Step Sequencer

October 20, 2009

Good morning,

Last time we took a look at the different parts of the FL studio interface that are used to make a track. Today I want to focus on the step sequencer, the place where patterns are created. As always, I will be going through things in more detail in the video so press play. 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 sequencer is empty and has some pre-inserted channels (4 drum instruments).

On the left against each channel there is an LED where you can mute the instrument or make it play in solo. You then have a rotating control for panning and for volume.

In its simplest form the step sequencer is used by switching each box on or off, left-click being on and right-click being off. You can then play the pattern either by clicking the play button or by hitting the spacebar. Once you have selected some notes, you’ll see something like this:

A little music theory
If you already know about beats and bars, ignore this bit. For those who don’t, here goes. Let’s say a song is a large apple pie. If we split the pie into 8 even slices, we have split our song up into 8 bars. Each musical bar is of a certain length and it is very unlikely to have bars of different lengths (it can happen, but unlikely for dance music).

Bars are themselves split up into beats. In FL Studio you get 4 beats per bar. If you look closely at the pics above, you’ll see that each beat is in a different colour and represented by 4 square blocks per beat. In the video I will play an example and count the beats and bars.

You’ll see now that FL Studio by default makes our pattern length 1 bar of 4 beats. What if we wanted more or less beats? This can be accomplished by using the little setting in the top left that says ‘–’. If you have a scroll wheel, hover over it and scroll. If not, hover just above or below it and click. Let’s extend the pattern to 8 beats.

We can now fill in the rest of the beats for this pattern. It might be worth noting now that you can actually extend this indefinitely and create as many beats for the pattern as you like. It’s therefore possible to build a song up with just a single pattern and use FL Studio like other track-sequencing applications where you just copy/paste the repetitive audio all the way until the end.

Context menu

By right-clicking on a channel’s name, you have more options. The only 3 I can see myself using are:

‘Send to piano roll’ – have more control over the melody creation.

‘Load sample’ – put an audio file into the channel.

‘Delete’ – get rid of the channel. Be careful here as when you add a channel to a pattern, it is inserted into every pattern. Therefore when you delete a channel, it is removed from all patterns and any music you created with it is gone.

Piano roll
This will be the most used feature of FL Studio during song creation since this is where we create the melodies and clean them up after not getting it quite right recording with a keyboard. The step sequencer itself is fine for creating drum beats. However, since you can’t change the note being played, i.e. the pitch, it isn’t very useful for the actual melody of the song, e.g. basslines, leads, pads, strings.

At the top of the piano roll are editing options such as drawing, slicing and zooming. On the left is a virtual keyboard where you can hit a note to hear how it will sound for the selected instrument. In the center are the notes of the melody. You can drag notes around, use the left-click to insert new ones and use right-click to remove them. To change the length of a note, hover over the end and then drag it to the desired length. In the video it all becomes clear.

Until next time….

Now I’m actually starting to make progress with learning about FL Studio. Next time I will take a close look at the playlist as that is where the patterns are merged to create the end result.

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Forum topic of the week

Do you have any tips on using the step sequencer or piano roll? 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.