Fruity Loops

So I'm thinking about getting Fruity Loops. But I've had it before and it was really difficult and confusing. Anyone know of any other really good programs that are more user firendly and affordable? Thanks

 

Ableton Live


more expensive

smaller learning curve

better presets

more advanced tweaking

simple interface

if you have any production skills whatsoever you will make infinitely better tracks than with FL

...expensive

if you have windows easy to find a cracked version

if you have mac leopard pm me :0

 

Fruity loops...it's pretty damn easy...seriously, whoever told you it's hard is dumb as rocks.

The honest truth? Not worth the money. The samples suck, the plugins are typically pretty confusing at entry level, and you can only make so many types of music.

I, myself, use programs to make hiphop beats, but with fruity loops they usually turn into some techno/trance crap...it's lame.

I like Reason better...it's more realistic in that it actually is based on real hardware, and it has waaaaayyyy better samples. It just isn't very easy to start off on. It is VERY confusing at first.

But yeah, there are ways to get these programs for free...and they are legal too.

I'm not sure about more recent FL versions, but there was one point that you could download the demo, set your computer's clock back 7 years, and instead of a 30 day trial, you have 7 years and 1 month

WHat kind of music are you looking to make?

 

d&B and sum trance

 

well I have no production skills whatsoever. I am trying to learn.

 

Reason won't accept VST's. Fail!

Ableton Live= Win!!


lol



however having both equals god if you use ReWire.... just keep it on the DL, for god's sake don't let the hippies find out.

 

just use fruityloops...it'll be so incredibly easy when you first start out that you will probably hit yourself

 

no it's not easy. I've already tried it, I hate it as a matter of fact.

 

the only way to produce good tracks with fruity loops is if you are already an expert in electronic music production and DAW's.

i can hear instantly if someones amateur electronic music was made in fruity loops, but there are some people who use it, for whatever reason they like the interface of it, and i would never be able to tell.

 

I love FL for producing a bit of D'n'B,
Just set the tempo to 160bpm, Get some decent breakbeat samples & VSTi's and once you get a hang of the interface It's hella easy.

 

honestly fl can be used for any music, its just set up for techno styles. second of all if fl is hard for you to figure out, any other music production programs going to be hard, its all a matter of figuring out what the standards are (ex: midi, vst, ins and outs, and what not).

Ableton is my favorite for working with say a guitar, or any external instrument that your recording, but fl can do it too. but if you dont do that, fl comes with a fair amount of internal synths, just get a midi keyboard to really make the most.

another thing about ableton, is you can just point the mouse at something and itll tell you what it does. for a beginner that really helps, but you may as well just stick with fl since its more set up for your genre. also keep in mind if you ever collaborate with someone else playing that kind of stuff, theres more of a chance theyll use fl.

 

I have a love-hate relationship with fruity loops. It has allowed me to plan out compositions much more complex and interesting than I would have come up with just dicking around with instruments. If you have a musical idea, fruity loops allows you to quickly put it down and save it so you won't forget it - unlike messing with practicing that guitar part you came up with until you get it perfect then trying to hook up your recording equipment then cutting the sound file up and arranging it until it sounds the way you want it.

On the other hand, though there are hundreds of instruments that come with fruity loops, about 70% are pretty much useless unless, as somebody mentioned, you're making some kind of trance or dance music. Rock is pretty much out of the question, unless you're just using FL to plan/compose the song and plan to record it with live instruments later (for this it works just fine). I'll try to give a quick overview of how to use the most essential parts of fruity loops in my next post, but be warned I don't use or know about ALL of FL's functions, particularly anything related to recording live audio - I just import my FL files into audacity and record over them there.

 

Let me reiterate that what I'm about to explain is how I use fruity loops to make the type of music that I make - it may not answer all you questions but should get you familiar with the most important basics.

The two most important parts of FL as far as I'm concerned are the pattern window and the playlist - both of these should appear on the screen when you start a new file.

You use the pattern window to create "pieces" of your song - if you have studied music you can think of this as being sort of like a measure. The pattern window is the gray box with a column of big buttons with instrument names on the left side and a bunch of tall rectangles to the right of these buttons.

For now, try clicking on a few of those rectangles randomly and they will "light up." Now hit the play button at the top of the screen - this will play the pattern in a loop.

Now hit stop and notice a box with the number "1" to the right of the play/stop/pause controls. This indicates the number of the pattern you re working on. Click on that box and move the mouse up until the number changes to "2". You will notice that you once again have a blank pattern. Try clicking some of the rectangles again but try to make this pattern different from the first.

I suppose this would be a good time to explain where to find instruments. On the very left side of the fruity loops program you'll see a list of stuff that you probably have no idea how or why to use. I hope somebody can help complete my crappy little tutorial here - I don't remember which folders the instruments are in and I'm in linux so I can't open up FL and look - I think one of them is called "generators." In any case, you can figure out the way I did by just clicking to expand all of the directories in that window until you find instruments. Once you do all you have to do is drag them to the pattern window and a new instrument button and set of rectangles will be added to it.

So what if you want to actually want to pick different pitches for these instruments to play? You may have noticed that using the rectangles int he pattern window doesn't allow you to select a pitch. There are two ways to do this.

The first is to click the icon in the top right of the pattern window that looks like a set of piano keys - also make sure that you have the right instrument selected by clicking the tall thin gray thing just to the right of the instrument button, which will turn green when you do so. Clicking the piano key button will open up a big box of vertical sets of keys. Try messing around with this a bit and hit the play button and you should be able to figure out how to use this without any further explanation from me.

This piano key method is very convenient but also limited - particularly because you can only select one note for the instrument to play at a time. What if you want the instrument to play chords? Thats what the piano roll is good for.

Right click on the desired instrument button and select "piano roll." You'll get a window with a single vertical set of piano keys and a bunch of empty boxes to the right of them. Try clicking in the empty boxes. Note you can stretch or shrink the length of notes here by clicking on the end (right side) of the note and dragging either left or right. Again, I can't describe in perfect detail how exactly to use the piano roll but you should be able to figure it out fairly quickly just by messing with it a little.

So now you have some patterns, but you can only get them to play separately. How do you arrange them into a song? Thats what the play list is for.

The playlist is the other window that should have appeared when you created a new file - it probably showed up near the right side of the screen. It should look like a big window that is taken up mostly by a big blue area filled with little empty squares.

Each row of squares corresponds to one of your patterns - the first row is pattern one, the second is pattern two, and so on and so forth. Before you start working, I'd recommend clicking on the button at the top of this window that looks like a square with 9 smaller squares inside of it, then click "cell" - this will ensure that your patterns line up exactly with the little squares in the playlist window. Now try clicking at the very beginning/left of the first row (pattern 1) and a long rectangle should appear there. Now do the same for pattern two, except click on the box just right of where the pattern 1 box ends. Then try filling in BOTH patterns after that - so if you look at the playlist from left to right, you should have a box in pattern one, then a box in pattern two starting where pattern 1 leaves off, then boxes for BOTH patterns where the pattern two box leaves off.

Now look to the left of the play/pause/stop controls and notice a two little boxes, one with "pattern" next to it and the other with "song" next to it. The pattern box should be lit right now - click in this general area and the pattern box will gray out and the song box will light up. Now hit play and FL will play the song you arranged from your patterns in the playlist window.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention - you'll probably want to try out a few different instruments to find one you like or that most closely fits the sound you're going for. A few of the instruments in the list on the left side of the Fruity loops program will play a sample when you click on them, but the ones that do tend to be the crappier ones. In most cases, if you want to see what an instrument sounds like you have to drag/add it to the pattern window. Then just hit some keys on your keyboard. One cool thing about fruity loops is that it turns your computer keyboard into a (rather crappy) musical keyboard. If you don't like the way it sounds, just drag another instrument onto the button for the instrument you just added - this way the new instrument will overwrite the old one and you wont accumulate a huge list of instruments in the pattern window that you aren't using for anything.

Thats all I got for now. I think that pretty much covers all the basics and most important stuff. There are still some things you'll probably want to learn, like how to add effects in the mixer window or change the properties of individual instruments so that your Fruity Loops song doesn't have that generic fruity loops sound - but I'll leave that to you to study on your own once you're ready.

If you'd like an idea of what you can achieve using (mostly) only the methods I described above, stop over at

www.myspace.com/shoopymuhgoopy

- All of these tracks involved FL at some point in production, and most were made almost entirely in FL. I'd particularly recommend Their Heads are Filled with Gold, as I think this is the most impressive thing I've managed to squeeze out of fruity loops - but keep in mind I did use the mixer window to add effects, messed with some of the instrument properties (slightly) and recorded vocals over the final FL cut in audacity. And yes, this is a bit of shameless self-promotion but I think it is relevant and perhaps even useful for the topic at hand.

By the way, if you think Shoops MuhGoops is the worst name for a band ever, thats cause it is. Shoops started out as a joke and we only just recently realized that we like some of our material and have a real passion for making music (albeit strange music). We've been trying to come up with a new name for at least a year now but just can't seem to be able to come up with anything that sounds right.