Team Pony

[chez-the-guy]

Originally Posted by chez-the-guy

If you didn't know I'm a 13 year old

You might be thinking...
a 13 year old? making this type of music? are you crazy?!

This is for ryu[yasha] who wanted to take up FL Studio. I'm pleased with that.

BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF FL STUDIO 10

Heads up: Almost every knob in FL Studio: you must click and drag up / down or left / right to toggle.

Here's a screenshot of the default FL Studio screen.


*note that the things I call the elements by may not be the official name for it... I just call it what I feel like calling it

Purple = Menu Bar. Here you can find all the commands and actions. It starts out with the toolbar containing File, Edit... etc. Let's take a closer look at those other buttons, shall we?

Inside the menu bar, I've put a couple of things in colors and some things in numbers. Let's start with the colored items.
Red = The master volume. Only mess with this after you've finished your project and there are issues with volume levels.

Orange = The master pitch. Used to raise or lower the pitch of the entire song.

Green = Pattern / Song selection, labeled "Pat" and "Song." If the orange pattern light is showing, the currently selected pattern will play. If the green song light is showing, the entire song in the playlist will play.

Dark Blue = The Time Meter, as what I like to call it. There are four letters on the left. SB and BM. The B/M toggles whether the time displayed is on beats or actual minutes / seconds. The S/B toggles whether the time displayed is on steps or beats (only applicable when the time display on B/M is on B).

Light Blue = Play / Stop / Record Button. Pretty self explanatory. You can also press the spacebar to play and stop. Once you press the play button, it will turn into a pause button.

Pink = Tempo Meter and Pattern selector.
The tempo part can be toggled by right clicking and selecting an option, or you can left click, hold and drag up and down to change your tempo. You can drag each 0 in the last .000 to change the decimals by increments of tenths, hundredths, or thousandths.
You use the pattern selector the same way: left click and drag up and down to select a pattern.

Brown = Oscillator. Shows the waveform of sounds being currently played. You can right click the oscillator for options. There are also bars on the right, they represent the stereo output.

Lime / Light Green = There are two parts to this. In the picture above, where it says "1", that number represents how many voices are currently being processed. If it maxes out around 99, the playback will stutter and crackle, so don't let it max out!
The second part is where the picture says "195," that's the amount of memory being used on your computer. You can right click that meter and change it to toggle the amount of memory being used, or the amount of free memory.

Now, there are also some buttons that you can click to turn on and off; I labeled them 1-10.
1 = Toggles keyboard to piano input. If it's on, you can use your keyboard to play notes of the currently selected channel. You can right click this button to set your starting note (which is the Z key on your keyboard).

2 = Countdown before recording. If this is on, there will be a countdown before you record. You can right click this to toggle whether there will be a one or two bar countdown.

3 = Blend Recorded Notes with Existing Data. I'm not sure what this does but I think if it's on, it will merge your recorded notes with existing notes.

4 = Loop record / enable overdub. I'm not sure what this does.

5 = Enable note / clip groups. Pretty self explanatory. I'd leave it on, even though I'm not sure what it really does.

6 = Metronome. You can right click this button to change the metronome sound.

7 = Wait for input to start playing. You can right click this button to toggle it so this option is only active when recording something.

8 = Step editing mode. Brings up the step editor / step sequencer.

9 = Scrolls to reach time markers. This, when on, scrolls the playlist / piano roll / whatever the player so that it keeps in time with the cursor of the song.

10 = Multilink to controllers. Not sure what this does.

Green = The browser. Here you can browse your FL Studio 10 directory for packs, instruments, VSTs, presets, samples, etc, and drag them into your project. Just find the file you want, click and drag it into the place you want to insert it to, e.g. the step sequencer (below all the other existing channels).

Red = The step sequencer. You make patterns in these. Each pattern can be put in the playlist and they can be copied, so there's no need to make a 192-bar loop of the same beat, when you can just paste a 4-bar pattern of that same beat 48 times in a row. To use the step sequencer is... pretty self explanatory.

Pink = each of these are channels. Or, that's what I call them. They represent all the different instruments / samples in your project. You can right click on them for different options, and send them to a piano roll.
To the left of channels are a green light and two knobs. The green light represents a mute button. You can click on this to turn it off, muting the entire channel. You can right click to solo the channel, meaning only that channel will play.
To the right of the mute button are two knobs. The knob on the left represents the channel volume (which toggles the volume for only that channel), and the knob on the right represents the channel panning (which side of the earphones the channel will play).

Orange = This huge beautiful element is the playlist. It's where your entire song goes. You put combinations of patterns into here. Think of it like different sections of instruments, you can put all of them together, or leave all but one out for a solo of some sort.

Blue = Mixer. You can add certain channels to an insert channel in the mixer, and add effects to them. This is useful when you want to have multiple channels with the same effect for each of them.

That's basically it! You'll learn over time, trust me ~
have fun with fl studio, guys
-chez-the-guy