FL STUDIO EDISON TUTORIAL – CHOPPING and EDITING SAMPLES
FL STUDIO EDISON TUTORIAL – CHOPPING and EDITING SAMPLES
Using loops and samples made by others is a great way to get started making music with FL Studio; however, eventually you’re going to want to cut up your own custom samples to use in your tunes. This tutorial will show how to use Edison in Fruity Loops to easily accomplish this. Edison is super powerful when it comes to audio editing and sample creation. If you have been using another external application or are new to editing, it would be wise to check out and learn how to use Edison.
You might already have a piece of audio that you want to chop into loops or samples, but if not here’s a small loop that I used making this tutorial you can use.
EDISON TUTORIAL EXAMPLE LOOP
Right click, choose Save As, and save it to your desktop or somewhere else you can locate it.
Start up a new FL Studio session and put Edison in an insert slot in the mixer.
click to enlarge
Now open the Edison window and drag the audio you want to chop into it. You should see the waveform of the audio file.
In the upper left of Edison there is a transport control where you can play the audio to preview it. Here you can also loop the file or selection. This feature comes in handy when you want to preview a loop or sample and make sure they line up properly.
If you loop play the example file I provided, you can hear that the loop does not play seamlessly. That’s OK because I am going to show you how to cut out a perfect loop and also how to chop out individual hits that you could use to build up a new track.
If you click and drag your mouse inside the waveform area, it creates a selection area. This is how you select the portions of audio that you want to manipulate and chop in Edison.
A lot of audio work is accomplished by being able to look at and understand waveforms. So here’s a quick rundown for those that are new to them. The example audio will make it easy to see what’s going on with the waveform since it is a simple little beat with nice clean hits. Basically, the flat horizontal line is silence and the vertical lines represent where there is sound. The louder the sound, the bigger the vertical line will be. So, the longest vertical line will be right where the sound hits and then it fades down back to being flat (silence).
It might seem strange for someone looking at waveforms for the first time, but after you work with them a few times it becomes very easy to understand. Just play the loop and watch as Edison scrolls through the sound. You can see how at the beginning of each hit there is a large vertical line and then a blob of lines, which looks like a right pointing arrow, shrinking back down to a flat line. Here’s an image that explains it better.
To cut out a sample all you have to do is highlight the portion you need and use the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button in Edison
The selection in the above picture is a single snare hit. Hit play and you can preview your selection. When you select a piece of audio to cut out, one thing you want to do is make sure the edit is as clean and precise as possible. So, you need to zoom in real close to make sure that you have a good tight selection. Zoom by scrolling the mouse wheel or using the PageUp and PageDown buttons on your keyboard. You want the selection to begin just before the hit and end at its flattest part right before the next sound.
Now that you have a clean sample selected you can simply drag it into the step sequencer window and start using it in your music. Do this by clicking and holding on the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button in the top right of the Edison window then dragging your mouse cursor into the empty space above or below the other channels in the step sequencer.
Add some notes to the step sequencer and you can here that it is playing your new custom sample. You can now use it as you would any other sample you have. This is great if you want to pull out individual hits, but what if you want a larger portion or loop. You could just repeat the above steps using a bigger selection of the audio and make one big loop sample. But I’m going to show you an even more powerful way to cut out a loop that includes markers, so you can put it into Fruity Slicer and have better control of the loop. Using Edison in FL Studio makes marking and chopping loops simple.
Before you drag a loop selection into a channel or Fruity Slicer you want to set markers. You do this by making a selection within the loop you want and pressing the M key. A little window will pop up where you can name each marker if you want or just hit enter and the markers will get generic names of Marker #1, Marker #2, Marker #3, ect.
How you divide up your markers is up to you, here I just put a marker on each hit of the loop. You could also do it only on down beats or any other way you’d want. I find marking each hit to give me the most options later when I put the loop into Slicer to manipulate and trigger the sections.
After laying out all the markers insert a Fruity Slicer into the step sequencer, make a selection around the entire loop you want to use, then drag and drop from the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button into the Slicer.
Now that your custom loop is marked and put in the Fruity Slicer you can see that it is sliced according to the markers you placed. This allows you to trigger each slice from the piano roll or MIDI keyboard along with a bunch of other fun ways to manipulate the loop. I’m planning on making a FL Studio Fruity Slicer tutorial in the near future, so stay tuned. This tutorial should enable you to start chopping up and working with your own loops and samples from any audio source and using them in your Fruity Loops Studio audio projects. Good luck with your creations.
FL STUDIO – FRUITY LOOPS – TUTORIAL RESOURCE
Using loops and samples made by others is a great way to get started making music with FL Studio; however, eventually you’re going to want to cut up your own custom samples to use in your tunes. This tutorial will show how to use Edison in Fruity Loops to easily accomplish this. Edison is super powerful when it comes to audio editing and sample creation. If you have been using another external application or are new to editing, it would be wise to check out and learn how to use Edison.
You might already have a piece of audio that you want to chop into loops or samples, but if not here’s a small loop that I used making this tutorial you can use.
EDISON TUTORIAL EXAMPLE LOOP
Right click, choose Save As, and save it to your desktop or somewhere else you can locate it.
Start up a new FL Studio session and put Edison in an insert slot in the mixer.
click to enlarge
Now open the Edison window and drag the audio you want to chop into it. You should see the waveform of the audio file.
In the upper left of Edison there is a transport control where you can play the audio to preview it. Here you can also loop the file or selection. This feature comes in handy when you want to preview a loop or sample and make sure they line up properly.
If you loop play the example file I provided, you can hear that the loop does not play seamlessly. That’s OK because I am going to show you how to cut out a perfect loop and also how to chop out individual hits that you could use to build up a new track.
If you click and drag your mouse inside the waveform area, it creates a selection area. This is how you select the portions of audio that you want to manipulate and chop in Edison.
A lot of audio work is accomplished by being able to look at and understand waveforms. So here’s a quick rundown for those that are new to them. The example audio will make it easy to see what’s going on with the waveform since it is a simple little beat with nice clean hits. Basically, the flat horizontal line is silence and the vertical lines represent where there is sound. The louder the sound, the bigger the vertical line will be. So, the longest vertical line will be right where the sound hits and then it fades down back to being flat (silence).
It might seem strange for someone looking at waveforms for the first time, but after you work with them a few times it becomes very easy to understand. Just play the loop and watch as Edison scrolls through the sound. You can see how at the beginning of each hit there is a large vertical line and then a blob of lines, which looks like a right pointing arrow, shrinking back down to a flat line. Here’s an image that explains it better.
To cut out a sample all you have to do is highlight the portion you need and use the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button in Edison
The selection in the above picture is a single snare hit. Hit play and you can preview your selection. When you select a piece of audio to cut out, one thing you want to do is make sure the edit is as clean and precise as possible. So, you need to zoom in real close to make sure that you have a good tight selection. Zoom by scrolling the mouse wheel or using the PageUp and PageDown buttons on your keyboard. You want the selection to begin just before the hit and end at its flattest part right before the next sound.
Now that you have a clean sample selected you can simply drag it into the step sequencer window and start using it in your music. Do this by clicking and holding on the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button in the top right of the Edison window then dragging your mouse cursor into the empty space above or below the other channels in the step sequencer.
Add some notes to the step sequencer and you can here that it is playing your new custom sample. You can now use it as you would any other sample you have. This is great if you want to pull out individual hits, but what if you want a larger portion or loop. You could just repeat the above steps using a bigger selection of the audio and make one big loop sample. But I’m going to show you an even more powerful way to cut out a loop that includes markers, so you can put it into Fruity Slicer and have better control of the loop. Using Edison in FL Studio makes marking and chopping loops simple.
Before you drag a loop selection into a channel or Fruity Slicer you want to set markers. You do this by making a selection within the loop you want and pressing the M key. A little window will pop up where you can name each marker if you want or just hit enter and the markers will get generic names of Marker #1, Marker #2, Marker #3, ect.
How you divide up your markers is up to you, here I just put a marker on each hit of the loop. You could also do it only on down beats or any other way you’d want. I find marking each hit to give me the most options later when I put the loop into Slicer to manipulate and trigger the sections.
After laying out all the markers insert a Fruity Slicer into the step sequencer, make a selection around the entire loop you want to use, then drag and drop from the “Drag / copy sample / selection” button into the Slicer.
Now that your custom loop is marked and put in the Fruity Slicer you can see that it is sliced according to the markers you placed. This allows you to trigger each slice from the piano roll or MIDI keyboard along with a bunch of other fun ways to manipulate the loop. I’m planning on making a FL Studio Fruity Slicer tutorial in the near future, so stay tuned. This tutorial should enable you to start chopping up and working with your own loops and samples from any audio source and using them in your Fruity Loops Studio audio projects. Good luck with your creations.
FL STUDIO – FRUITY LOOPS – TUTORIAL RESOURCE
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