IMAGE-LINE FL STUDIO 8

Apr 22, 2008 3:29 PM, By Jim Aikin

THIS PROGRAM DOES IT ALL

Some recording software works hard to convince you that music is Serious Business. But the passion of FL Studio’s designers is to make music fun! FL Studio serves up a full suite of software tools for producing no-compromise, state-of-the-art mixes — yet the user interface is exciting, inviting, and unique. One glance at the FL Studio window and you’ll want to reach out and touch: It’s that tactile.

FL Studio integrates perfectly with third-party VST and DX plug-ins, both synthesizers and effects, but you may not need them. Even the basic versions of FL have several built-in synths and effects, and the XXL Edition is packed: included are a powerhouse FM synth, a full-featured sampler, a high-energy physical modeled guitar synth, and a modular programming environment called SynthMaker, in which you can create entirely new instruments and effects from scratch. Plus, all versions except the entry-level Express provide access to a huge downloadable library of free samples.

In this article we’ll look at XXL. For details on the various versions, go to www.flstudio.com, click on the Demo button, and click on Feature Comparison.

There’s so much in FL Studio that an article about it is always in danger of turning into a laundry list of great features. As you read the descriptions below, don’t lose sight of the music. Feel free to imagine what it would be like to roll out your own stellar mixes with this amazing program. (Or download the demo and find out!)

The Big Picture

FL Studio is a pattern-based sequencer with track-based workflow, too, so it offers maximum convenience for dance and hip-hop producers and remixers: You can create a few cool patterns and insert them end to end to make a full song arrangement, then overdub a couple of longer tracks that need to change, such as vocals or lead lines.

The software is not just for dance and hip-hop, though: For sessions with live musicians, the multitrack audio recorder can lay down tracks from all of the inputs on your hardware at once. And the Slayer plug-in is deadly accurate at metal and grunge guitar, thanks to a physical model that lets you move the pickup, change strings, switch to a single- or double-coil pickup, and select an amp and speaker cabinet.

FL’s Playlist window (see Fig. 1) combines audio clips, pattern (MIDI/Synth) clips, and automation envelope clips in a single seamless interface. The older pattern grid is still included, but patterns can now be inserted and moved around graphically in the clip area.

Intelligent automation is an FL specialty: Grab a knob or slider and record its moves while the music plays, map your own hardware sliders to FL parameters, or create multisegment envelopes and drag them forward or backward in the song. You can even process the automation data in real time using math functions. For instance, you might want to move the mod wheel and have three different parameters respond to it in different ways — one inverted, one normal, and one with a clipped curve that reaches its maximum when the wheel is only halfway up. No other sequencer can do this.

With the XXL Edition you get Sytrus, an amazingly deep synthesizer, and the DirectWave sampler. Sytrus does classic six-operator FM synthesis and stunning analog sounds, and lets you create additive synthesis waveforms too. Its rich supply of multisegment envelopes open up some radical sound design possibilities. DirectWave links directly to “home base” over the Internet, so you can download multisampled instruments as you need them. All of the usual sound playback features are included in DirectWave, and if you need extra control over the sample data you can load it into FL’s Edison plug-in.

Using the Wave Traveller plug-in, you can program complex “scratching” moves on any chunk of audio and then trigger them live from a MIDI keyboard. If you need goofy robot voices for an electronic mix, load the Speech Synthesizer. Or maybe you’d rather generate mysterious sounds based on a graphic image using BeepMap.

Gigging with FL? With the Fruity Notebook plug-in, you can pop up a window containing lyrics (or notes on which sliders you need to grab next). This window can be automated so it changes as the song plays. If you have a fast computer and a big screen, launch FL’s stunning Chrome plug-in for some video synthesis effects, again synchronized to the music.

New in FL 8 is a Score Logger, which is always recording MIDI in the background. When you play a cool lick, saving it to a new piano-roll track is a one-click operation. In the effects department, the Fruity Limiter and the cleverly named Soundgoodizer have been added. The Soundgoodizer has just one knob, but as you turn it up the music gets louder without overloading. A multiband compressor is also included in FL Studio, of course. A complex delay line, morphing graphic EQ, a vocoder, and other effects are also part of the package.

Another great feature of FL Studio is the ability to create your own on-screen control panels for external hardware synthesizers. Just load a new Dashboard, add some knobs, sliders, switches, and numerical readouts, and then give each of them an output controller type.