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This Fruity Loops tutorial will go over the basic functions and how to use the step sequencer. Hopefully this can help new Fruity Loops users jump start producing tracks and if you have been working with FL Studio for awhile you can pick up a few things as well.
Boot up Fruity Loops, start a new project, and pull up the step sequencer if it's not already on screen by going to VIEW at the top and selecting step sequencer or pressing F6.
Usually when the program boots up the step sequencer will already be up loaded with a kick, clap, HiHat, and snare track, if not add some sounds from wherever you keep your samples. A couple easy ways to do this is by either hitting F8 to bring up the browser and going to the Packs folder where your sounds should be stored or clicking CHANNELS at the top, selecting Add One, and adding a Sampler track. Then right click the Sampler in the step sequencer, choose "load sample", find your sounds and choose what you want to use.
For this FL Studio tutorial I'm going to use a kick drum, HiHat, snare, and crash cymbal to build a basic track while highlighting most of the step sequencer functions.
Now each button in the pattern grid represents a 16th note. If you have no idea how to read basic music note values and time signature I suggest learning them. It's a great skill to know and not that difficult; also knowing even the basics help a lot when laying out beats and melodies in Fruity Loops. I'm working on a tutorial on note values so stay tuned. For this example we are using just standard 4/4 time, which is the most common and what Fruity Loops starts up with.
But for now an easy way to illustrate how to lay out different notes in Fruity Loops is to right click on the kick track and select "Fill each 4 steps", this will give you quarter notes for the kick drum. Right click HiHat and choose "Fill each 2 steps" and you'll have 8th Notes. Do the same for the Snare track and select "Fill each 8 steps" for Half Notes.
Of course you can also add notes manually by left clicking on any button on the grid and remove them by right clicking them. Left click the first note on the left on the cymbal track and you have yourself a whole note. Now press play and you have a nice basic beat. If you want to speed up or slow down the beat use the Tempo control to the right of the play and record buttons.
After creating a rhythm in FL Studio you have many options to tweak it right on the step sequencer. First starting on the left you can turn on and off each channel by clicking the little green light, this is a great way to test different sounds or solo certain tracks while arranging and building your music.
Next the two knobs control each tracks pan and volume. The pan knob will let you adjust each sound right or left in the stereo mix. Click the HiHat's pan control and drag it down to the left a bit this will give a more realistic stereo position. Then pan the cymbal right a little and you'll have a nicer separation and more human sounding drum kit. You can monitor how much pan percent, as well as many other functions, by watching the info window just below FILE in the top menu. If you’re ever wondering what some button or whatever does just hover over it with the mouse cursor and check the info window.
After the pan and volume knobs you have the channel button this is where you'll see the name of the sample or vst instrument - synth you have in that channel. If you right click on a channel button you can add notes like we did earlier along with a host of other functions including inserting a new channel, deleting or replacing the channel, or sending the channel to piano roll; which is a whole other beast that I’ll post about later. Also left clicking on the channel button will bring up the channel settings for that Fruity Loops channel.
Next to the left you have the select button that highlights the track you are editing right now if you want to select more then one channel hold SHIFT while clicking the little select buttons. Then the pattern grid fills the rest of the step sequencer.
Finally up in the top right of the step sequencer there is a slider and a couple buttons. The button on the left will bring up the Graph editor where you can make a bunch of different adjustments to Pan, Velocity, Filter Cut, Filter Res, Pitch and Shift.
This is a quick way to edit certain parameters for each channel and works as a kind of easy automation for that pattern. So click the graph editor button and a graph will pop up; the bar under each note controls whatever parameter shown at the bottom for that certain note. Here I'm editing the Velocity of the Hi-Hat channel which is volume for each note. This is good for making tiny volume variations to each hit giving your Fruity Loops tracks a more human feel. If you want to adjust the other setting just click and drag the Velocity button on the bottom of the graph left and right.
Click the graph editor button again to close it and click the keyboard button next to it. Here again a window will pop up under the channel letting you change the pitch of each note on a piano type layout. This is a fast way to build up melodies when using vst instrument plugins with FL Studio and is an alterative to using the piano roll.
Load up an instrument and play around with it sometime. And last is the Swing slider. This will allow you to add a certain percentage of swing to your Fruity Loops beats. This basically shuffles the note values giving the pattern different feels. To hear the effect highlight all the notes across the pattern grid for the Hi-Hat channel (giving you 16th notes), press play, and adjust the swing slider.
Good luck learning to use Fruity Loops with this FL Studio tutorial, is should get you on your way to creating audio tracks. I found that the best way to learn Fruity Loops is read a tutorial about something specific like the step sequencer then go through all the functions and buttons experimenting until you know how each will effect your project. So take some time and learn the basics of how to use Fl Studio step sequencer. This knowledge will help build a solid foundation in your music making.
