Fl studio tutorial:learning the playlist

This is where you would arrange your song by
defining parts like the intro , verses ,chorus and
more. You can also use this view to visualize
automation and even some basic editing
of Pattern sequences and audio clips .
This tutorial assumes you have some data
already defined in your Patterns. Please see the
[Patterns tutorial] for more information on that
process. I recommend that you download this
sample project and open it in FL Studio .
Playlist_Example.FLP
The Playlist can be selected from the toolbar
button: or by pressing F5.
Clicking the button or pressing F5 again will
toggle the Playlist on or off.
Let's begin by looking at the basic parts of
aPlaylist :
You can see a couple of areas of interest. First
we see the toolbar across the top. Below that is
a scrollbar. And below the scroll bars are
markers indicating measure of time.
There is a split area below that. One section
(usually the upper section) represents the clip
areaand the other (usually the bottom) is
the pattern block area. the pattern block area
can be identified by the list of patterns running
down the left side and the small square grid
sections.
We'll cover the tool bars in a more advanced
tutorial. For now, lets just concentrate on
getting some basic arrangement using
the playlist .
If you opened the project above, you should will
have three patterns to work with.
Pattern Block
In the playlist window we will arrange them in a
specific order. Go to the playlist make sure you
scroll the view all the way to the left. Find
the pattern block area, click on the left side
where it is labelled Pattern 1 to activate teh
pattern. You can now click to the right where
you see the grid and draw blocks into the grid
for the row labelled Pattern 1 .
We have just put a our basic drum beat down.
Make sure you repeat the blocks going to the
right 8 time
s total.
To test this, select SONG as your playback
mode and press play.
You should see the playlist scrolling through the
8pattern blocks. Stop the playback and go to
the next step.
Pattern Clip
Next let's see how we can add a pattern to
the clip area. Select Pattern 2 in the Pattern
Block area to activate the second pattern. Move
up to the the clip area and click near the left
side. You should now see a pattern clip. You
can use the mouse to align this pattern clip . Try
to align it so that it starts on the 3rd bar mark
and repeat it two more times.
Click the play button again and it should now
play Pattern 1 by itself for two bars before
playingPattern 2 along with Pattern 1 for the
next six bars. You have layered
two patterns together!
Just for fun, click on Pattern 3 in the Pattern
blockarea to activate it. In the clip area, draw
in Pattern 3 to play for the last four bars of the
8 bar sequence. Hit play to hear the results.
Volume Automation
Finally lets look at a simple automation we can
apply. Say we want our song to fade out during
the final two bars. Here's how we do that.
First, you need to highlight the area we want
to automate. While holding the CTRL key, click
and drag from the start of bar #6 to the end of
bar #8 inside the time marker area. Notice how
the selected area turns a reddish color.
Next go to the main volume on the main
toolbar. Right-click on it and select " Create
Automation Clip".
This will insert an automation clip of the
selected region with a line across it. This
represents the volume level. Let's go back to
the playlist by pressing F5. Then we can
unselect the area by doing a CTRL + Click in
the Time Marker Area .
Finally we can find the right most handle in
the Master Volume Envelope and drag is all the
way down.
Next press stop to reset the player and click
Play again. You should now hear the song play
through and fade out.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we covered some basic on using
the playlist. We were able to insert patterns into
the Pattern Block area as well the the Pattern
Clip area. We also made a simple fadeout using
anautomation clip .
Source:www.fruity-loops-tutorials.com