PIANO ROLL

Piano Roll This feature is available only in FruityLoops Edition and Producer Edition.

The Piano Roll lets you construct songs with unlimited complexity, that would be hard or impossible to do with the Step Sequencer's grid.

  1. Piano Roll Menu Button
  2. Toolbar: Tools Menu; Draw ( P); Paint ( B); Erase ( D); Cut ( C); Select ( E); Zoom to selection ( Z); Snap Selector;
  3. Time (Horizontal) Zoom
  4. Color Group Selector
  5. Slide Toggle ( S)
  6. Display Mode ( M) : Keyboard; Mini Keyboard; Text (Drum Names, Slice names etc.);
  7. Preview Keyboard
  8. Property/Event Selector
  9. Slide Event
  10. Note Events
  11. Integrated Event Editor

Basics

Notes in Piano Roll are displayed as horizontal bars (10) and slides are shown as horizontal bars with a small triangle drawn in the left side (9). You can preview tones by left-clicking the Preview Keyboard keys (7). Pitch is mapped from bottom to top. Horizontal dimension represents time and each number in Piano Roll's ruler represents single bar.

The time segments the Piano Roll is divided into are set by the window's "snap" parameter (). Selecting "Main" will use the global snap value as defined in the Recording panel instead.

Click channel's name in the title bar to select another channel to display in the Piano Roll.

Operating with Notes

Each note in the Piano Roll has its own length, as a difference from the Step Sequencer, where the only way to turn off a note is to cut it off using another one. Switching to draw mode () lets you draw, edit and delete notes. The paint mode () is similar, but allows you to draw multiple notes at once while dragging horizontally in the Piano Roll.

In draw or paint mode, left-click in the Piano Roll's grid to draw a note. After that you can drag its left side to move it vertically and horizontally. Dragging its right side horizontally changes the note's length. You can right-click a note to erase it (you may instead switch to erase mode to erase with left-clicks () ).

You can select several notes, so you can move and resize them all at once. Press and hold Ctrl key and either click a note to select it, or drag a rectangle to select all notes in enclosed area. Hold Ctrl and Shift together while selecting to add notes to the existing selection. To deselect inidividual notes, hold Ctrl and click a note from the selection.

To resize (time stretch) an entire sequence, select the sequence, hold SHIFT and drag the right edge of a note in the selection.

You can also Ctrl+click or double-click the time ruler and drag along it to select all notes in a specified time range, or Ctrl+click the Preview Keyboard (7) to select a range of notes with the same pitch.

To deselect all notes, while holding Ctrl key, click empty space in Piano Roll's grid. Instead of holding Ctrl key, you can also switch Piano Roll to select mode by clicking the select mode button ().

A quick way to clone the notes in the current selection is to drag with the SHIFT button pressed in advance.

You can also draw complete chords at once instead of single notes. Right-click the draw mode button (2) and from the menu select a chord type. Now when you draw in the Piano Roll, FL Studio automatically creates a chord. To draw single notes again, right-click the draw mode button and select None ( Shift+N).

The Cut tool () allows you to split one or more notes in the manner you wish. To use the cut tool, make sure you're in cut mode (the Cut button is pressed), left-click in the grid area and drag to define the "cut line" direction and length. Release the mouse button to split all notes at their intersection point with the cut line.

The Playback tool () enables you to preview the current sequence by dragging horizontally in the piano roll (thus enabling you to define the playback speed and order). Alternatively, hold ALT key while in draw mode.

The Tools Menu () is a shortcut to the window's tools submenu (see the Piano Roll menu page), containing various commands for operating on patterns in the playlist.

Understanding Slides

In the Piano Roll you can make group of notes slide gradually from one pitch to another. For this purpose, you draw special slide events, which describe for FL Studio how notes should be slid. Slides look exactly as note events, but they have a small white rectangle drawn in their left side (8). To draw slides, click the slide toggle button (11). Then you can click it again to draw note events. Note that slides do NOT produce a sound themselves (although they preview when created/moved). Instead they make existing notes slide. When you draw a slide event, FL Studio will start sliding existing notes towards pitch where the slide is positioned. If several notes are slid simultaneously, the topmost is taken as a reference for the pitch offset (see picture below). At the end of the slide event, all notes are slid, so the topmost note has the pitch of the slide event. After the slide event ends, notes still remain offset from their original pitch.

This image shows how pitch changes with the slide event.

Note that the slide events have all usual properties of a note - velocity (note volume), panning, cutoff and resonance, so during pitch sliding, it also "slides" all properties from those of the playing notes to those of the slide.

Slide Color Groups

You can draw notes and slides in four colors - green, cyan, pink and yellow. The color you use does not make a difference in note's sound, it is instead used when sliding. Slides will apply only to notes that have their color. For example, yellow slide will bend the pitch of yellow notes, but will ignore green notes. This way you can have up to four notes sliding simultaneously in different directions (one for each color group). To select the current drawing color, click the appropriate button on the color group selector (12).

Slide color groups are also used with the Mono mode in the polyphony settings (see Miscellaneous Channel Settings). Mono mode applies to each color group separately. So using all four colors actually can result in a polyphony of up to 4 voices at once.

Integrated Event Editor

The Piano Roll includes an integrated event editor (10), which lets you quickly edit channel's volume, panning and pitch right inside the Piano Roll. However, the event editor in Piano Roll has one extension - you can also edit notes properties. Notes properties behave similar to the normal events, and are displayed in the event editor as lines with a small square at the top. Using this extension you can edit note's velocity (local note volume), panning, cutoff and resonance - these are exactly the same properties you can edit using the Graph Editor if you were entering notes in the Step Sequencer. Note that since note's properties are part of the actual note, you can not move, delete or interpolate any of them. When you move a note horizontally (thus changing its start position), its properties also move with it. To choose what property or event type to edit, click the property/event selector (14) and choose property/event type from the menu that appears.

NOTE: When several notes start at the same time you can not set the properties of each individual note (they are all set at once). To solve this issue, first select the notes you want to modify - editing this way alters only the properties of the selected notes. Another solution is to use the Note Properties Box (explained below).

Everything else in this integrated event editor works as in normal Event Editor window.

Note Properties Box

There is another way to set notes properties. It is useful when you want to set different properties for notes that start simultaneously (so their properties appear as one in the integrated event editor). Double-click a note to display its properties box.

1. Levels

Lets you change note's properties - panning, velocity (note's volume), cutoff and resonance. The reset button next to Level's panel title bar resets note's properties to levels they had before launching the properties box.

Invert Porta - Inverts the portamento state for this note. If the global portamento (see Misc Channel Settings) for this channel is off, for this note it is on and vice versa.

NOTE: If the note you double-click is a part of a selection, then the properties you set apply to all notes in that selection. The Time section is not available in that case, because the selected notes might have different length or start point.

2. Time Section

Lets you change note's start position and length. For each of both settings there are three LCD-s, for entering position length in bars:steps:ticks format.

Piano Roll Menu

This menu provides many important functions for working with the Piano Roll, such as copying and pasting notes, converting color groups etc. You can access Piano Roll's menu by clicking the Piano Roll menu button (1). For more information, see the Piano Roll menu page.