Tutorial 4: What is the Step Sequencer? What is it good for?

Tutorial on how to use the Step Sequencer in FL Studio

Perhaps the Step Sequencer (F6) is the heart of FL Studio. It‘s just steps in a certain sequence represented by the small line of buttons or steps located at the right side of every channel.  By default they are 16 steps divided four in groups of four steps and once you click them and press play they begin to sound from left to right until it reaches the end of the line, then the process repeats again in a “loop”.

It’s easy to work with this tool, which is very convenient because maybe, as I said before ,it is the most important part of FL Studio. Now, let’s take a closer.

Open FL Studio. You will probably see four default channels already loaded in the Step Sequencer, if not, follow this route: FILE/NEW FROM TEMPLATE/BASIC. There you have it, it should look like this:

These four channels or instruments are a kick, a hat (not to wear in your big head; check the previous chapter), a clap and a snare; they are some kind of plain drums. Click on some of their steps and press play (left click to activate them, right click to deactivate them). You will notice that there is a line of lights in the lower border of the Step Sequencer; each one is associated with every vertical bar of steps so when you press play they will start blinking indicating when the sound passes over its selected button bar. If you marked them randomly as the image above you will only hear an incoherent noise. So let’s make a little experiment to make it work.

1.      Right click on the channel called Kick and select “Fill each 4 steps”, then press Play.

2.      How does it sound? it reminds you a disco stuff, huh?, very simple…and monotonous.

3.      Now, for channel Hat select the steps number 3 in every group of four. Remember that there are four groups of four steps, every group differ with the next one by a different color (groups 1 and 3 are grey and 2 and 4 are reddish). If you count all the 16 steps from left to right you need to select steps 3, 7, 11 and 15. Press Play again.

4.      Now we have something more disco, right?, but let’s make it a little better.  Choose the Clap and click on the first step of groups 2 and 4 (Steps 5 and 13). After that it should sound even more familiar. Of course, it’s all very primitive, but that is how all begins.

When you right click on a channel you will see that the first command is “Send to Pianoroll”, if you do it, you will find that the buttons are replaced by a grey rectangular screen with some green lines. Clicking on this screen will open the Pianoroll. I’ll tell you in future chapters how to work properly with the Pianoroll, but, by now you can check it out a little.

The green bars represent each step you previously clicked on the Step Sequencer, and by holding left click you can move them up and down so it will change its tone, up for a higher note and down for a lower one. Nevertheless, as we are on a drums sample it will produce a weird sound when we move it. Pianoroll is better for other instruments like the piano, the guitar, etc.

But you don’t need to open the Pianoroll if you want to change the volume or the tone of your channels and steps. You can do it in the very Step Sequencer, just click on one of the two small buttons on the top right. The one at the left lets you control the volume (also known as velocity) as well as the panning, resonance, shifting and more.  The pink bars can be adjusted to the desire level.

The one at the right helps you change the pitch of the notes and it almost has the same things as its sister function at the left, but in a different way.  Well, don’t worry about them now, just focus on volume and notes, unless you want to get deeper in the headache with the other properties. Notice that when it’s open it looks like a piano too. Remember that this two functions are not so cool for drums samples, the drums instruments should be left alone most of the time, ok?

And that’s not over yet, you still have the Channel Snare there ready in the Step Sequencer to add more fun to the sound so try it out too placing it whenever you like the most. Of course, you can still add more samples from the Browser and try them too to enrich your track. In order to keep things simpler at this moment try to add simple samples like the ones already loaded, for example those included within the submenu Packs in the Browser; don’t add a generator from the Plug in database yet, we’ll talk about them soon, don’t torture yourself.

Congratulations! you have learnt to crawl with the Step Sequencer.

Author: Miguel Angel Trujillo