FL Studio Tutorial: The Basics Part I - How to Use the Interface, Channel Window, Step Sequencer

Interface

It is fairly easy to find everything in FL Studio. You should familiarize yourself with everything in the following thumbnails (the three images below were obtained from FL studio manual, click thumbnails to enlarge):

Most of what you need to know can be found in those pictures.

Incase you lost or can’t see your browser, step sequencer, mixer, piano roll, or playlist, check out these buttons. They control what you are viewing.

Browser

All of your drum samples should be loaded on the left side under “Packs”. You can click on each sound and hear it, and drag the ones you like to the Channel Window. If you want to learn how to add more samples, please read Free Hip Hop Drum Kit.

Channel Window

Once you have loaded your sounds to the Step Sequencer, you can start creating a drum pattern. Lets begin with something simple, a Kick, a Snare, and a Hat. Load one of each into the sequencer. Once loaded, you can click the little boxes to the right of each sample to activate them (a left click will place a sound at the given time, and a right click will remove it). You can then press play and hear what your pattern sounds like. Here is a sample pattern:

Pretty easy isn’t it? Each box represents a 16th note. You can use longer notes or shorter notes - to do this you would use the piano roll, which is later in this tutorial. Mess around with this simple sequencing method for a while and become comfortable with it.

Pattern Length
You can also make your pattern longer. To increase the beats per bar for the pattern, simple click and hold the item highlighted in orange in the image below - while holding, move your mouse up to increase the beats per bar, or move down to decrease. The most common beats per bar setups are usually 8 beats per bar, or 16 beats per bar.

Panning and Volume Control
Panning and volume control are also readily controllable in the channel window. In the image below, the item highlighted in blue is the panning control, and the item highlighted in red is the volume control. Each loaded sample has its own control. Further panning and volume control can be accessed in the mixer, which will be discussed later in depth. Also, the little green button to the left of the panning control can be used to mute the selected sample.

Swing
The swing in the top right is used to “humanize” the pattern when it is played. It helps your track sound less mechanic, and more as if a real drummer is playing (this is if you move it to the right). It is usually good to move to the right just slightly.

Channel Display Filter
The dropdown labeled “All” in the bottom left is used to essentially pick what is shown in the Channel Window. Sometimes when you have certain imported samples (like acapellas) they might not show up in your pattern with your other samples unless you select “All”. If you are confused it will make more sense when I show you how to use acapellas in FL Studio.

Channel Settings

When you click on a sample in your Channel Window, the Channel Settings will pop up. These are the properties of the given sample. I won’t go into too much depth about this right now, but there are a lot of interesting things you can do here which will be explained later.