Playlist Editor

October 24, 2009

Welcome back fans,

Let’s continue on the interface today and talk about the playlist editor. In the video I will be demonstrating the features explained below so hit play on the right. If you can’t see things in detail in the video, click on it when it’s playing to view a larger version in youtube.

When you 1st load up FL Studio, the playlist editor will be empty.

There are 2 areas to the window. The top area (clip editor) is to insert audio clips, automation clips and pattern clips. The bottom area (block editor) is where we insert pattern blocks. At the very top are editing tools we can use. I’ll go through a couple of these in the video.

On the top-right are buttons for zooming the editor window. The large square is horizontal zoom and the small square is vertical zoom. If you have a scroll wheel, hover over the square and scroll. If you don’t, click on the square and drag the mouse up for zoom in and down for zoom out.

Block editor
To insert patterns into the playlist, left-click the mouse in the grid for the required pattern. If you insert the pattern in the wrong place, just drag it to where it should be.

Sometimes you may want to make a copy of a pattern so you can make a slight change to it. This can be accomplished by right-clicking on the pattern number to bring up the context menu and choosing ‘Clone selected’.

A really cool feature in that context menu is ‘Flatten selected’. You can see for pattern 1 we have inserted the pattern 4 times. Let’s say we know that we’ll always need to insert this as a multiple of 4. We can combine the 4 inserts into a single pattern by flattening it. Note that this will repeat the entire pattern 4 times and save it in the original pattern. To do this all step sequencing blocks will need to be converted to piano rolls which FL Studio will do for you. Here is what our pattern 1 will look like after flattening it:

If we want to go the other way and split a pattern into 2, we can do this using the ‘Slice’ tool in the toolbar at the top. It’s the one that looks like a stanley knife. Let’s slice pattern 1 into 2 chunks.

You can see that the 2nd half of pattern 1 has gone down to pattern 2 and what used to be pattern 2 has now become pattern 3.

Another cool feature of the playlist editor is its ability to colour code the patterns. You could for example keep all drum patterns the same colour, all pads another colour, and so on. To change the colour, right-click a pattern and choose ‘Color selected’.

Clip editor

You can also insert patterns into the top half of the playlist editor. I’m not currently sure what all the benefits or disadvantages are of using this area. I have tried it and found one good use for it.

Let’s say you have a pattern but the very 1st time you play it you want it to start at the very end, not from the beginning. I haven’t found how to do this in the block editor but I can in the clip editor.

There is a tool at the top next to the slicer called ’slip edit’ and it looks like 2 arrows. By selecting this and shortening the start of the pattern, we can force it to play from any beat we want, very cool.

Until next time….

We’re almost there with the introduction to FL Studio. We will take a look at the mixer next time as well as how to create automation clips.

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Forum topic of the week

Do you have any tips on using the playlist editor? If so we’d all be interested to hear them. If there are any technical issues with signing into the forums, please contact me, the link is in the header at the top of the page.