As a music lover I always dreamt of being a musician or a famous singer or a great composer, but, I had a problem: my voice is terrible, I never went to a school music and worst; I never learnt to play a musical instrument. A good friend of mine tried to teach me some guitar lessons but my fingers did whatever they wanted but my command, and so it happened with the piano (what was it? too many keys?), and with the trumpet and so on until I realized that my passion for creating music was a lost cause.
But one day I discovered a strange software called Fruity Loops and my dreams woke up again. I remember that day, almost ten years ago, like if it were today. One night I visited a couple of friends and found them utterly hypnotized in front of a computer, manipulating something that appeared to be a video game at first sight. I looked at the screen and saw a flying cursor passing over dozens of tiny buttons and all kind of small indicators and colorful little lights.
“What’s that?” I asked intrigued.
“It’s a sound editor, I’ve just purchased it from the web” Replied one of my friends.
“No, it’s more than that” Said the other one. “This is to make your own music”
“But I hear nothing” I argued. “Do you actually know what you’re doing?
“Well…not really, it’s complicated; we don’t know where to start”
Half an hour later I left the house without hearing a single coherent sound made by them. Although they did find out how to make the thing sound, the noise I heard through the weak speakers resembled more to a factory machine squeezing some poor animal instead of music. Two days later my friends call me again saying they had finally made a song, so I returned to their house and listened their first creation. To be honest, it sounded like…well, it was a monotonous lame track, but it was enough to hold my attention, next day I purchased that “sound editor” and started working on it. Then it was named Fruity Loops, perhaps too similar to Kellogg’s breakfast cereal Fruit Loops, so it needed a new name, something more pro and serious, you know, something like FL Studio.
The first time I saw the FL Studio I got deeply impressed by the numerous unknown knobs, buttons and data I ran into, but after a while, collecting a lot of patient, I began to learn some functions just clicking here and there. However, it took me some time to get somewhere because there was a very important factor to create something good in FL Studio despite the skills I gained after constant practice: aptitude, or let’s call it “a good ear”. In other words: you can be an ace with the software but if you lack of inspiration or an open mind for music in general, you won’t get anywhere.
So this is the first advice before you start working with this magnificent program: Go and listen ten tons of music and PAY ATTENTION. Try to separate the sounds and follow each one carefully. Listen to every single instrument, tone, volume, scale and of course, how it’s properly combined with the whole thing. It’s not too hard, besides, the simplest the music, the simplest it is to individualize the different sounds it’s made of. Remember, the key to make a good track with FL Studio lays upon your own way of understanding music and how you appreciate it, rather than the technical knowledge you also need to work with the software itself.
Now, FL Studio is a powerful and complete tool with a huge diversity of options, it’s not only for composing but for mixing, sampling and even recording, so making a tutorial for everything is almost impossible. What you need to know is the basics to work with, once you are on it, the rest is somehow easy. The purpose of this blog is to help you give the first steps in FL Studio so later you can go down yourself into its mysterious depths.
Author: Miguel Angel Trujillo
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