Alright guys, today we’re gon na have a rapid-fire video. I’m gon na be running through the most useful p & l tips and tricks that you need to know to help you become a more efficient FL Studio user.
Starting off holding down shift when you’re entering in your notes will automatically make them however long you want them. Holding down control and selecting particular notes here on the left side will select all of the notes that you want to choose. Holding down control and selecting nodes in this area will let you select whatever ones that you want in this box here.
Now if you want to add a particular note on top of this, holding down Ctrl and Shift will let you do that.
And again, hold Ctrl and Shift to what you would select as well.
Holding down shift and dragging these notes run to let you easily duplicate these and let you put them wherever you want.
Holding down shift and hitting the arrow keys on your keyboard lets you move up and down a note, holding down Ctrl A to move up or down in octaves.
Hitting Ctrl plus C will let you copy the notes that you have selected. Ctrl N x lets you cut and Ctrl N v lets you paste. Ctrl plus B will automatically duplicate your entire section.
So this is useful.
If you want to automatically double the length of your pattern, we can hit Ctrl N A. That’ll automatically select all the notes in our current pattern, and Ctrl plus B will automatically double this. Pressing CTRL and z will let us undo what we just did.
And pressing it again, we’ll redo what we just did.
But if you want to undo further back into history, if you want to keep on doing that, hit Ctrl plus alt plus z, that’ll let you do that.
Now for some more unique tips shift and D will reduce the length of all your notes.
hit Ctrl N l for quick legato.
This will automatically extend all your notes into the next one.
If you quickly want to play around with the rhythm of two different chords, what we want to do is select them both, hold down shift and go in between and drag your mouse left and right.
You guys can see you can play around with a different note length like this. You guys noticed whenever I shift my note length right, it automatically goes by wherever the grid is set to.
But to quickly turn that off, hold down Alt and drag your notes around.
This will let you extend by whatever length that you want.
If you want to quickly expand or shrink your pattern, just select whatever notes you want to play with.
This error will show up and just drag this around.
When your cursor is on top of a note, holding down shift and scrolling the wheel on your mouse will let you bump the note off the grid so you can have a more human feel to the note.
So, you play around with the timing of the note pretty easily.
If you want all of your notes perfectly back on the grid, hit Shift and Q.
This is for quick quantizing.
But this only affects the start time.
If you want, you can also hit control. This also quantizes the end points of the notes as well.
If you’re interested in humanizing your pattern, start by holding down shift and hitting M.
Let’s select notes at random. You can hit it over and over again to select notes.
Hitting shift n I will invert your selection.
So whatever is not selected will get selected.
This is useful for quickly selecting random notes and then just playing around with the different parameters down here.
You can change a bunch of the properties of these notes down here.
Just select whatever parameter you want to play with and go to town. Holding down ALT and right clicking on a note or a quarter lets you quickly preview it.
Hit Ctrl T to add a marker to your pattern.
This is useful if you’re trying to record using your MIDI keyboard. You guys can see if I want to record a pattern.
It’ll only record in the first bar here.
But if we add a marker and drag it to a different point in our pattern, it’ll only loop around once it hits that marker.
Now there are a bunch of other shortcuts that I did not include that let you bring up these tools over here.
These are really useful tools, but they require a full explanation on their own.
So I’m gon na say that for the second half of this video.
To go through some of the other options that are up here, though, this magnet button up here lets you select the size of your grid.
So now when I drag these notes around, they go by the new grid line. The stamp button right next to it here lets you quickly insert chord scales or patterns.
This thing will only be enabled for one use though, but if you want to keep using it over and over again, turn off only one.
So that way, when I select whatever one I want, it will just do it over and over again.
If I select one of these scales, and I enter it into my pattern here and I go into a different channel, this is a tool that will easily let me see what notes belong into that scale.
By the way, hitting alt Nv turns these ghost notes on and off.
Or you could go into this menu, helpers navel and disable it here.
While we’re here.
If you want to change the way your piano looks, you can do so using these different options here.
The pencil option up here lets you draw in your notes like we’ve been doing this whole entire time.
The paintbrush right next to it lets you quickly enter in a whole sequence of notes if you just drag down your mouse. The paintbrush right next to it is painting in drum sequencer mode.
It says the exact same thing.
So this lets you play around with different rhythms.
If, for example, you’re entering in your high hats, delete right next to it that’s self explanatory, delete your notes.
The slice function up here lets you quickly go and take your chords and your notes and slice them however you want.
And by the way, if you want to glue all these notes back together just like everyone’s you want to put back together and hit Ctrl N g has dropped down right here lets you quickly scroll through all your different channels.
You can also hold down Control and use your mouse to scroll wheel to quickly go through them as well.
And lastly, we have the color and slide area up here.
If you want your note to slide, what you want to do is select the slides. Up here, play a note overtop the one that you already have.
We can do the exact same things with chords as well.
The way this works is it takes the slide distance between our slide note and the top note here.
So, for example, this is five notes. That’s going to take all of the notes in the chord and slide them up five as well.
Now, if you only want to slide one note in our chord, that’s when the color comes into effect.
So if I change this color to this one over here, and I change this note to be this color, the exact same color as a slide note that only that particular note sled.
Now the other option that’s up here is portamento.
This will create a short slide from one note to another.
As you guys can hear, this note now has a tiny bit of a pitch bend right at the beginning of the note.
There you guys have it. Those are the most useful shortcuts in the piano roll. I know it was a lot to take in, so you may want to take a short break.
Now what we’re going to do is cover the piano roll tools that I mentioned prior in the video and how to use them.
Starting off, we’re going to use a riff machine here. The shortcut for this is alt, e.
If we’re having trouble coming up with a starting point for our beat, we can create chords or melodies using this tool.
Starting off, we’ll turn off all of these functions up here.
So I can go through them one by one with you guys.
The first tab here is going to let us generate a progression. You guys can see as soon as I switch it on, this one long note here turns into a progression. We can cycle through a bunch of different patterns using this drop down here.
As well, we can adjust the note length using the time multiplier knob down here.
The next tab over here is a chord. This is going to turn these into a chord progression.
Fundamentally, it’s going to take all of our notes and just turn them into chords.
So this was our progression.
And if I turn this on, it just takes the notes from our original progression and turns them into chords easily.
A similar idea for this one. We have a bunch of different options here for what types of chords we want.
And once again, the time multiplier knob is right below it.
Let’s just play around with how many of these chords we want.
Next step, we have the arc tab right here.
This will take all of our cords and turn them into ARPs if that’s what we’re looking for. We can keep this option off if we want to. I did a video a while back on how you can use this section to create melodies on top of your
If that’s something that you want to see the next tab over right here, this is an option to mirror your patterns.
So you can flip it horizontally or vertically.
And then the next tab we have levels. This does exactly what it says. It’ll help you humanize your note levels.
So you can play around with the velocity pretty quickly.
And you guys can see at the bottom, all of our note properties are changing their pitch if we wanted to the art tab right next to it is for articulation.
What this will do is take all of our notes in our course. It’ll help you bring a more human feel to it by playing with the amount of gaps in between the notes.
Otherwise, it might just come off sounding super robotic and programmed in for the multiply dial here.
This will help you control just how extremely you want this effect to be variation right below it.
This helps create a sense of randomness.
So we don’t know which notes actually get shortened.
And the seed section down here lets you jump through a bunch of different options for this randomness.
as well.
There are a bunch of different presets underneath these options drop down here.
The next tab over is groove. This sort of acts as a quantization mechanism fundamentally, so I’m just gonna skip over this for now. We’ll go more in depth into this later on.
And finally, fit.
This is a huge and important tab here.
What this allows us to do is choose which key and scale we want these chords to be in.
So this is a very important and useful part of this entire chain.
This will let us easily cycle through a bunch of ideas if we get stuck.
If we don’t know what type of starting point, we want to just quickly go through a bunch of the different options.
Let’s see if we can find something that we like.
And it’s great because it also has this random function up here.
So if you just quickly cycle through a bunch of different ideas really quickly.
So if you already have a good idea of what key skill that you want your site to be in, it might be a good idea to start with this tab here, turn this on, and select the key and scale from here.
Otherwise, if you don’t have a real preference, you can save this for the end and just start cycling through a bunch of ideas like we just did here.
And from there, we can use this as a starting point for a beat.
It’s really up to you how you want to use this next tool that we’re going to look at is strum.
The shortcut for this is called s.
This is the tool that’s going to help you make your chord sound a little bit more human, a little bit more interesting as well. We can create a streaming effect with our chords.
So instead of sounding like this, sound like let’s get that cool strumming effect for all of our chords.
Now, there are two sections to this tool. We can play with the start time and the end time.
The first row of dials up here, let’s just play with the timing of our notes.
So if we shift this to the right, it’ll move the top row of notes over.
If you shift it left, they’ll move the bottom row of notes over the tension knob right next to it.
Let’s dictate how extreme you want.
Perfect to be the velocity section down here. Let’s do the exact same thing but with the velocity instead of the actual note timing.
And the end section does the exact same thing, obviously playing with the end times of the notes instead of the start times.
So yeah, a really useful tool if you want to add this type of effect of strumming just to have reports that are a little bit more human.
Next up, we have the tool here for quantization.
The shortcut for this is alt and Q.
This is a tool that’s going to help us with the timing of our notes.
If they are a little bit too sloppy for our liking, the start time here lets us control how flush against the grid we want our notes turned all the way to the right is completely against the grid.
And the more left that we turn this, the more and more it’s going to go back to the original position of our notes, the quantize duration mode. This will let us play with the duration of our notes and we have the option right next to it to either quantize the duration or just leave it
And we do also have a bunch of presets here with the quantization you guys can see.
So pretty self-explanatory.
If you have a pattern that’s a little bit too loose, a little bit too off the grid.
This lets you control just how flesh back on the grid you want it to be.
It’s not a binary decision, like the quantization that I showed you guys in last week’s video. This will let you feel a little bit more granular and hands on with just how quantized you want your pattern to be.
Next up, we have the articulator tool.
The shortcut for this is alt and L.
This does the exact same thing that we saw in the rift machine, except we can use it on pretty much any instrument now.
For example, I can use this in my hi hat pattern, so it doesn’t have the exact same length playing over and over again.
As opposed to this.
By the way, I should let you know this won’t automatically give you that effect.
And what you need to do is go into your sample properties and need to turn on the envelope right here and play around with the ADSR.
To enable this type of effect.
The next thing that’s pretty useful is the randomizer.
The shortcut for this is an altered arm.
So right off the bat, you want to make sure that the pattern is turned off.
Otherwise, I’ll just give you a random pattern, which you do not want to just let us do just like a reference sheet is quickly playing around with the levels of the properties down here.
Like a pair of panning, for example, playing with the pitch of my notes, and it has some variation as well as philosophy if I want.
This is something that’s useful if you have a very repetitive pattern, you want to bring some variation to it.
The next tool that we’re going to look at here is the chop tool.
A shortcut to this is all to you.
So what this is going to do is take your note and chop it down into a smaller note based on this dial here.
This is especially useful if you want to build your snare rolls your hi hat rolls.
The next tool is the arpeggiator. This is just like the tool that we saw in the riff machine again. I really recommend watching my old video about how you can use this type of tool in order to create a melody for your PCL easel.
And finally, we have this tool here called slaanesh.
The shortcut for this is alt W.
This is a tool that we can use if you want to play around with the rhythm of our chord that you come up with a chord progression that we really like.
This will let you easily and quickly test out a bunch of different rhythms.
The same thing with our drums.
If we had a crazy high hat pattern, we want to quickly play around with the rhythm of it. This will really be helpful as well.
Basically, what this tool does is it takes all of your notes and it shifts them around based on these parameters that we select down here.
Essentially, what it’s doing is taking our loop our pattern and it’s breaking it down by the periods that we choose up here.
And it deletes various sections in that period based on what we choose down here.
By the way, when you use this tool, it might be a good idea to use a stretch to compensate feature.
Otherwise, it might jumble up your pattern a little bit too much.
So switch this on if you find that’s happening to you.
So you can shuffle through a bunch of these different options to try a bunch of different ideas.
Maybe get a good idea you have ever thought of in terms of the overall rhythm of your chords or your drums or whatever you want to use this on.
And there you have it.
Those are the most useful tools when it comes to using the piano roll and FL Studio.
If you found this video helpful, please do like and subscribe comment down below let me know which of these tools interests you the most.
As usual, my free job kit is available in the description box below as well and I will see you guys.
