Book Image

A Power User's Guide to FL Studio 21

By : Chris Noxx
Book Image

A Power User's Guide to FL Studio 21

By: Chris Noxx

Overview of this book

A digital audio workstation empowering both aspiring and seasoned producers to create original music compositions, FL Studio has not only advanced the culture of collaboration across several genres but has provided a creative outlet for up-and-coming artists worldwide. Achieving professional production prowess takes practice, market insight, and mentorship. This book explains how the author used FL Studio as a creative palette to build a successful career as a record producer, using specific techniques and workflow processes that only FL Studio can accommodate. You’ll develop a Power User's mindset, create signature sounds using stock FL Studio One Shots, create top-level drum loops, learn about FL Studio's VST’s, and approach arrangements from a practical and pop music perspective. This comprehensive guide covers everything from crafting and adding hypnotic melodies and chords, to mixing and mastering productions, and promoting those records to artists and companies, to take your career to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to create original productions from scratch using FL Studio’s virtual instruments and sound kits, mix and master the finished production, and arrange it using the Billboard-charting formula.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1:Understanding the Basics
3
Part 2:Creating Music with FL Studio
9
Part 3: Best Techniques and How to Appear on the Billboard Charts

Building MIDI templates in the Piano Roll

A MIDI template is a pre-scored series of notes within the Piano Roll that, over time, you will accumulate for workflow optimization. These are note or chord progression scores we will build following the formula of creating melodies that work and ultimately saving the scores as MIDI files, so we can drop and drag in and out of the Piano Roll tool when creating new productions. In this section, we will go through each step to starting creating MIDI templates.

Let’s open up FL Studio and load into the Channel Rack the FL Keys VST (for this example, you can use any playable VST, but starting chords or a melody on a simple piano VST can help save time when creating future productions in FL Studio):

Figure 2.33: FL Keys | the Piano Roll window

Figure 2.33: FL Keys | the Piano Roll window

For the exercise we will discuss in this section, we will create a chord progression that you can use to create template frameworks using the MIDI export feature in...