FL Studio: The Basics
Use of the program and basic knowledge of music theory
Author: Überschall
Quite some people here on this forums are using FL Studio and make some songs with it, of which some are very enjoyable. Me, myself, I have been using this program for about two years now and I am very familar with it, having a contract with a label (together with a RL friend) and having earned some money with it.
Now, I want to share some of my knowledge. Music is a nice thing making life colorful and being able to describe any of life's many aspects and emotions, everybody likes music.
I've heard a lot of songs by other users and sometimes I was impressed, either by how good or how suck-ass they were. Sometimes the tecnical shit was used nicely, other times, the very basics of music were hit with fists. Time to change that.
Starting out something
So let's say you open FL Studio 7 for the first time. It will appear like this:
What you see is the Step-Sequencer (I will call it "SQR" for short rather than "SS" to avoid confusion with a familar army from seventy years ago). The grey and red-ish things are, indeed, the steps. The things to the left of it are channels. The big thing on top with the numbers in it is the, let's call it clock, what you see on the far left of the screen is the browser. When I first started out, I never used the browser, but it is very handy.
The Channels that are already there, are Samplers, featuring sounds that are in audio format such as WAV, MP3 or OGG, so-called samples.
FL Studio comes with some samples and some are packed in the presets that you can chose. To be honest, those samples suck ass. Try to get better ones as fast as possible, there are some very nice ones all over the internet.
As do the samples, so do the presets, mostly suck. To get rid of this preset and just start from nothing, which I'd always recommend, go on like this:
That's right. Choose the "Empty" preset to start a song all by your own, making you do whatever you want to just from the start.
Now, to get something in there, we'll use basicly the only good FLS standart sample, a String patch. To clarify, this:
Is not the string I mean. It's rather one like this:
To get to the Stringpatch sample, goto the browser and go all this way on him:
Click on "Packs".
Now go to "Strings".
And Drag'n'Drop "String Patch 1" onto the "Sampler" channel. That's about it.
Now press [Q] on your keyboard to play the note C on the channel that you've chosen, you'll hear a violin. If not, you did something wrong. Retry then.
Chords, basic music theory
Strings are usually used to play chords, backing up melodies. If multiple notes are played at the same time by one instrument (channel), that's a chord. There are classical chord instruments like strings, pads and rhodes. Guitars are used for chords very often, too, but they're often pretty suckish sounding in FL Studio.
To get any sort of tune going, right-clock onto the String Patch channel and click on "Piano Roll". What you've got now is this:
This is the essential. The Piano Roll (PR). You can't make anything that involves notes without it. Well, technically you can, but boy is that complicated, hard to grasp and also inaccurate.
The piano roll decides when, which note is played. By clicking in there, you place a note. That little green-ish thing is a note. Hit [ ] (yeah, Spacebar) to make that little Orange triange on top of the PR move across it. As soon as it reaches the little rectangle you placed, it will get played as the note where you placed it, defined by it's vertical position well-defined after the keyboard you see on the left. Play around with this until you get what it does.
When you're done, place a note like this:
To define the length of a note, move the cursor to it's end and drag it around.
What you've placed there is a C. The note C.
What we wanna do is make a chord, no, make two. Minor and major are the chords that are the most common and easy to use, so we'll do a Cmin and Cmaj.
This is where the music theory gets necessary.
Generally speaking, a minor chord is any chord which has a minor third above its root, as opposed to a major chord which has a major third. More specifically, it is the three-note chord made up of a minor third and perfect fifth above the root — if the root of the chord is C, the C minor chord will consist of the notes C (root), D# (minor third) and G (perfect fifth). This is also known as a minor triad. Below is an A minor chord (consisting of notes A, C, E) shown three ways (root and inversions); all are A minor:
Image:Minor chord root and inversions.PNG
The minor chord resembles the major chord except that it has a minor third with a major third on top, while a major chord has a major third with a minor third on top. They both contain fifths because a major third (4 semitones) plus a minor third (3 semitones) equals a fifth (7 semitones).
A minor chord in just intonation is tuned in the frequency ratio 15:12:10. In twelve-tone equal temperament (now the most common tuning system in the west), a minor chord has 4 semitones between the third and fifth, 3 between the root and third, and 7 between the root and fifth. It is represented by the integer notation 0,3,7. The fifth is only two cents narrower than the just perfect fifth, but the minor third is noticeably different at 15.641 cents smaller.
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Mkay. tl;dr. Let's make this one easier to grasp by defining it along the PR. In the PR, a chord is played by several notes ontop of each other.
For a defined chord that sounds good, there are strict distances between the notes that need to be taken seriousely, it's what ruined many many songs on this forums. A minor chord features three semitones, then four. So when you put the first note in there, the root, and you wanna put the second count three semitones upward from it, not including the root and placing the next note on the third semitone. Then, from that second note on, count upward four semitones and put the note in there, the outcome shall be like this:
You might not get this at the first run, so retry just like in the picture above. It's easy, really.
All that's different for major is that it doesn't go 3-4 (semitones), it goes 4-3 (semitones). That's all you gotta keep in mind.
Minor: Root - - - Second Note - - - - Third Note
3-4
Major: Root - - - - Second Note - - - Third Note
4-3
It's that simple.
Now that you've got this done, you can press [Spacebar] to listen at it. Swell, isn't it?
Whith this done, you can select all three notes and move them fuckers around. To select them all, hold down [Ctrl] while pulling the frame around all three notes so they get red. Then click one and drag it, the other ones will go with it.
Advancing the Structure
Now we'll make this a real backup for a song. Drag your minor chord there:
Now add the following chords after it, all the same length and on the appropriate roots as shown below:
Now it's a Minor, then a major, another minor and another major.
Hit [Space] to play it. It's nice, but we want it to be a little slower, because I wanna make a slow song right now. What you need to do is decrease the amount of Beats per Minute (BPM).
The area below the clock that says "140.000" is your target. Click on it and pull the mouse down until you reach around 96 BPM.
Now listen to your creation again, much slower. But you know what would really pwn right now? Slower strings that fade in better. Off we go!
Close the piano roll and click onto that "String Patch 1" channel. At the window that opens, choose "INS":
What we care about with the fading in and shit is the "Attack". It defines how fast the played sound reaches the top notch of it's volume. To manipulate it, this is what matters:
The envelope. You see those little knobs? The one that has ATT written under it? Crank it up until it's like this:
See how that changed that little graph? =)
Listen to the strings again. They fade in really nicely. Play around with the other knobs, too, to see what they do and to see what you can change with them.
Note that I didn't wanna post this here. The forums I want to actually post this at are down right now at the WORST IMAGINABLE MOMENT, so I have to save atleast the text without the unparsed links here. Sorry for that. Maybe it helps you anyway xD
