Tutorial 7 THE PLAYLIST (Part 1)

Once you have all the instruments (samples) you want in the Step Sequencer, or at least some of them to start with, then you need something to organize the whole thing: The Playlist (F5)

The Playlist is where you give real shape to your song. As a rule, you don’t use all the samples at the same time, sometimes you want to stop using a specific sound or use it again later on the song. Of course, this cannot be done from the Step Sequencer or the Piano Roll. The tool for this purpose is The Playlist, lust like the director of the orchestra determining who is going to sing and when, and who is going to remain silent. To do this operation we´ll need to separate one sound from another in different tracks. After we have achieved this part we can decide where to locate the sounds within our song. First you have to pick which sample or group of samples you want to define for each track.

Let us make a short exercise:

1. Open FL Studio with the Basic set. Sometimes it opens like this but if it doesn’t, then try File/New from template/Basic. You must have four default samples loaded in the Step Sequencer: Kick, Clap, Hat and Snare.

Let’s select the kick for the first track.

2. Right click on the Kick sample and choose Fill each 4 steps. Press play and it will give you something like a disco sound.

If you look at the pattern selector (PAT screen) you will see that there is a number 1

This means that the selected samples belong to track number 1.

NOTE: Check that the yellow light at the right side of the Play button (Pattern/Song mode) is on in PAT, otherwise you won’t hear a thing.

This lets you work with individual tracks. Later, when you wish to listen to the full song you´ll have to switch it to SONG (The green light below), but NOT NOW.

3. Now we are going to select the sample named Clap, but in a different track. Go to the pattern selector and once you are on it you’ll see that the cursor changes into a two up/down-direction arrow (it happens the same with the cursor when you run over the Tempo at the left, but don’t you dare to touch this!)

Hold down left click and move it up until you see number 2 informing you that now you are in the second track. Yes, I know, the selected bars of the kick disappeared. This happens because the kick’s track 1 is left behind and you are in a new one; if you go back down to number 1 you will see your kick configuration again, so don’t worry, you didn’t erased anything.

Now, in track 2 you can work with the Clap, let us do something similar, but this time we will only mark two bars at the step sequencer like this:

4. Do the same with the Hat in a track 3 as follows:

5. And a track 4 for the final sample, the snare:

Of course, you have put each sample in a single track, but you can place as many as you want for each track or use different patterns of the same sample in several tracks. You only need to know that in every track the Step Sequencer’s arrangement is usually individual and the more tracks you use the better your final song is, as well as easier to work with the instruments.

I know what you are thinking: “Hey, but there is nothing about the Playlist in this chapter”. You are right. However, you cannot work properly with the Playlist if you don’t make a good distribution of your sounds in different tracks. Learn first how to do this well, It’s not complicated, because in our next chapter you’ll learn to work with thePlaylist.

Author: Miguel Angel Trujillo