Song Tutorial

First of all, before anything, sit down and play with Fruity Loops for about an hour. Then come back to this. If you haven’t thoroughly messed with Fruity Loops, this won’t make much sense.

I usually start out making a song with a beat, so, the first thing you’re going to want to do is choose your drum instruments. You can see the ones I chose in figure 1. After you choose these instruments, you can set up a beat. Example in figure 1.

Figure 1.1

The Step Sequencer.

The first channel is a ts404 instrument.

The second is a bass drum,

The third is an open hi-hat,

The fourth is a closed hi-hat,

And the last is the snare drum.

Now lets make the bass drum more interesting… Click on the button labeled C_Kick to bring up the channel settings. From here you can click on the Time tab, and create an Echo delay.

Turn the knob labeled Feed up about a quarter of the way. That gives it a nice bouncing effect. You can play with all these knobs to see what they do.

Below the echo delay is the arpeggiator. You won’t be needing this for the bass drum, but you should try this with other sounds.

To make the sample cut itself off when a new note is triggered, click the cut itself button under the misc tab. This is good for longer sounds, or sounds with looping points.

Once you have a good Drum beat going, you can continue on to pattern 2. To do this, click on the 2 or click the up arrow to move to pattern 2. Once in Pattern 2, you can start writing a bass line, or a music line. We’ll do this with the ts404. Click every other tab for the ts404. (8^th notes). Now We will select a melody for this. In

order to do this you must open the keyboard editor. To do so, click on the button labeled 1 in the picture. When you do this, you will see a drop down piano right below the ts404 line. if it’s now at the ts404 line, click the green light between the tabs and the label of the ts404. From the keyboard editor, you can select what note each plays. At the very top of the editor, there are gray blank spaces. This is the slide option. If you click here, the note will slide. (#2 in picture). When you are finished with that, you are ready to go to the play list. First lets take a look at this tool bar.

1 brings you to the Playlist, 2 brings you to the step sequencer, 3 brings you to the piano roll (full vers), 4, brings up the sample browser, 5 brings up the fx window.

Click the first one to bring up the playlist. From the playlist, you can edit how the song goes. You can choose when the patterns play in the song. Do as the picture shows.

The arrow at #1 shows the looping point. When the song reaches the end, it will loop to this point.

There you have it… a VERY basic song. Now play it over and over and over until your head explodes! Now you can add variations to it… Just keep building and building, until you have a full song.

Download the song we just made! Click Here!

-FredFredrick

Have any questions or comments? Contact ME.