Understanding the Fruity Loops workflow – Make Music Right Now

When learning any new piece of software it takes a little while to understand things. The Fruity Loops workflow is the basic set of activities taken to make a tune.

Creating a choice music track in 5 steps:

1. Instruments/ generators –These are used to make sounds and are arranged vertically in the step sequencer. The instruments/generators are shown to the left as Kick, Clap, HiHat, Snare etc.
   
2. Composition/ sequencing – The musical elements are entered in to the step sequencer or piano roll. The step sequencer consists of the grey/red boxes in the image on the left. Highlight a box in the step sequencer  to play a note on the corresponding beat.
3. Arrangement – Pattern blocks are arranged and can be looped in the Playlist window. The are shown on the right as long grey rectangles. Audio clips can be loaded in and arranged towards the bottom of the playlist editor.
4. Mixing – The sound produce by the instruments, generators and/or audio clips pass through the mixer where effects can be appliend to them. Reverb, compression, eq and distoriton are just some of the many effects to choose from. The mixer can also be also used to set the levels of each of the individual sounds so that the overall sound is loud enough to a level that it doesn’t clip.
   
5. Exporting/ rendering – After a set of intruments have been programmed in the playlist to form a song, the sound data can be exported to a sound format such as .wav or .mp3 and played in winamp or burnt to a CD.This is a basic overview of the Fruity Loops workflow in its simplest form. So get to it – start a new project make a tune, convert it to mp3 and bounce around the room to your sweet new tune!Yeah well ok you might not fully understand Fruity Loops just yet but play around you will fill in the gaps for yourself, that’s how I started out 🙂