Actually Useful Piano Roll Tips & Tricks – FL Studio 20 Tutorial

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Hey guys, this is the arcade and I’m back with another tutorial.

And in this one, I’m going to show you tips and tricks for playing the piano roll.

And I’m going to show you a few things that you might not know about the piano roll.

By the end of this video, you should be a piano roll pro.

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Now let’s get back to the video to open the Piano Roll just radically on the sound of the piano roll.

This is where we’re going to spend most of our time right now.

So a lot of you struggle with making melodies and chord progressions.

So there is one huge tip I can give you right now for that.

Are you singing and making melodies?

Have you been struggling to make a good core progression for hours, but you can fairly well worry no more about dragging a simple solution for all of your brothers.

Does anyone remember that video?

But now, in all seriousness, if you do struggle with making melodies, here’s a little quick tip you can use.

And that is going to the piano roll menu, going to helpers, scale highlighting, and choosing automatically.

Now nothing has changed, you might have noticed.

But once you start putting down some notes, it will make a difference.

So let’s actually create a few bass notes.

As you might have noticed, once you put in the first note, it has enough information to determine what type of scale you are on.

And from that point on, you just put the nodes on the grid where they are grayed out a little bit more.

So these are all good for this key you are in.

So, for example, let’s put a nose like this.

And I put in the melody, some sort of melody.

So just stick to the highlighted parts of the grid.

And let’s create this melody.

And as you might have noticed, once we created the melody, the key of the song changed.

Therefore, the highlighted parts changed a little bit.

For example, this one is now off key because it’s not in the highlighted part before it was fine.

But once you add more notes, it changes the scale.

So let’s move this one down.

Or maybe even down here in the highlighted parts.

And let’s hear the type of melody we’ve created.

So it was really simple. It is a great tip for anyone who has trouble creating good chord progressions and melodies.

Now that we have a simple melody with some bass notes, let’s add some chords.

So to do that, use the stem tool, which is this icon right here. Click on it.

And now you can create the type of chord you want to make.

So let’s choose a major and just create it right here.

Then let’s do a minor chord and put it right here.

As you can see, something changed right there.

But the only reason that happened is because now the chord is selected. Once you do select it, it changes back.

So don’t worry about that. If you want to create multiple chords, and you don’t want to keep going to the same tool, just deselect the only one that’s like the minor chords.

And you can put it in here multiple times.

And you’re gon na hear this one doesn’t quite sound right as the minor chords.

So let’s change that to a major chord again. Delete this one and put in the major chord.

Just like that, we have ourselves a little chord progression with some melodies in the key of F major. You can see the key in the top left corner of FL Studio. That’s where it shows. Okay, to make this piano seem more natural, we can actually randomize the velocity.

So select the top now only for this experiment and go to Tools, which is this icon right here, then go to Randomize and only have the levels enabled.

As you can see, you move the velocity to randomize the velocity of the knobs and make them seem more natural.

You can also disable the bipolar, which will only make them louder, and if you enable it, it will make them louder and quieter.

So yeah, let’s just have it like this and press Accept.

Another tip you can use is to use the slice tool and hold the Alt key so you can slice anywhere on the piano roll and just slice it up like this and press Delete. We’re going to have some nice rolls which feel more natural.

So just like that.

This one is actually quite offbeat.

So you can use Ctrl, press the mouse and drag it to select it, and then to move it, hold the Alt key and you can move it even off the grid.

We also select all our records and randomize the velocity once again, just a little bit. Something like this maybe, except Another thing you might notice is that you can resize the nose from the right side, but you can resize it from the left side, which I think is kind of annoying.

So you can actually enable that by just going to the menu, editing.

Hello, resizing from the left.

I can resize it from both sides, which is a really nice little tip.

Now let’s actually resize these by selecting them and pressing CTRL Q, which means they will stick to the grid as they are supposed to.

And I showed you the slice tool before, but we can actually use this Trump tool. Just select the chords and go to strong. Just increase the time.

Maybe change the end time as well.

That’s another way we can do this as well.

Now, as you can see, if you use the same tool, the cords stick together. If you want to ungroup them, just select them, go to group ungroup.

And now you can freely move any notes wherever you want.

So one tip I want to show you is when you have some notes selected, you can press Ctrl and arrow up or down to put them an octave up or down.

So let’s put those octaves down.

And now another way you can sell notes is by holding Ctrl and Shift together and then pressing the mouse and dragging it to select the middle notes and then holding the Ctrl arrow up to create this whole progression that has the middle nose octave higher.

Now it sounds like this.

So that’s another shortcut you can use.

That helps a lot.

Alright, so let’s reset the chorus once again.

So let’s say you want to copy your chords over. The easiest way to do that is to hold Ctrl select them and then Ctrl V. That will copy the course over after the first selection.

So that is the easiest way to just copy them one after another.

You don’t have to worry about things like not hitting the grid properly, and stuff like that.

So let’s delete the melody for now.

And let’s put the chords an octave up.

So one of the things we can do in FL Studio is to arpeggiate these chords.

So let’s play them and go to arpeggiate.

Now we have this arpeggio just like that.

Also, you can use different patterns that are here.

So yeah, arpeggios are pretty nice. If you want to quickly transform your chords into a melody, an arpeggio is a good way to do that.

Now let’s bring the melody back.

And so one of the things that What if we want these scores to be one after another like this?

So I just did that.

It took a few seconds.

But what if we have a way longer melody chord progression, and with different science notes? It will take a while to do that.

So what you can use is the chop function.

So just go right here to chop.

Again, you can select, you can sell different Trump rhythms, and you can even create your own.

So those are shops. Let me actually just decrease the volume hold shift to keep the volume the same.

So now, what if we want to make this way faster? One of the things you can do is select the whole thing, and then you have this arrow.

So if you drag it, you will make it slower.

If you drag it to the left, you will make it faster.

And also, if you hold the ALT key while dragging it, it will snap to the grid and make it a bit easier to set up.

So let’s make it like this.

And now it will be pretty fast.

So maybe we want it like this.

That brings me to another point, which is time signatures.

Now this is not the usual time signature.

So you can actually change the time signatures in time markers at time signature change for free, and as you can see, it almost seems like this is the correct one.

But if we put it on the playlist, it won’t.

And on the correct beat, we would have to change the time signature here as well.

But in the piano roll, it makes a lot more sense and the grid is set up so we can work in this time signature.

And the last thing that I can show you is another shortcut. Hold shift and arrow up or down to transpose the nose, up or down.

Any guys? Those are a few piano tips and tricks. I hope you learned something new.

I think there are a lot of things in FL Studio that a lot of people don’t know about.

And it’s always good to explore them and show them to you.

You might want to watch this video a few times to remember all these things.

And make sure to use them to really remember them.

And hopefully, it will save you some time in the future.

Other than that, thank you for watching and I’ll see you on the next one.

Goodbye.