The Four Bar Loop
To understand the basics of FL Studio 12, I will be leading you on how to create the four bar loop. The four bar loop is the perfect starting place for any musician and is essential to understanding how to create and organize sounds on FL Studio 12. The first thing you must understand is that this process is different for everyone. I’m going to show you my way of doing things.
Starting out, in your head, think how the thing your making should sound. Consider the melody, the pace (BPM), and all the instruments that you can hear. Now, take what you just thought and go to the Tempo Tapper in the Toolbar section of FL Studio. Click the button, then, click the pop-up tempo tapper at the pace of the loop in your head. Good work! You now have your BPM. You can hear how fast your track is by pressing the repeat button in the toolbar and turning on the metronome.
For me, the next step is to find sounds I want to use for the percussion. Assuming you’ve downloaded a sample pack (Check out my Sounds page for a free one!) pick out the drum sounds from your browser that you want in your four bar loop. For example, I will use a kick, hi hat, open hi hat, snare, and a clap. Now, drag the samples one by one into the channel rack. To create a pattern, press the step sequencer buttons; each one represents a single beat.
Once you’ve made your drum pattern, now it’s time to consider the melody. Some ways to go about this include designing your own sound by drawing and recording midi notes through a synth, recording real instruments using a microphone, and sampling from an external source.
If you want to use a synth, press the “+“ on the bottom of the Channel rack to open up a pop-up menu full of plugins. Chose a synth and add it to your channel rack. Now, right click (or control click) the synth on the Channel rack and select “piano roll“. Here, you can record or draw in MIDI any pattern you’d like using the draw tool on the piano roll.
If you want to record, chose a microphone from your audio inputs and press the record button up top on the tool bar. Make sure that your metronome is playing and the looping tool is off (if you want your recording to loop back to the start that’s fine too).
If you’re looking to sample, find one from your browser or desktop that has a similar BPM (beats per minute) as your percussion and use the SliceX plugin to edit it. Once you have it, either play it through the piano roll through MIDI or drag in your new sampled audio file into the playlist.
Once you‘ve recorded and drawn all the MIDI on your pattern, you need to put your channels onto the mixer. There are multiple ways to do this. While holding down shift, select all of the channels on the Channel rack and click on the small empty icons to the right of the channel (they should turn green). With them selected, go to the mixer, right click on the first mixer track, then select “assign to mixer track”.
Select the pattern and use the pencil tool to paste it on the Playlist. Now, right click the pattern selector and chose “Split by channel”. With this, you can separate all of your sounds and control what you hear.
Congratulations! You now have your first four bar loop!