reeverb 2 with WET turned all the way up.
4. Send the mid band (2) into the same reverb.
5. Send the low band (3) straight out to To FL Studio, with no reverb at all.

The low end stays tight and punchy, and the reverb only touches the grit on top. The 808’s main low frequencies stay untouched, with a soft ambient layer above them.

Maximus comes with Producer Edition and up. On Fruity Edition, the stock Frequency Splitter can also split a sound into low, mid and high bands.

3. Duck the reverb on chords and leads

The same idea cleans up any reverb that smears. The video loads Fruity Reeverb 2 on a set of dry chords, raises the low cut (1) so the reverb skips the low end, sets the decay (2) to about 3 seconds and turns up the wet (3). The length sounds great. But it smears into the next chord.

So add Fruity Peak Controller to the chords’ mixer track, before the reverb, and link the reverb’s WET to it with the Inverted formula, the same way as the 808 trick. Now the reverb ducks while the chords play and fills the space when they stop. “As you can hear, with the Peak Controller it’s getting way, way more clear. The chords are in your face,” Max says.

Two Peak Controller knobs fine-tune it. Raising BASE lowers the reverb overall, and DECAY sets how fast the reverb swells back after the chords stop. If your chords already have volume automation, turn TENSION up a little and VOL down. It’s worth using on most chords and leads, and it works for delay too: put the Peak Controller before the delay and link the delay’s wet instead.

4. Give the snare a long reverb tail without the mess

In the video, a long reverb tail on the snare made the drums super messy. The fix is the same trick again. Put Fruity Peak Controller (1) before the reverb (2) on the snare’s mixer track, then link the reverb’s wet to it with the Inverted formula.

Now the dry snare hits clean, and the tail blooms in the gap after it. The project uses ValhallaRoom, a paid reverb, but Fruity Reeverb 2 works the same way. Save this one for the advanced stage of mixing, the moment you think the beat is done. For vocals, always duck the reverb and delay this way, and our guide to mixing vocals with stock FL Studio plugins shows that setup click by click.

5. Make the reverb move with an LFO

This one is for EDM and dubstep. The video’s growl, a gritty bass sound, has a huge reverb (a 20-second decay at full wet) that already ducks while the growl plays. To make that tail pulse, it uses the LFO side of Fruity Peak Controller. An LFO is a slow, steady wobble that moves a knob up and down on its own.

1. Add Fruity Balance, a simple stock volume and pan plugin, to the growl’s mixer track.
2. Right-click its volume knob, choose Link to controller, pick the Peak Controller’s Peak ctrl – LFO and click Accept.
3. Shape the wobble with the LFO’s VOL (1), TENSION (2) and SPEED (3).
4. Automate the mix knob of Fruity Balance’s mixer slot, so the wobble only kicks in after the growl stops. Then automate SPEED for even more movement.

To automate a knob, right-click it and choose Create automation clip, then draw the shape in the Playlist. Fruity PanOMatic can make a similar volume wobble, but the Peak Controller gives you more control, and the same volume LFO trick works even better on vocals.

Bonus: throw reverb into the gaps

A reverb throw is a burst of reverb that switches on for a moment, usually at the end of a phrase, to fill a gap or lead into the next part. Put Fruity Reeverb 2 at 100% wet on the track, then automate the mix knob of its mixer slot so it rises at the end of every second bar (1). Draw the first ramp. Then copy it along the song.

Stock-plugin mistakes that make beats sound cheap

Stock plugins are rarely the reason a beat sounds cheap. These six habits usually are:

• Plain reverb on everything. Without ducking, the tails pile up and the beat turns to mush.
• Effects on every channel. Many good sounds need nothing but the right volume.
• A limiter left on the master. Mix into an empty master instead.
• A silent track after adding Fruity Peak Controller. Its Mute switch is on by default.
• Boosting EQ to save a weak sound. Swap the sample instead. Gold in equals gold out.
• Judging sounds on their own. Always listen with the whole beat playing.

Try trick 1 on your next beat. It takes about two minutes, and you’ll hear the 808 come forward the moment the reverb gets out of its way.

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