Sunday, November 18, 2012

Tutorial 2: Which of these hundreds of beat buttons should I press first?

Tutorial on beat buttons in FL Studio?

The answer to that might be anyone, but that would get you nowhere, although everything in FL Studio is connected. The best thing to do is to choose your first sounds.


Hey take it easy! For that, go to the Browser at the left side and navigate through the bar. Notice that every time you click on a sample it makes a short sound indicating you its type of sound. But the Browser (F8) has several submenus or groups of samples so maybe you are not sure of which one to pick and of course what to do with them. This is the first news: The samples go to the Step Sequencer (F6), the square box just at the right of the Browser, Remember?.



Sometimes, when you open FL Studio, a whole track is displayed and you see all of its samples loaded in the Step Sequencer. This track or song comes with the software and it has two main purposes: To show how does a finished/half finished track looks like so you can have an idea of what you are suppose to do, and to make you feel like an ant when you see how complicated this could be, specially because the track is a tremendous piece of music art. Well, don’t feel bad about it, that initial track was made by FL Studio Gurus but even they were like you at the beginning. You can listen to more of those incredible tracks opening the folder Project (in green letters) in the Browser by right clicking on them.

As I said, the program sometimes starts loading one of these tracks so we need to clear the Step Sequencer to begin our work. This is what you’re going to do:

1. Go to the Menu Bar and click on FILE, then NEW. You will be asked to save the initial default track before it closes, maybe because you touched something. Press NO, unless you want to ruin the track.

2. If the program started with one of these default tracks and you did the step 1 you will then notice that there are 4 samples in the Step Sequencer (sometimes FL Studio starts like this). They are a Kick, a Clap, a Snare and something called Hat (nothing to do with covering your head). Now, have you seen a drums?, if not, turn off the PC and go to sleep. Drums are used in almost any kind of music, from rock to salsa, and they are always played seating, requiring the four members of the musician (You know, two hands and two feet).

To be a good drummer you need to learn to use each of your members independently, not like the guitar that is played only with your hands, well, Jimmy Hendrix played it with his teeth, but there was only one Jimmy and you are not him. The advantage of the FL Studio drummer is that you only need two fingers on the mouse to play it, isn’t it incredible?.

In a drums, the biggest horizontal drum is the Kick, and is activated by a foot pedal, producing a low dry sound similar to a heartbeat. This sound is usually intercalated with the snare, I mean, one after the other and rarely both at the same time. The Snare and the clap emit a higher sound and usually mark the rhythm of a song, except that the clap is more electronic and typical of disco or pop and does not come with a standard drums. The fourth thing is the hat and it represents the highest sonority of our drums, remember the round flying-saucer-like metal discs? They normally sound at different cadences and frequencies. These four samples are very basics of a track and later I’ll explain why are they first chosen by the program to start, it all depends on priorities and drums or any percussion have TOP PRIORITY to begin to work with FL Studio. SECRET NUMBER ONE REVEALED.

3. To add more samples go to the Browser, pick one you like and drag it to the Step Sequencer. Try not to place it over one of the four samples already mentioned or you will substitute it. If you are careful enough then you will have 5 samples now there. There is another way, maybe easier, and it is right clicking on the sample in the Browser.

4. Right click opens a small window with several options. Left click on Open in new sample channel to add it to the Step Sequencer or Send to selected channel if you clicked in one of the current samples of the Step sequencer to substitute it. There are some more options but don’t worry about them now.
That’s all you need to know to add samples to the Step Sequencer. Piece of cake, huh?

Author: Miguel Angel Trujillo

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