Fruity Loops – Basics and Drums

Fruity Loops is a very flexible program and probably one of the best choices to start creating your own electronic music or adding to acoustic tracks.

These tutorials are meant to speed up your learning curve when creating music. Early tutorials are meant for total beginners, with later tutorials expanding on the knowledge so even experienced music makers can find a tip or two. In later tutorials i will show you how to sample, manipulate synths, general terminology, using and installing VSTs (plug ins), mixing and various other topics that should set you up for the future.

Today you will learn how to create a beat for a chillout/dubstep track and putting it into a sequence.

This is the basic FL Studio layout. In the top left part are the general menus, to the left is the play panel and BMP (beats per minute) and a little lower are the sequencers, here you can insert either drum samples or synthesisers to create a sequence. To the left of the playlist you should see two blinking lights, one saying “PAT” and one saying “SONG”. When switching to “PAT”, the play, stop and record buttons will only play the pattern selected, whilst the “SONG” option will play all the sequences in the arrangement.

Fortunately, you don’t have to stick with the shitty standard drum samples, and can simply drop your sample into the box. There is a huge selection of samples out there! Don’t compromise a good drum sequence with boring samples; spend a good amount of time when choosing drums as they can make a good drum sequence sound great. I will put up links to good sites for drums and percussion later on.

As you see, I already created a drum pattern using custom drum samples; the tempo is set to 102BPM. Now that we have a basic drum pattern down, we can start working on other sections.

To put this sequence into the major arrangement, called “playlist” in FL, press F5, or go to menu/view/playlist. The bottom part of the playlist is where you can arrange your drum or synth patterns, this way you always remain in constant overview of where each sequence is located and re-arrange easier.

In the next tutorial: Modifying drum volume, pitch, stereo-pan, piano-roll and exporting your creation.