Another nice trick with the slice tool is you can have the top and bottom of the slice be different places, and the slice will be the average of the two points. So if you ever need an extra half beat of hihat bleed or something it’s easy to do while still staying quantized.
Everyone talks about the piano roll being the highlight of FL studio, but for me it really is the mixer. I’ve tried other DAWs and giving up the ability to route any mixer track to any combination of other tracks is impossible for me at this point. I think that flexibility on full display in the mixer side is what makes it so complicated from the playlist side - which is where you will spend a lot of your time after you figure out the mostly intuitive piano roll but before you get to really play with the mixer.
The problem with the playlist is over the years it has tried to be all things to all people. It is the arrangment view where you stitch your patterns together into songs. Then they added live mode and it had to be able to function as a performance space similar to the grid system in ableton (but of course with greater flexibility, because you can put anything on any square, they aren’t pre organized into mixer tracks like ableton). Then they wanted to make it into a linear audio editor like Protools so they added the ability to turn each track into an audio track pre-routed to a mixer track with recording controls on every level. Oh, and also this is one of like 5 places you can work with automation data so it has to do that too.
I have found over the years that my biggest leaps in music have come from better and better understanding how to use the playlist. I’ll send you a screenshot of how I organize things later, but it takes up 2/3 of my screen pretty much all the time. Keep everything in there organized. I put one instrument to one track (say synth one in track one, synth 2 in track two, drums in track 3, etc). I then add automation directly below each instrument it affects (so drum automations, even if it takes 10 tracks, would be on the 10 tracks directly below drums) and if I have too many tracks to fit on my monitor, then I group the automations with the instrument/audio tracks and hide the automations that I’m not editing.
If you need a scratch area for audio editing and ideas, you can drop in a song marker that says “start” and give yourself a few bars of playlist to work with. The start marker is where your song will start rendering and where your play head resets to. Bonus, if you mark the various sections of your song (verses, bridges, tempo changes, etc) those markers will show up in the audio file when you import it into FL later, like leaving yourself helpful notes if you mix stems or master your work as a separate step. In a similar vein the fruity notebook plugin is great. I can leave myself notes of what I think the track needs at the end of a session so next time I jump back in (even if it’s months later) I can remember what I was going to do next.
So this is my default layout when I load in. I have the sample browser set so that it only shows up if I mouse over to the left. I let the playlist be that large and sit on top of everything and then if I need to see something else I click into it and bring that to the top. I can see enough of the other stuff to keep an eye on it, but I mostly want to keep track of the playlist. Whatever plugins I’m working with I keep it to one or two at a time and let them be on top while I’m working with them, but I close them when I’m done. In mastering that part at the bottom left is where I keep youlean loudness meter, and in general during production my plugins are kind of in that area.
Interestingly enough, the floating windows are one of the things I’ll really have to get used to over time, just because I’m so used to everything being docked and uniform. I had no idea that you could hide any of these until you mouse-over them, though, but I could see that definitely coming in handy!
I’m not sure if mine is just a slight variant from the default view, but the channel rack on the upper left, playlist on the upper right, and mixer pretty much spanning the bottom is how I have it. I’ve been playing with some of the other UI settings like having all of the plugin categories in tree form (I love this feature), and the compact modes on the mixer which also help a ton. I might actually try out your visualization settings though just to see if I like that way better, because I find myself maximizing the playlist quite a bit for editing and that might be slowing things down.
I’m starting to think there’s actually more good features than quirks with FL, so that’s a huge step in the right direction. I still can’t get over how convenient it is to have multiple playlist windows for extreme freedom with sound design techniques, independent of the track in progress. And oddly, keeping audio / instruments separate isn’t nearly as hard as I had originally thought!
Holy god damn, I found my solution for a multi-zone sampler that doesn’t require Falcon, Voltage Modular or Redux (although all 3 of these also work!). Nobody talks about using it for this purpose, so I will
What you do is load everything into FPC just how you want it, and then right-click the track and select the 'Create DirectWave instrument" option. Give your samples a good length, expand the sampling range, and when it creates your instrument, save it somewhere. Then you have an auto-choke, multi-zone sampler like everything else.
This is pretty damn awesome too, because if you’re using something like Falcon, Redux or VM, you can go even crazier with your options before finally condensing it down to a directwave instrument. Redux allows you to create phrases (which is essentially just tracker-speak for SliceX, except you can switch instruments entirely and operate on them with both FX chains and track FX, as well as creating choke points with the ‘off note’ function, multitracking samples, etc), so one note can just be a gigantic arrangement of various samples sequenced and layered together in cool ways.
Holy hell. It’s a post-christmas workflow miracle.
I also like the idea of just saving a shitload of these and forgetting about them. It’s like having a whole palette of sounds you created for later use and almost no CPU required to run them. Absolute madness
FL changed their version naming scheme again so the new version dropped and it’s FL24 now. I’m installing as we speak, looking forward to non-destructive ratcheting and trying out the chord generator (I’m curious if I can write like 2/3 of a chord progression but can’t figure out how to bring it home if maybe the chord generator can fill in the blanks, it says it can pick sympathetic scale/chords to the existing melodies so I hope so). Oh, and low lifter, I was actually close to pulling the trigger on a similar plugin so that being in FL now is killer.
Hell yeah, these updates are fucking awesome so far.
My guess is that if you don’t want to nudge things around, you might be able to create a timing script or just have it generate off of a Riff Machine riff or something. They seem to say they have updated the piano roll scripting API, but I don’t know if this is just related to MIDI controller input or not. I usually don’t mind nudging things around in post but I could see that being annoying for some.
The chord progression generator is so cool. I like that it allows you to reroll your chord or just select variations to create things that sound really nice together. Being someone who’s particularly bad at melody, this might incentivize me to revive some neglected projects (one of them might have a recent connection to the forum!)
Bit of good news/bad news after using it for half a day:
GOOD: The chord prog generator is better than I’d hoped. There’s a lot of dedicated controls for if you want it to do things like use substitute notes from out of key to spice up the chords, or you can have those notes added on top. Also pretty specific controls over the number and length of chords you want, so it can generate like a 16 chord progression over 32 bars if that’s what you need. And it has an arpegiator/performance section but either isn’t working as advertised or it doesn’t work well at 180 bpm - all the controls were not very subtle (timing seemed to do nothing, not density had 3 settings spread over a 270 degree knob, etc).
BAD:
Low Lifter isn’t included in my version, and I don’t see it available for separate purchase yet either. IDK how FL prices their separate plugs, so I will wait and see. I think it sounds better than the one I was thinking of buying, but the one I was thinking of buying was only 30 bucks so I’m hoping for that to be image line’s price.
Within 3 hours I noticed as many graphical glitches that were not there before and had one crash. With auto-saving I lost no progress, but that still totally harshed the mellow I had going.
-Failed to activate the first time, I assume their servers were slammed with everyone updating.
There are some nice other updates here that aren’t going to do anything for me - I have too many synths already so their souped up jupiter clone isn’t going to help me.
CLAP… I guess I can beta test if anyone brings me a CLAP plugin now? I don’t want to manage a 3rd plugin repository so I won’t be installing CLAP willingly.
Piano roll scripting is something I’m glad they’re working more on, but I do not want to code myself. I want this to get to a M4L type state where I can just download other people’s work and load it without any drama. There are totally things I wish the piano roll could do that it doesn’t, but I’m not going to code it myself - that’s what I paid Image Line one time 8 years ago for! - actually their chord generator is a big step towards some of the workflows I’ve been wanting for years, so here’s hoping FL25 brings a v2 of that.
I’ve kind of wondered if they might ever go in that direction. Patcher is still pretty lackluster but they could go all out and create a usable system for people who don’t really want to write code and just visually snap shit in place. Even extending to the piano roll (kind of like bitwig’s ‘note’ grid, where you can visually-program or re-pipe MIDI).
Honestly it’s the non-modularity and non-adaptability that makes FL still unable to be my DAW of choice, but they’re getting closer. At least I can use it as a MIDI / scripting workshop of sorts, and that’s still worth it.
There’s a lot of deeper bugs within the functionality of Patcher that need some serious cleaning up, but if they ever prioritize for the true nerds it’s going to really strengthen the backbone of the DAW imo. These new features are really great, but they’d be way more stackable with a few tweaks
I can’t believe how immersed I’ve gotten into FL studio again since the update. Even though I still hate the untethered workflow and somehow can never get MIDI note FX to work (outside of FL’s dedicated devices), Toxic Biohazard, Harmor and Harmless are the shit.
Nag screens be damned, this is a powerhouse. The piano roll is now the most overpowered of its kind in existence. I wish I could just detach the piano roll itself and stick it inside of Bitwig or Renoise.
Still looking for some way to get patcher to handle MIDI note FX, since it picks up on their I/O just fine yet somehow (seemingly) sandboxes itself away from system calls. VSTs also don’t seem to be able to call up MIDI devices and loopbacks, leading me to believe that FL is indeed closing off everything that isn’t FL studio, since other DAWs allow you to route things to wherever.
Deeper explanation if anyone cares
Mostly I use things like Cardinal, Nest, Voltage and even Sonic Pi and Bespoke to create branching sequences from chord progressions, and this is all done through MIDI. In normal DAWs, you can just pipe MIDI into and out of a device (including loopbacks), but when you do this in FL, it has a really hard time figuring out what they hell you’re trying to do, even when the inputs and outputs exist in the Patcher’s GUI or you already have a MIDI output lined up through a VST or otherwise. Mostly, it just doesn’t work at all, so I’m not sure why they even have the I/O in the GUI in the first place.
Sometimes it’s not even that complicated; even just a real-time note quantizer gets slapped on shit so I can experiment more. But FL doesn’t seem to have one of those, which kind of sucks
Maybe I need to make use of the MIDI output device, route it through something and pipe it back in? Seems convoluted as fuck, but I could probably just use that routing for creating stuff if it would work. I wish they would pay more attention to these things sometimes, but there’s really no perfect DAW.
Worse case is I have to use native controllers in patcher, but that might be an OK tradeoff for the new features
Not sure if anyone knows about this but they’re running some kind of crazy promo right now. Your prices may be different than mine, but I think my next upgrade is $80 and the all-plugins version is $160 or something bizarre.
Not sure if I’m going to be able to swing that this time around but for anyone who needs the full version, this seems almost as good as (if not equal to) their Black Friday deal
They’re finally advertising it as an upgrade promo. I feel a little less-crazy now, because the only place I was previously seeing this was in the bowels of my account. The promo ends on September 9th
I end up having to do bullshit like this just to get their counter element to work correctly. I’m glad that it does, but their numbers aren’t rounding like they should and they don’t let you duplicate anything in the Patcher. God forbid they make our struggles just a little easier
On one hand I’m glad that it’s this capable, but on the other it feels so goddamn half-baked
Just for that I’m going to give myself a black market upgrade
Been trying out Ableton and FL for IDM or generatie music, i like FL interface better and wish it had the randomisation and probability tools that Ableton has, but the FL channel/arp feature sort of works. How do you guys randomise things in FL.
Hi KvIT, so far i am using FPC and random sample pickup to get random beats or sample glitching, also the sampler channel set to arp random is cool, the arp also on melodies does it for me, sometimes i use the peak controller to get even more variations of a sound or arrangement. I will see how to use PlugData (never knew about it). I just try to keep it simple and no VST’s just FL tools. So i guess i can open the files in 10 years or so if i feel the need to.
Looks like the formula controller’s ‘rand’ function is going to be your best bet, if you don’t want to use anything external and basically want it to recur in real time. Interesting topic, and I’ll exprriment with some rigs when I can to see how practical it actually is in the real world. Converting RNG to pitch data is a breeze pretty much everywhere aside from FL Studio (Renoise and Redux kind of excel at this kind of thing natively) but I’m certain there’s a solution here, too.
Alright, I got something working. So unfortunately it uses PlugData s a dependency, but all you’ll have to do is make sure that the PlugData Clap is installed on your system because I’ll be making a simple GUI that hopefully fits what you need.
I didn’t have to do it this way (I just wanted to involve as little PD as possible as a challenge), but it uses the formula controller for a random value and I created a sample and hold in PD that locks down the value and outputs it. This is normal sample and hold behavior (meaning you get a stream of random notes in real-time that you can skew to your liking), but it’s cool to have a patcher version that works for FPC. Plus, you don’t need to be a modular nerd for it to work, and that’s the idea.
I’ll upload a prototype soon and then you can let me know what could be better. Skewing the values so that they work with FPC will take a little bit of finetuning, but that’s always kind of fun in my book. Hopefully I can make a snazzy GUI to coincide with the important features
I also want to sync it to FL’s ‘songtime’ parameters so it makes sense to use it in FL projects without worrying about sync issues. Thankfully, they give you all of that stuff with the Formula controller so you don’t have to use any other plugins – if only they gave us the S&H capability
Be warned that this is an extremely crude version, but I wanted to test if having PlugData on your system would allow this thing to work. I’m going to have to do some research on how exactly FL uses discrete values for their GUI controllers (or some experiments if they don’t offer documentation on it), but if this works across systems then we’re at least in business.
Anyone is free to test this one and suggest anything, too. I’m sure it’ll take a little while to get everything right, so any additional feature ideas would definitely be considered and I’m even cool with making weirder versions once the original one skews and controls correctly.
So if this produces noise doesn’t throw an error (let’s set the bar just a little lower ), we’re set on that front at least. PlugData is here
