need really really easy drumming

March 10, 2010 1:38 PM

FL Studio help needed: I want to be able to create drum tracks with all drums in one piano roll.

Here's what I want: I am creating tracks with fairly simple drum parts. I have my favourite drum samples but find it tiresome to have these as separate samples in the sequencer. Instead of having multiple drums (snare/bass/hi hat etc) listed as instruments in the sequencer window, I would like one (ideally labelled 'Drums', but if it has to be something else so be it).

I would then like to be able to arrange these drum hits in one piano roll window within FL Studio. I know I can do something like this in FL Studio using layers. I can click Add Layer, select various drum samples as children, and there I go. This is fine to an extent, but all these samples (plus the layer) still show up as separate instruments in the sequencer. For visual reasons, and others, I would rather have just one instrument devoted to drums. Also, when I use this layer method, it seems that I'm stuck with note names on the left side of the piano roll (C5, B3 etc). I would love to have just Snare, Bass etc there.

I guess this is quite a basic question so I'm hoping there might be a simple solution, possibly within FL Studio itself. I have all the drum samples I need, so I don't want some expensive drum sampler plugin, but maybe a freeware plugin might make sense?

posted by cincinnatus c to media & arts (4 answers total)

I use NI Battery, and it's brilliant for this sort of thing. I know FL Studio comes with a few plugins - maybe one of them is a drum sampler? If not, there's surely free VSTs out there that will do fine.
posted by naju at 2:40 PM on March 10, 2010

Solution 1 (basic, perhaps not what you were asking):

If you squint right, it sounds like you're trying to get the piano roll to look and behave like the step sequencer, but for a limited subset of your samples. BUT. You can get your step sequencer to just display your drums, if you want.

Put your drums into one layer. Then, click on the word "unsorted" on the bottom edge of the step sequencer window and change the dropdown value to the name of your drums' layer. Now you will only see your drums in the step sequencer.

Solution 2 (less basic, probably more like what you want):

Make a song file that just plays your drum samples in a row, in the same order that you want them to occur vertically on the piano roll, with enough space between them that each sample has fully decayed before the next one is triggered. Render this to a lossless format for best quality.

In your actual song, insert a FruitySlicer plugin (may require purchase- it's been a million years since I've used this). Within the plugin, open your rendered wave. The plugin will slice your rendered file into a set of drum sounds, each individually addressable with a single note in the step sequencer or piano roll.
posted by Jpfed at 3:06 PM on March 10, 2010

You could make a soundfont of your drum samples with something like Synthfont assigning each drum sample to a different midi note then when you load that sound font (which FL plays natively) the whole lot would reside in one instrument and be programmable on one piano roll. There's a bit of learning to be done but once you have it set up you won't have to touch it again and it'd do exactly what you want.

As to getting the names of the samples on the piano roll. Nope, dunno.
posted by merocet at 6:45 AM on March 11, 2010

It seems that what I was looking for was quite straightforward - FL Studio's FPC sample player makes it easy to do exactly what I need.

Thanks everyone.
posted by cincinnatus c at 9:54 AM on March 12, 2010