Actually Useful Piano Roll Tips & Tricks - FL Studio 20 Tutorial

this video is brought to you by cat beast calm design your own custom snap backs in hats hey guys it's arcade and I'm back with another tutorial and in this one I'm gonna show you tips and tricks for piano roll and I'm gonna show you a few things that you might not know about piano roll by the end of this video you should be a piano roll pro also check out the sponsor of today's video which is cap is calm it's a site where you can make your own custom hats so if you are interested in that link will be below in the description now let's get back to the video to open piano roll just radically gone the sound PN row and this is where we're gonna spend most of our time right now so a lot of you struggle with making melodies and chord progressions so there is one huge tip I can give you right now for that are you sheet and make you melodies have you been struggling to make a good chord progression for hours but you keep failing well will rain no more all trying smell the green tape a solution for all of your problems does anyone remember that video but now in all seriousness if you do struggle with making melodies here's a little quick tip you can use and that is going to the piano menu go to helpers scale highlighting and choose automatic now nothing change as you might have noticed but once you start putting down some notes it will make a difference so let's actually create a few bass notes [Music] as you might have noticed once you put in the furred note it has enough information to determine what type of scale you are in and from that point on you just put the notes on the grid where it is a great out a little bit more so these are all goods for this key you are in so for example let's put a nose like this and now let's put in the melody some sort of melody so just stick to the highlighted parts of the grid and let's create this melody and as you might have noticed once we created the melody the key of the song changed therefore the highlighted parts changed a little bit for example this one is now off-key because it's not on the highlighted part before it was fine but once you add more notes it changes the scale so now let's move this one down or maybe even down here on the highlighted parts and let's hear the type of melody recorded [Music] so it was really simple it's a great tip for everyone who has trouble creating good chord progressions and melodies now that we have this simple melody with some bass notes let's add some chords so to do that use the stamp tool which is this icon right here click on it and now you can create what type of a chord you want to make so let's choose major and just create it right here then let's do a minor chord and put it right here as you can see something changed right there but the only reason that happened is because now the chord is selected once you deselect it it changes back so don't worry about that if you want to create multiple chords and you don't want to like keep going to the same tool just deselect the only one then select the minor chords and you can put it in here multiple times [Music] and it's gonna hear this one doesn't quite sound right as the minor chord so let's change that to major chord again delete this one put in the major chord [Music] just like that we have ourselves a little chord progression with some melodies in the key of F major you can see the key in top left corner of FL studio' that's where it shows okay to make this piano seem more natural we can actually randomize the velocity so select the top notes only for this experiment and go to tools which is this icon right here then go to randomize and only have the levels enabled as you can see we move the velocities randomize the velocity of the knobs and make them seem more natural you can also disable the bipolar which will only make them louder and if you enable it it will make them louder and quieter so yeah let's just have it like this and press accept [Music] another tip you can use is use the slice tool and hold the Alt key so you can slice anywhere in piano roll and just slice it up like this and press delete we're gonna have some nice rolls which feels more natural so just like that [Music] this one is actually quite off beat so you can use control press Mouse and drag it to select and then to move it hold Alt key and you can move it even of the grid also select all our chords and randomize the velocity once again just a little bit something like this maybe except [Music] another thing you might notice you can resize the notes from the right side but you cannot resize them from the left side which i think is kind of annoying so you can actually enable that just go to the menu edit allo resizing from left now you can resize knows from both sides which is a really nice little tip now let's actually reset these by selecting them and pressing ctrl Q which means they will stick to the grid as they are supposed to and I showed you the slice tool before but we can actually use the strum tool just select the chords write a song and go to strum [Music] just a increase of time [Music] maybe changed the end time as well [Music] that's another way we can do this as well now as you can see once if you use the same tool the cords stick together if you wanna ungroup them just select them go to group ungroup and now you can freely move any notes wherever you want so one tip I want to show you is when you have some narrow selected you can press ctrl + arrow up or down to put them octave up or down so let's put them octave down and now another way you can sell it knows is holding ctrl + shift together and then pressing mouse and dragging it to select the middle notes and then hold ctrl arrow up create this whole progression that has the Millhouse octave higher now it sounds like this [Music] so that's another shortcut you can use that helps a lot all right so let's reset the course once again so let's say you want to copy your chords over the easiest way to do that is to hold ctrl select them and then ctrl B that will copy the course over after the first selection so that is the easiest way to just copy them one after another you don't have to worry about like not hitting the grid properly and stuff like that so let's delete the melody for now and let's put the course octave up so one of the things we can do in FL studio is to arpeggiate these chords so let's play them and go to our pad shades now we have this arpeggio just like this also you can use different putters that are here so yeah arpeggios are pretty nice if you want to quickly transform your chords into a melody arpeggio is a good way to do that now let's bring the melody back and so one of the things what if we want these chords to be like one after another like this so I just did that it took a few seconds but what if we have way longer melody chord progression and with different science notes it would take a while to do that so what you can use is the Chop function so just go right here to chop and you can saw it again [Music] [Music] you can select you can sell it from different chopped rhythms and you can even create your own so those are shops let me actually just decrease the volume hold shift to have the volume the same [Music] so now what if we want to make it this way faster one of the things we can do is select the whole thing and then you have this arrow so if you drag it you will make it slower if you drag it to the left you will make it faster and also if you hold Alt key while dragging it it will snap to grid and make it a bit easier to set up so let's make it like this and now we will be pretty fast so maybe we want it like this [Music] that brings me to another point which is time signatures now this is not the usual time signature so you can actually change the time signatures in time markers at time signature change do like three four and as you can see it almost seems like this is the correct one but if we put it in the playlist it won't end on the correct beat we would have to change the time signature in here as well but in piano roll it makes a lot more sense and the grid is set up so we can work in this time signature and the last thing that I can show you is a nother shortcut hold shift and arrow up or down to transpose the notes up or down [Music] [Applause] any guys that is a few piano tips and tricks I hope you learned something new I think there is a lot of things in a fuss to do that a lot of people don't know about and it's always good to export them and show them - you might want to watch this video a few times to like remember all these things and make sure to use them to really remember them and hopefully it will save you some time in the future other than that thank you for watching and I'll see you the next one goodbye [Music]

Channel: Arcade

Views: 1,447,577

Rating: 4.943583 out of 5

Keywords: piano roll tutorial, fl studio 20 tutorial, piano roll tips and tricks, tips and tricks, tutorial, music production, how to make melodies, music theory tutorial, how to use piano roll, chords tutorial, chord progression tutorial, piano roll features, how to piano roll, how to, fl studio piano roll, make better melodies, tricks, tips, shortcuts

Id: YE5S1lb9tH4

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 07 2019