arpeggiate the piano roll in fl8?

[spkta]

anyone know any good help files for turning my plain old piano roll blocks into slick ass scales? whats a good scale to use? i know the info manual for the daw has some info on it, but everyone on the forums usually has something helpful to include. thanks.

[serox]

anyone know any good help files for turning my plain old piano roll blocks into slick ass scales? whats a good scale to use? i know the info manual for the daw has some info on it, but everyone on the forums usually has something helpful to include. thanks.

Youtube has tonnes!

[spkta]

thanks for the tip, imma try "arpeggiate fl studio" see what happens.

oh and i just brushed up on the daw manual... extremely nonhelpful, so any more tips would be greatly appreciated

[serox]

youtube has shit loads of great vid's and there is normally more than one so you get to see different ways of working which is cool.

[Brisance]

whats a good scale to use?

Obviously the one, you are writing the song in, innit?

[spkta]

whats a good scale to use?

Obviously the one, you are writing the song in, innit?

*picks up music theory for dummies*

hmmm... let me absorb this one... either im thinking way too much or not enough here....

[serox]

*picks up music theory for dummies*

hmmm... let me absorb this one... either im thinking way too much or not enough here....

This^

Its a long road.

[spkta]

*beings to read music theory for dummies...*

[wub]

anyone know any good help files for turning my plain old piano roll blocks into slick ass scales? whats a good scale to use? i know the info manual for the daw has some info on it, but everyone on the forums usually has something helpful to include. thanks.

Well, now it's time to get a melody going on here. I'll choose a Piano for this, the FL Keys. It's a VSTi (Virtual Studio Instrument), which are widely used to get imported into music programs. You can have all sorts of shit there, Pianos, Guitars, Basses, all sorts of synthesizers but also FX.
To insert a VSTi, go this way:



Right-Click an existing Channel and choose insert. Not "replace"!
Then that dropdown thing will come up. Yours will propabely not have as many VSTis in it as mine, but that doesn't matter now. FL Keys itself looks like this:



You can hammer around on the keys of your typing keyboard to create sounds. FL Keys sucks, there are way better and also many free alternatives to it out there on the net, but I'll use it for demonstration purposes. On high notes, it doesn't even sound all that bad anyway.

Shit, now here comes some heavy music theory.

To have everything stay in tune with everything, all notes must be in the same scale. If you don't know what a scale is, learn it. The C-Major scale i.e. covers every white key on the keyboard. The D#-Minor scale covers every black key. However, we're not using either of those. To find out what scale we actually used, take a look at the strings again, as they're the only harmonic instrument we used so far. Look at the first chord of it and there you've got the answer:



It's a G#-Minor. That means we need a G-Sharp minor scale. How do I get that scale? I've got a damn helpful link for you here:

http://www.looknohands.com/chordhouse/piano/

Chordhouse is an online application that shows you chords and scales that you selected on a keyboard. It basicly taught me scales and chords.

Once you get to it, do the following:



Minor is sorta tricky. I have yet to learn what Melodic Minor is. It's usually either Harmonic, or Pentatonic Minor, you have to listen to find out. In this case, it's propabely Harmonic.

Now, to further help you, we'll do a little trick here. In the FL Keys channel you have opened do this:



When you now click into the PR, it will automatically place the whole scale, starting from the note you clicked. Click G-Sharp.



For the sake of your ears, don't play that. It sounds horrible at once.

Now that I mixed Major and Minor here, I just found that this sounds a little odd. So, I look at the second chord in the strings pattern and see it's an F#-Major. So, choose the Major scale and click on F-Sharp.

Now, here comes the trick. Cut them down to four bars of size and copy the whole scale. Start with G#-Minor. Copy it and Paste it one octave below and one octave above the initial G-Sharp. Repeat this with F# Major. Now, get out of this channel and turn it's volume down to 0%.
Insert another FL Keys Channel:


This may look a bit different from yours because the PR isn't the same. At the time I took that screen I didn't know how shitty it would sound without the F# Major scale in there.

Get into the Keys #2 Channel's PR and do this trick:



Now, in gray, you'll see the notes from the other Channel. This "Ghost Channel" thing is an assist in helping to stay in tune. It shows every note played in any channel at the selected pattern, so now it shows you the two scales.

This is the moment, where you start dropping some notes. Here are the basic guidelines to melodies:

* Only put in notes that are laying within the scale, don't put in notes that are not shown as one of those ghost notes.
* Don't hop between high and low notes. There are some jumps you can make, but usually it sounds shitty if the notes are far away from each other.
* Vary the duration of the notes and don't always stay on the ticks. If you always stay with quarter notes, the melody gets boring. Throw in eighth notes, maybe even sixteenths or anything inbetween. Make sure it's not confusing the rythm, though. Turn on the FL Studio Metronome by pressing [Ctrl]+[M]. It will tick-tock everytime you playback your melody so you can ensure that it's not going too far offbeat.
* Repetitions. I read in a musician's magazine that repetition in a melody is the key to bugging one's ears. Make some rythmic patterns appear several times in the same melody, maybe even the same notes. It really gives a lot to the melody.

So, with this guidelines, lay down some notes. I made some shit, like this:



You can see that I didn't jump between high and low notes, varied the rythmic patterns and also got a repetition in the middle of it. It's not particulary a great melody, but it'll do.



(Taken from here)

[spkta]

ahhh dude... youre my fucking hero.

THANK YOU!

someone should sticky this shit... *nod self*

[spkta]

i just reread that shit... damn dude... thanks again!

this shit belongs in the bible or somethin....

[dom]

looks a bit different on my FL but try going to the FUNC part of the instrument window and there is an arpeggiator there. you can change various functions including the scale it will play

[Brisance]

I begged fl's developer to add scale hints to the piano roll, and he was like why would you want to see the scale?

There is some kind of scale helper function thing, but it confuses the hell out of me...

[3za]

Yeah, the scale helper sucks. Once you've got three notes it starts guessing, but three notes can be in quite a few scales.

scales are complex that is why the scale helper sucks. if you think about it C major and A minor for example use the same notes so how dose the helper tell it just has a guess. then when you only use a few notes it becomes hard to tell what scale it is, and even harder for the scale helper is when you do key changes it just like wtf.

the scale helper i think is called scale hint bar. it is only ment as a hint, when you come back to old projects it can help you find out the scale even if it is saying the wronge one. so to tell you the scale is impossiable but you should know any way as you wrote it

[3za]

or so that piano roll trick is shit imo. learn the music then you can do a lot more then just write a tune using 7 notes that sound good together. its cheating yourslef and the music. this stuff takes time to learn but it is worth it.

[3za]

^ not helpful.

So's english.

never was that

or i am saying is learn about music if you are trying to write it.