FL Studio Tutorial: Pattern Automation

FL Studio enables you to automate certain events at the pattern level using the "event editor". The "event editor" lets you draw the envelope that's gonna modulate the event. When you right click on a knob (say, the channel volume knob), you have access to the event editor by clicking on "Edit Events".

Once you are in the event editor, the task at hand is to draw the envelope. For a volume fade-in, all you have to do is draw a straight line that goes from 0 to, say, 75%. If you use the "Draw" icon aka the pencil using the right mouse button (for straight lines), it should be relatively pain free.

Don't get confused by automation in FL Studio. You have automation events for patterns (described here) and automation clips which are not linked to patterns (not discussed here). Two different things.

The video below pretty much sums up what I am trying to say above.



When drawing the envelope in the event director, you have to make sure that the level past the pattern you are currently considering is at the default level. You can see this in the video below.



This third video shows you how to fade out a tune using the event editor of the tune's last pattern automating the mixer master volume.



Personally, I find the event editor to be pretty horrible. First of, when you select a zone, you should be able to draw whatever you want within that zone and that should not affect anything else. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way (the strange thing is that it does behave that way when you use the LFO tool). Also, whatever you do for one pattern should never affect what's after in the playlist but it does. For some reason, the event editor lets you edit the envelope past the last bar of the pattern. That doesn't make sense to me.

FL Studio Tutorial: Repeat Marker

Let's talk about the "repeat marker" in FL Studio.

The "repeat marker" enables you to repeat the tune in the playlist from where the repeat marker is positioned. No, it's not a "time marker", it's a "repeat marker"!

You create it by right double-clicking on the timeline - it looks like a small arrow pointing to the left - and you move it by right-clicking (keep it pressed) and dragging. Now, the hard part ... How do you get rid of it? By dragging it all the way to the left.

When you place it past the end of the song, it's a bit like you're making the song longer and the rendering of the tune into wav or mp3 files will go past the end of the song to the marker. This will make sure any decaying sounds are captured in the export file.

I am kinda showing all that in the tutorial video below.


In FL Studio 10, the "repeat marker" is no more as it has been replaced by the "time marker" (Playlist Options->Time markers->Place song loop). You can move the time marker with the left mouse button and delete it with a right mouse click followed by delete.

FL Studio Tutorial: Channels and Mixer Tracks

Let's say you have a bunch of channels, each with its own instrument, and now you want to apply some effects to one or more of the channels (but not to the whole thing) and you are not too familiar with FL Studio. So, you go into the mixer and there you see, with horror, that all your channels (or, at least, most of them) are actually in the master mixer track. Well, it's because, when you add a channel, the mixer track the channel is assigned to is always the master mixer track by default.

To change that and assign a mixer track to a channel, you need to go into channel settings (just left click on the channel of interest) and select a mixer track. You actually do that by changing the value in the FX box (upper right). By default, when you add a channel, it's "--", which means master mixer track. Once you've done that and go to the mixer, you'll see that your channel has now its own mixer track and you'll be able to apply effects (up to 8) to that channel/track.

The video below kinda explains that.

FL Studio Tutorial: SampleTank and MIDI Out

You may have heard of an offer by IK Multimedia which allows to download "SampleTank FREE", a full-featured version of SampleTank 2.5, with a 500 MB specially selected samples library (you actually get 204 sounds for free, 58 of them being samples).

It's a nifty sampler plugin for FL Studio, the very cool part being that it's multi output. Indeed, when you start an instance of SampleTank (by adding a FL Studio channel) and look at the SampleTank interface that pops out, you have the ability to load up to 16 sounds, each of which is assigned a midi channel (not to be confused with a FL Studio channel). Now, don't get too excited because only one sound is available for the SampleTank FL Studio channel you've just added. So how do you access those other sound channels?

The answer is the FL Studio plugin called "MIDI Out". Remember the midi channels that are assigned to the sounds you loaded in SampleTank. Well, if you add a new FL Studio channel with MIDI Out and set the midi channel to whatever you have in SampleTank, you magically have access to the corresponding SampleTank sound (make sure the port is the same in MIDI Out and SampleTank).

Of course, you could launch instances of SampleTank for each sound you want to use as a FL Studio channel but it's very inefficient cpu and memory wise. So, it's better to load one instance of SampleTank and use MIDI Out plugins to access the actual SampleTank sounds.

The video below shows you how to access the sounds in SampleTank using instances of the MIDI Out plugin in FL Studio 9.



If you double click on the video, you'll go straight to youtube where you'll be able to change the display settings to 480p and watch a much larger video.

By default, all midi channels go to whatever FX channel you have assigned to the SampleTank instance. If you want each midi channel in SampleTank to have its own FX channel in FL Studio, you first need to change the output values of the MIDI channels in SampleTank. So, use the mouse wheel to change the "OUT" to "3+4" for the 2nd midi channel, "5+6" for the 3rd channel, etc. You then need to go into the SampleTank fruity wrapper settings, click on the "PROCESSING" tab and assign an output for each SampleTank midi channel. Now, how does that output relate to the FX mixer channel (insert) of the MIDI channel? Good question! Add the FX channel number assigned to the SampleTank instance to the output number and you get the FX mixer channel (insert) of the MIDI channel. So, for example, if your SampleTank instance is FX channel 5 and if you put "---" for the SampleTank 1 output in the PROCESSING tab, the FX mixer channel for MIDI channel 1 is gonna be 5+0=5. If you put "1" for the SampleTank 2 output in the PROCESSING tab, the FX mixer mixer channel for MIDI channel 2 is gonna be 5+1=6. I am sure you get the idea.