• Fl Studio Riff Machine Presets
• Riff Maker
• Fl Studio Scales

今回は、「FL Studio」の「riff machine」という機能でソフトシンセでループを作ってみます。 今回使う ソフトシンセは「Sytrus」という「 FL Studio 」に付属しているソフトシンセです。. Ever have those moments where you’re trying to write some tunes and the inspiration just isn’t there. Well that’s where FL Studio’s Riff Machine really comes in handy. It’s a tool that generates melodies from within the Piano Roll, and works really well to inspire riff ideas for your songs. Hellooo again! I have become interested in the riff machine and was wondering if there is any way to generate your own FL studio score files. In other words, is there a way to teach the machine some new riffs?

Ever have those moments where you’re trying to write some tunes and the inspiration just isn’t there. Well that’s where FL Studio’s Riff Machine really comes in handy. It’s a tool that generates melodies from within the Piano Roll, and works really well to inspire riff ideas for your songs. Let’s take a look at how to use this tool and incorporate it into your productions.

Step 1 – Program a Simple Pattern

To get to the Riff Machine, first open up the Piano Roll (F7). Now go to Tools > Riff Machine. The Riff Machine will create a channel with the Sytrus instrument inserted on it.

When the Riff Machine toolbox comes up you’ll notice that notes have already been generated by it. This is because all the settings have been activated. But to get a better idea of how each choice works, go in and disable each tab. So for example click on the Prog tab, and click the red button next to Step 2. Go through all the other tabs after the Prog tab and disable them. Then go back and enable to Prog tab, so it’s the only active tab.

With the Prog tab, you can create simple note progressions in the Piano Roll. This progression is determined by the pattern chosen. You can choose different patterns in the Pattern section. Click on the folder, and choose different progressions to hear how they sound.

Under Options you can choose to multiply the number of notes in the piano roll with Time Mul, or try adjusting some of the parameters in the Level section for different results on the note progression.

Step 2 – Turning Your Single Note Progression into Chords

Now let’s add some chords to this progression. Enable the Chord tab, and you’ll see and hear how extra notes have been added to build up chords to the pattern. Like with the Prog tab you can choose between different patterns.

What I like is tweaking the Time Mul under Options. This will create different chords amongst the intervals in the measure. Drag this all the way to the right for long sustained chords, or pull it to the left to break up the chords for more interesting chord patterns.

Step 3 – Arpeggiate that Progression

Or how about adding some arpeggiation? Just do this by simply enabling the Arp tab. You can select patterns or determine how the arpeggaitor is reacting under the Options. You can flip or alternate the Arp pattern, or increase the range for an arp progressions that spans over a wider octave range. This can also be flipped or alternated. Time Mul works much the same way as in the Prog tab.

But what really works well is to decrease the gate parameter to introduce some gated notes or chords to the riff. And there are different ways to sync the appeggiation. It can be synced to the time of the project, to the block/grid, or the chords for different variations on the arpeggiator.

You can also flip the pattern in the Mirror tab. What is different about this tab is that it can be flipped horizontally or vertically. Try it out for some real interesting results on your riff. Or click on the Random button for randomized flips on your notes.

Step 4 – Add Variance with Levels and Articulation

The Level and Art tabs are great ways to add some variance to the note levels and their articulation, giving a more natural sound to the riffs and imparting a sort of human element into them. Try out the Level tab first. Tweak these parameters until you get a sound that sits nicely with your pattern. I found it worked really well to add some humanization to the panning and velocity. Letting the pattern jump around a bit more and sound less static.

Under the Art tab (and this is short for Articulation. At first I thought this was a tab where I could import images and artwork into FL, but afraid it’s not). Multiply will lengthen the notes, where Gap will shorten them. And Variation will vary the lengths of the notes depending on how you have set the Multiply and Gap parameters.

Also if you click the drop-down menu next to Options you have a choice of Legato, Portato, and Staccato.

Step 5 – Add in Some Groove

Another way to add in some variance is through the Groove tab. Enable this, and then try out some of the Groove template patterns. You can edit the groove start time, its duration and the sensitivity, which is the amount of groove that is applied to the notes. And next to duration you can choose how the duration of the notes are quantized.

Step 6 – Key Ranges

Key scaling works great if you want to conform your riff to a particular scale or mode (the Fit Tab) so that the riff plays correctly within it. For example, you can set the root note (the Key) to D and set the scale to Dorian. Now the notes will move themselves along the piano roll to conform to the Dorian scale in D. How cool is that! There’s quite a selection of scale and mode varieties that you can use so try them out and hear how they can change up your riffs. Maybe give your riffs a Hungarian flavor with the Hungarian minor scale.

Step 7 – Throw the Dice

And last but not least, at the very bottom of the Riff Machine is a button called Throw Dice. By clicking this you will randomize all the tabs and parameters in the Riff Machine. This is a great way to get quick results with it. Hit the Throw Dice until you get a riff pattern that you like. And once you’re happy with all the settings, click Accept to accept all the changes made, and then these notes will be printed to the Piano Roll. Even though this riff has been set to the Sytrus instrument, you can go in and change it to any other instrument you have available on your system.

So that’s how to use the Riff machine to inspire ideas with your songs. You’ll get those moments where you just can’t come up with something that suits your song arrangement, and maybe the Riff Machine is exactly what you need. Try it out and see what it can bring to your songs.

For further FL Studio Tips and Techniques check out the following tutorial:

Tools in the Piano Roll. These are things that don’t involve necessarily clicking directly in the piano roll, but selecting something else that acts on what you have already or generates new notes.

This is the last in the “Piano Roll” mini-series. Go check out parts three and four for more.

I’m not covering everything about working with MIDI in FLStudio, there’s still some things to come. This has just been about the piano roll and surrounding functions.

On to it now…

Other posts in this series:

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below! I read every comment and respond to most. No registration is necessary to comment, so don’t be shy.

• Quantizer

For the sake of this post, I’m considering a “Tool” to be anything that acts on midi via some explicit interface.

That means things that require interacting with a menu or a window.

The Basic Piano Roll and Advanced Piano Roll posts dealt with things that were direct interactions with the piano roll interface or directly influenced it. This time I’m going over things that you can pop up a window or dig in to a menu.

However if you are an even mildly knowledgeable musician you’ll find it fairly limiting until you add a lot of your own presets, and that won’t even fix the workflow issue.

Claw machine is rather unique. It goes through your MIDI and ‘grabs’ parts out like a claw machine. It can fill in the gaps or skew the process towards the end of the pattern to create a build up (or breakdown or drop).

When slicing up samples or working with synth parts that don’t re-trigger on note-on, Claw Machine can create some interesting rhythms that you may never have thought of yourself.

LFO Tool creates modulations of the data in the control editor, or the main data in the Event Editor.

I think the LFO Tool is pretty awful. There’s no skewing, no adding with existing data, limited shapes, no parameter modulation (or changing parameters over time).

It’s a very simple “make a shape of this data” tool that destroys whatever was already there. It could be A LOT better

It fiddles with your notes so that they fit the desired key and transpose as you wish. Notably it has an option to let you choose which direction notes are snapped: under, above and alternate. The note snap direction can greatly affect the tonality of your generated part.

You can also select the range that things must stay in. Anything above or below is shifted, and where it’s shifted to is determined by the “Wrap top to bottom” option.

It’s not as complex and capable as some other transposition tools can be (see transpose at the bottom).

The lack of functionality does match the simplicity of use though, so I find that acceptable.

Chop divides your notes based on the time setting and the pattern. Once again you can create your own scores for these, and I suggest that you reference the manual about this feature.

The notes are either divided right on the grid (absolute mode) or relative to the start of each note (absolute off).

The patterns used have a few cool features. You can define a pattern, notes that won’t be chopped and pattern length. Same as arpeggiators except octave range limitation does apply.

There’s the ‘Quick Chop’ feature that does this based on the snap settings, with no need for a dialog.

Create a quick chop at the beginning of the selected notes. Useful, simple.

The flip tool flips your MIDI notes around. You can slip horizontally and vertically.

The “preserve start times” makes sure that your rhythms are intact when flipping certain compositions.

A very simple tool that adjusts the start/end times of notes to the grid. Sounds kinda lame right?

NOPE.

Three big things here:

• You can use scores to create quantization patterns. You can save a MIDI performance and then pull that back up and use those note positions as your “quantize grid”
• A grid is displayed on your Piano Roll to show you exactly where the grid is.
• Everything is applied and shown in realtime.

It seems like a simple tool, but it’s incredibly powerful. If there’s not a grid pattern that you want, or if you need to match a performance then you can do it.

Once again it’s not as powerful as some others (scroll to the quantize window), but the simplicity:power ratio is great on FL’s quantizer. Connect excel 2016 to ibm db2.

If you require some complex quantizing features then you will be sorely disappointed, but if you just want to align some notes or create some great rhythms then you are going to love it.

There’s also a ‘Quick Quantize’ and ‘Quick Quantize Start’ that do what you may expect.

Quantizer… ugh

Just a side note: FLStudio does not snap to the grid. It snaps BY the grid amount. So if your note is off the grid line and you want it to line up for some reason, you must use the quantize tool

These are often called “Absolute” (snap to grid) and “Relative” (snap by grid amount) in other DAWs. FLStudio only has the latter, and for the former you are required to use the quantize functions.

It’s a randomizer. The parameters are fairly self explanatory. The only slightly strange one is “population” which basically stacks randomizers.

Fl Studio Riff Machine Presets

You can turn off the Pattern and Level sections to work on one or the other, or both.

The “Pattern” section creates new data. It will not let you randomize start/end times of existing notes.

The “Levels” section allows you to randomize control data of current notes.

Once again, one of the notable features is that the seed for the randomizer can be selected, and more important you can go back to previous seeds. That way if you want to go back to something you like then you can go back to it.