Tutorial 3: What else can I do with the browser?

Tutorial on using the browser in FL Studio

The Browser is full of different sounds, but that’s not all, in addition, you can also find the plug in database, generators, channel presets, your projects, etc. (it even has some voices or short electronic phrases in a submenu called Speech, click on them too, some are really funny), and almost everything can be added to the Step sequencer. 

But there’s more: sometimes you click on one specific sample and it gives you an idea for a song. Let’s try an example:

1. Click on Channel Preset on the Browser, then on 3c Osc. This is for FL Studio 9, but the sound can also be found in versions 8 or 10

2. Click on a sample named Arpeggio 7. It won’t probably sound so you will have to place it on the Step Sequencer (you don’t know how to do it? Check the previous chapter and next time do your homework).

3. Now, remember that in the Step Sequencer you have a line of horizontal buttons at the right, click on the first one, you will see it turn white, this means it’s on.

4. Press Play below the LCD timer, but before that, check that the little yellow light indicating PAT is on. This light is located at the left of the Play button and it has another green sister light right under it (SONG), don’t click this one or you won’t hear anything.

5. When you press play with the PAT activated you will listen to a loop. This is just a mere sound that repeats itself, but if you are human and you have heard some disco or pop songs this loop will somehow remind you of a song, why?, because these two kinds of music (and not only them) are mostly based on loop sounds. Of course, this is for simpler, mostly dancing songs, thank God Mozart and Bach didn’t have access to electronic sound software in their times.

6. The point is that when you listen to this loop you begin to understand what FL Studio is about and you immediately wish to start creating your first songs. That’s ok, you’re about to, but first let’s take another look at the Browser.

In the submenu Packs you can find great drum kits, basses, pianos, some cool voices, etc. but one of the best sections in the Browser is the Plug in Database/Presets where you can find great sound generators such as the FL Keys, the FL Guitar and the FPC. There are other remarkable generators like the Simsynth or the Sytrus but now let us focus on the three mentioned before.

The FL Keys: This is nothing but a piano simulator. When you open it you find a group of several piano types and after adding one of them to the Step Sequencer you can trying it out. Click on the keys on the generator to listen how it sounds. The upper knobs let you adjust as much variations as you like for. Great, huh?. 

The FL Guitar: Well, just like the name, it’s a guitar simulator, and not only that, it’s also a bass simulator. The regular guitar (acoustic or electric) and the bass guitar are sister instruments but they have different purposes. In the real world, a common guitar has 6 thin cords and a bass only 4 which are fatter in diameter, and made to produce a lower frequency sound which usually sustains the song.

A song without a good bass background is incomplete and lacks of “body”. Another secret revealed: THE BASS IS THE BACKBONE OF YOUR SONG.

The generator looks like this: 

You must know that the work with this generator is maybe a little more complicated than the FL Keys so we’ll return to it in a future chapter.

   

The FPC: This is a drum machine and looks like this: 

As you can see, it has three main sections marked with a white border line. The left lower section (The one with 16 squares, two of them in blue) represents the pads where you can listen, by left clicking, how each single pad sample sound.  The other sections are the Main pad properties (the one at the top that reads Pad 3/32…Kick Drum…etc) where you can adjust the volume, the scale volume, mute, etc. And the right bigger section named Layer Properties where you can adjust each sample’s layers such as  velocity, panning, pitch, etc.

There are more generators, all of them with their own technical complexities, but you don’t need to worry about them now.

And finally, before we end this chapter I will share with you a third and perhaps  the biggest secret of FL Studio: EXPERIMENTING AND TRYING OUT IS A GOOD WAY TO LEARN HOW CERTAIN THINGS WORK. Feel free to click randomly on some generators, samples, effects, piano rolls, the mixers, etc.; sometime this is the best way to understand them and how they work.

Author: Miguel Angel Trujillo