Samples and Beat Resource, Fruity Loops

If your looking for some new interesting sounds and tones for your Fruity Loops projects check out Beats365. This site has an excellent database of unique new samples, beats, and sounds resources to add to your audio. They provides thousands of royalty-free beats and over 10 gigabytes of sound samples. I found some real high quality material on here for using with FL Studio.

Beats365

Fruity Loops - Fl Studio REsource

Audio Interface with FL Studio

If you're wanting to upgrade your system and that onboard soundcard you have on your computer isn't getting the job done for Fruity Loops, I suggest you look into getting an audio interface. A few weeks ago I bought the
Presonus FIREPOD Firewire Audio Interface
and it's really been an awesome addition to my music making gear.

It has 8 Mic/Line inputs for hooking up all your microphones and laying down your vocal or instrument tracks with Fruity Loops audio recording. Also Firepod includes MIDI in/out connections to trigger and control your soft sythns and VST plugins with a MIDI controller; I have a Yamaha keyboard and a Trigger Finger that works great with this for real time MIDI input.

All these features have worked perfect with Fruity Loops and helped reduce my recording latency too. I'm really happy with the hardware and software interface when using this audio interface with FL Studio, and if you're looking for one definatly check out the Firepod or the smaller Firebox looks pretty cool too.


Fruity Loops / FL Studio REsource

Fruity Loops Manual

I've gotten some emails asking where to find the Fruity Loops manual PDF. After some searching online I haven't really found the PDF manual yet, but here is a link to the full FL Studio 7 Reference Manual online in HTML.

Fruity Loops Manual

Although it can be a little dense and overly complex at explaining things; look it over when you need general advice on using certain features in Fruity Loops then come here and check out my tutorials for help with specific creative applications in a more step by step format. If anyone has a link to the FL Studio manual in PDF send me the link at audio.resource@gmail.com and I'll pass it along to other users looking for it. Keep the music flowing...

Fruity Loops/ FL Studio REsource

FL Studio Tips: Learning to Use Fruity Filters

This tutorial is going to breakdown the basics of using an audio filter in FL Studio along with some tips and trick you can use in your Fruity Loops music projects.

Basically an audio filter is just as the name says; it filters out audio either above or below a certain frequency--called the cutoff frequency. The two we'll learn about in this tutorial are the "low-pass" & "high-pass" filters. A low pass filter allows all the audio below the cutoff frequency through or to "pass", things such as kick drums, bass guitar, and other low end instruments; likewise, a high-pass filter will let all the high frequency audio through; for example, cymbals, high ringing synths, ect... In this lesson we will be working with the Fruity Filter. The best way to learn this is just to open up FL Studio and tweak around with the settings on the filter.

So, start Fruity Loops and either lay down a basic beat or load up a project or one of the demo songs. Try to use something that has a full range of sounds, including kick drums, bass guitar or synth, snare, cymbals, hi-hats, maybe some guitar or samples.

Now pull up the Mixer (either by selecting it in "View" at the top nav-bar, or pressing F9) and select the Master channel in the Mixer. Over in the right hand side in an effects slot, click the little down arrow choose "Select" and stick in a Fruity Filter.

In Fruity Filter you will see 6 controls (Cutoff freq, Resonance, Low Pass, Band Pass, High Pass, and x2). Our main focus here will be on the Cutoff Freq, Low Pass, and High Pass knobs. Start by turning all of them all the way down to the left, now if you press play in Fruity Loops you will probably hear nothing, as the filter is filtering out everything and not allowing any audio to pass through.

First turn up the Low Pass knob all the way, this basically turns it on. Now slowly start to bring up the Cutoff Freq knob. And you should now start hearing the audio come through mainly the low end things like kick drums, bass, ect. As you can see when you turn on a low pass filter everything under the cutoff frequency comes through while blocking everything above that cutoff. This is great for pulling bass-lines out of a song or sample. Also you can use this as a cool frequency based fade in or out effect on your music tracks. Just start either full off or full on and slowly twist the cutoff knob from one extreme to the other.

The High Pass does the same thing, but it only allows sounds higher or above the cutoff freq to pass through. Turn the low pass all the way down and bring the high pass all the way up. Now as you bring the Cutoff freq up you will hear the bass tones drop out and only the high end stuff such as cymbals will be coming through. High pass can be used for many things including giving your tracks that lo-fi played through a radio or tiny phone speaker sound.

You could also automate these filters while recording in Fruity Loops for some great WahWah type of effects. If you turn the x 2 knob On and the Resonance up you will get even more pronounced filter effects on your audio. Now that you know the basics experiment with these filters on your own projects and you'll soon master them and have another weapon in your Fl Studio arsenal. And just about every VST or hardware based filter will have these same control, so you will be able to jump right in and start filtering your music projects.

Fruity Loops - FL Studio REsource

Fruity Loops: Edison Tutorial

Fruity Loops REsource is back in effect. I plan on making a bunch more Fl Studio tutorials to post on here in the near future, so stay tuned and if you have any topics you'd like to see tips, tricks, or whatever for send an email to audio.resource@gmail.com and I'll see what I can do.

So, I got Fruity Loops 7--if you haven't got it yet go and order it now, well worth the upgrade-- because for one with FL Studio 7 came an excellent little thing called Edison. Edison is a fully integrated easy to use audio editing and recording tool. And in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to record some audio into Edison and how to quickly chop it up into some nice samples. Now I used to record into Audacity, send it over to Fruity Slicer, and set sample points in that, but now you can do it quick and painlessly all inside Fruity Loops with Edison.

Hook up a mic to your computer, find something to sample (hit a drum, a bottle, or just clap, whatever you want) and start Fruity Loops. Grab yourself a
Shure SM57
- cheap, awesome pro mic to make some samples with if you don't already have a good microphone) If you don't have a microphone available here's a WAV file I made up of my Maracas you can use to follow along.

MARACAS WAV FILE HERE right click it and "Save Target/Link as..." to your computer

First thing you want to do is open up the mixer by pressing F9 or selecting Mixer from "View" at the top. Now in the mixer choose an empty insert slot, I'll use Insert 1 here. Then in the top right of the mixer where it says "IN" click the little box and select whatever your mic is hooked up to probably your soundcard. You should now hear your mic and see the level on the meter. Now in one of the Effects slots on the mixer hit the little arrow choose "Select" and stick in Edison.

Edison Tutorial Pic 1

Open Edison and look at the top right meter to make sure your signal is coming into it. Now simply hit record and record a bunch of hits of whatever into the the mic you should see the wave forms appearing in Edison as you do this. When you're happy with the results stop it by hitting the record button again.

If you're using the maraca WAV file above I made, find it on your computer and just drag it into Edison instead of recording a mic.

Hopefully if everything worked you should see your new samples in Edison like so...

Edison Tutorial Pic 2


If you don't know how to look at a piece of audio and visually understand how it looks I suggest you hit play a few time on Edison and watch and listen as it scrolls through. Basically the flat line is silence and where ever you see the spikes that is gonna be your hit. You really need to practice seeing audio in this way to get the most out of your music creation.

OK next we are going to chop this into individual samples you can trigger in Fruity Loops or any other music loop sequencer for that matter. First, you see the little icons right above the sample--the little disk, scissors, wrench, eyeball, ect..) Those are all the tools used to edit in Edison. Now click the icon that looks like a + with a little flag by it (fifth from the right), this will allow you to set markers. What they do is basically split up the sample into pieces just like the slice points in Fruity Slicer or Recycle ect... So add a marker and drag one right in front of each sample hit. Keep making markers and do this for each hit in the file. Now each of your hits is divided up into it's own region. If you want to demo a certain hit to make sure it's markers are lined up right just hit the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard to cycle through them then you can play it and adjust the marker placement if necessary.

Once you got all the markers set, click the little wrench icon and choose "Normalize" this will level out your samples and adjust the volume for better sounding hits. You can also do things like reverse the sample here and all kinds of other wacky things. Play around with these tools sometime.

That's it now you have each hit in it's own region divided by markers. All thats left to do is save the samples, construct some tunes, and get rich off the royalties. What I like to do is make a special folder to hold all my custom samples in and find them quickly. To do this browse into your FL Studio folder on your computer, mine is at C:\FL Studio 7\ then go into the "Data" folder, and then the "Patches" folder. Now you can right click here and create a New folder. Name it whatever, I use "My Samples" and now bring up the Browser in Fruity Loops (hit F8 or select "Browser" from View at the top left in Fruity). And you will see your new folder in the Browser where you can store all your new samples.

Once you have all your markers set up click the first little disk icon and choose "Save sample as..." this will save a copy of the entire sample in case you want to edit the markers again later. Next click the disk icon again and choose "Export regions as..." what this does is automatically chops and saves each individual hit you made with the markers into it's own sample. Now export these into the folder you set-up earlier or wherever you keep your samples. Open up the Browser by hitting F8 or selecting View at the top and making sure "Browser" is checked. Now you should see all the new chopped samples in the sample folder you created. Named something like Maracas - Marker #1 #2 and so on...

Now you can use these unique samples in Fruity Loops and really start to develop a custom sound library. Easy right. There are many other great features inside Edison, but this should set you on the fast track to getting deeper into using it for your music projects. If you need more help go back through the tutorial slowly or send me an email at audio.resource@gmail.com and I'll try to get you set up. Now get to chopping and creating. Til next time, good luck.


Fruity Loops REsource

Samples/Beats - FL Studio

Expand your Fruity Loops Sample library with:

Beats365

Fruity Loops - Fl Studio REsource

Fruity Loops REsource

Welcome to the Fruity Loops -FL Studio REsource. Here you will learn about Fruity Loops music software--including: samples, sounds, generators, beats, plugins, demo, soundpacks, audio recording, packs, songs, vst, instruments, VSti, DXi, downloads, sound packs, beat maker, drum machine, full version, beat making, drum kits, guide, rap, rapper, hip hop, techno, drum and bass, create, pro, video, audio, music, production, producer, edition, forum, help, instructions, files, buy fruity loops, instrumentals, reggaeton, freeware, download, and more. Also, discover tips, tricks, manual, and tutorial on how to use and get the most from Fruity Loops 7, 6.0, 6, 5.0, 5, 4.0, 4, 3.5, 3, programs. Free FL Studio help. Fruity Loops for dummies. Make your own music. Synch up with Cakewalk, Sonar, Cubase, Magix, VST, Pro Tools, Reason, Acid Pro, Cool Edit Pro, Sonic Foundry, samples, drums, Music Creator, Audacity, DJ software, beat machines, Virtual Studio, Fruity Loops Vsti--TS404 bassline, Speech Synthesizer, 3x OSC, 4Front, BeepMap, BooBass, Chrome, Fruity Slicer, Layers, Plucked, Sampler, Simpler, Buzz Generator, Dashboard, FL Keys, FL Slayer, FPC, Fruit Kick, Fruity DrumSynth Live, DX10, Envelope Controller, Granulizer, Vibrator, MIDI Out, Rewire, SimSynth, Sytrus, Wasp XT, Wave Traveller, and Fruity Loops FL Studio Effects-- Edison, Band EQ, CEnter Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Distortion, Flangus, Parametric EQ, PanOMatic, Reverb, Spectroman, Vocoder, WaveShaper, music creation software and all other online internet computer music systems.

Fruity Loops - FL Studio REsource

FruityLoops FPC Tutorial - Part 1

Learning the basics of the Fruity Loops FPC generator will be the focus of this FL Studio tutorial. I'll show you how I use the FPC and set it up to create beats using input from your computer keyboard.

Start up Fruity Loops and load the FPC into a channel of the step sequencer. To do this press F6 to bring up the step sequencer, right click on a channel and select Insert then FPC. Now it will load up and you might notice that the FPC is based off the old MPC hardware sampler, drum machine.

Basically what you have is 16 pads on the right that can be loaded with a sample and triggered by clicking on each pad or routing it to a MIDI controller of some kind. And on the left there are 16 corresponding boxes of the pad note and cut group matrix. These set what MIDI note will play the sample you have in the same pad on the right side. For instance maybe you have Pad 1 in the lower right hand corner and the pad note/octave may be at C5 here C is the note and 5 represents the octave.

At the top it shows which pad you’re editing and the sample loaded in it. Also next to the Pad name you can set the volume and pan of each individual pad sample. If you want to load a different sample into a pad click the little folder icon in the lower right of the pad and browse for your sound.

Also at the top there is three tabs labeled Pads, Layer Properties, and Mixer. Pads is what we're working with now. Layer Properties allows you to set up various layers and sounds based on velocity changes. This tab can be tricky to use and I'll write a tutorial on using it in the future. And of course the Mixer allows you to boost and cut the volume of each pad as well as your usual mixing functions. However for now just focus on the Pads.

How I like to use the Fruity Loops FPC is by setting it up to be triggered by my computer keyboard. This way I can input beats live while recording then fix whatever needs adjusting in the Piano Roll editor. It gives a more human feel to the tracks when you’re actually playing the hits rather than laying everything out in the step sequencer.

First, I'll find the Kick Drum, snare, and a hihat on the FPC pads. By default mine are on pad 2, 3, and 5. It might be the same for you or you may have to load up your sounds or use different pads. It doesn't really matter what pad on the left side on FPC each sample is on, as the right side with the notes will determine which key will trigger that specific pad.

Make sure that you have the Typing keyboard to piano option is turned on. If not go to the top of FL Studio and select Options and make sure "Typing keyboard to piano" is checked.

Now you can use your computer keyboard as a MIDI input controller. Fruity Loops is set up at note/octave C4 starting at letter Z on your computer keyboard going up. For example letter Z = C4, X = C4, C = E4, and so on up the scale. The letters above these S,D,G,H,J, ect are your flat and sharp notes. Insert Fruity Keys into a channel after you've turned on Typing keyboard to piano and play around with it and you'll figured out how each key is mapped to the keyboard. Here's a useful little chart I made that shows each key and the NOTE/OCTAVE in red that it will trigger in FL. Print it out and use it as a quick reference for your Fruity Loops projects.

CLICK HERE FOR CHART

Now all you have to do is put whatever sample you want to trigger into a pad on the right of FPC and set it to the key that you want to use for it on the left note side.

Here I set Pad 2 as Kick drum on the right and as note C4 (which is key Z on the computer keyboard) on the right side of FPC. Pad 3 is Closed Hat note G4 (key B). Pad 5 is Snare set to note E4 (key C). You could just as easily use whatever keys on your keyboard you like for each. I like to set mine at least two keys apart on the keyboard as sometimes when they are right next to each other on my laptop keyboard they false trigger each other for some reason. With this I can play my Hi-Hat pattern on the B key and lay out the Kick and Snare hits with Z and C.


click to enlarge

Now you can set the tempo to your track hit record and play your beat or melody in real time. While not as responsive as a real MIDI controller it is great when laying down ideas and when you don't have or want to hook up your other MIDI gear.

If you’re interested in using the Fruity Loops FPC with a real MIDI controller to lay down your tracks check out these couple of controllers. They each have 16 pads laid out just like the FPC in FL Studio and can trigger the exact pad just as you see it on screen when using FPC.



Korg padKontrol

M-Audio Trigger Finger-16 MIDI Drum Control Surface

I've known a few people who had one of these MIDI controllers and they worked great with Fruity Loops for real time input in the FPC or any other VST instrument, generator, or plugin.

Until next time, stay classy San Diego... and Good Luck.

Fruity Loops - FL Studio REsource