Let's Talk About FL Studio... (video)
- Thread starter Iron Keys
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from the video, some things definitely look a little convoluted for my liking. And one thing I don't like, is all the tiny dot buttons, and the little hand. I dunno.
I really enjoy Studio One. But I feel quite strongly tempted to get Ableton still. Think there's a few cool features and workflow related things that would boost me.
thedreampolice
A backwards poet writes inverse.
There are things FL can do that no other DAW can but I never took to it for those reasons.
For me FL studio has all I need. I mainly use the directwave plugin to load the entire song I want to sample, so I don't need to pre-chop it. Don't know if other DAW's have this integrated as well, but I don't see a reason to switch DAW's if the current one works for me. Routing is fairly easy and the first thing he mentioned in the video is a plus. It's just all about what you're used to. I started with Madtracker back in the days and after a while changed to Fruityloops. They had quite some similarities so for me it was easy to adapt my workflow.
Also, shortcuts help. The guy in the video is exaggerating like he has 2 left hands or is too stupid to shit.
Like what? Creating a pattern isn't necessary. You can drag samples directly inside the playlist, if you prefer to work that way. Assigning mixer tracks to instruments? He suddenly doesn't know how to count to 5 and never heard of grouping instruments.
Looking at his channel, the content is created for children.
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Just saying for me. I don't see why I'd move to it. S1 workflow is incredibly good. I'm still tempted to get Ableton as well, as that seems to have a few handy features and workflow things.
Some of the stuff shown in the video, and I've had expressed to me by other FL users, seems a bit unintuitive.
OGBama
Big Clit Energy
you dont use fl studio, how do you know who makes the best tutorials for it?
Its all well and good plugging fellow members to help them out, but if you have never used FL Studio how can you recommend things about it?
I love FL, but i also hate FL. Particularly for plugin support reasons (Native instruments being the big one here). The NI support in FL is dogshit at best. Also I've had multiple occasions now where FL completely forgot where my plugins are and I had to manually find them and try to get them working again.
I've noticed a particular cult of personality around FL that I would say is pretty negative. I think that's more due to that FL is free to use (without save files) and that brings a whole host of people who don't know what they're doing fumbling through the program and creating stuff.
I can't hate it outright though because I know how it works. The workflow in other programs seem alien to me and it becomes very difficult to transition from one to the other. I can do stuff easily in FL that I'm at a loss when I tried to jump into Ableton Live (that came with my keyboard) This is probably a particularly on the nose point to what this guy is saying here. FL is different. I don't think it's necessarily worse, but I think the way it works doesn't translate across as well to other programs.
I will say though, one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had is with the MPC 1 DAW. It's 100% user related, but switching between FL and MPC was a nightmare and I still don't understand it.
Also @2GooD Productions 100% agree with your point on recording. That's why I, too, bought Cubase. I decided to try recording in FL just to do some one shot stuff for a beat and jesus christ was it ever painful. Why the fuck would it save each vocal in its own slot, rather than just the timeline itself? If you need multiple takes to record a verse, having all the bad takes still in the audio subsection after you delete it off the timeline is unnecessary and makes it way too difficult to figure out what you actually want to use. I also think the way the ASIO drivers in FL process sound do some weird shit behind the curtain that make it sound significantly worse than when I record in Cubase.
I've noticed a particular cult of personality around FL that I would say is pretty negative. I think that's more due to that FL is free to use (without save files) and that brings a whole host of people who don't know what they're doing fumbling through the program and creating stuff.
I can't hate it outright though because I know how it works. The workflow in other programs seem alien to me and it becomes very difficult to transition from one to the other. I can do stuff easily in FL that I'm at a loss when I tried to jump into Ableton Live (that came with my keyboard) This is probably a particularly on the nose point to what this guy is saying here. FL is different. I don't think it's necessarily worse, but I think the way it works doesn't translate across as well to other programs.
I will say though, one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had is with the MPC 1 DAW. It's 100% user related, but switching between FL and MPC was a nightmare and I still don't understand it.
Also @2GooD Productions 100% agree with your point on recording. That's why I, too, bought Cubase. I decided to try recording in FL just to do some one shot stuff for a beat and jesus christ was it ever painful. Why the fuck would it save each vocal in its own slot, rather than just the timeline itself? If you need multiple takes to record a verse, having all the bad takes still in the audio subsection after you delete it off the timeline is unnecessary and makes it way too difficult to figure out what you actually want to use. I also think the way the ASIO drivers in FL process sound do some weird shit behind the curtain that make it sound significantly worse than when I record in Cubase.
Ive had the same issue a few times, because some of my Kontakt libraries are on external drives, when I plug in the drive and its assigned a new drive letter than what it was before I have trouble finding all my samples again. Its happened a few times, after updating fl studio too. Pain in the arse. I still have the same problem in Cubase though as its a windows problem not a DAW one.
I set up some templates as well, but when that happens, it cant find any of the drum samples and I have to redo them all anyway.
But yeah the recording was a pain, I had an artist I was recording and she always wanted to rerecord everything, I had so many takes it got so confusing trying to find what I wanted and what I didnt. Then it also saves them to some folder on the C: drive, filling that up.
OGBama
Big Clit Energy
I @2GooD Productions tried FL in the pre-YouTube era around 2002 and from what I can remember I knew nothing about “producing” nor did I own a keyboard workstation etc. at the time. First thing I attempted “looping” was the “Shook Ones” instrumental.
Fruity Loops of 20 years ago and FL Studio of today are 2 different things completely.
Another gripe I'll have with FL recording is that it constantly outputs the audio out of the channel you set the recording to, which includes the effects on it. If I want to use OVOX to do some fucked up processing on the vocals then that OVOX channel will do that to every background noise that the mic picks up while I'm working on it. This is probably partly to do with me not knowing how to record using the program, but honestly I don't think it should do that out of the gate. There's no reason to have the mic pick up anything and play it through your headphones/monitors unless you're actually recording. Especially when the CPU load gets pretty high in FL and I have to turn the latency up to stop it from crackling and popping. Having any audio coming through the microphone at a weird offset to what i've made makes it impossible to work with.
ive never been able to tame the latency on FL, if I bring it down so that its workable then theres too many artifacts. I was always having to fix late notes. Every recording had to be nudged slightly. Dont have any of that with Cubase, Cubase just works. Does everything I need, and if it doesnt, I have the plugins that do.
I only really start to notice it when FL gets into the 60% and up CPU load range. The Dirty North beat I made a few weeks ago was hovering at 80-90% CPU by the end of it and it absolutely required me to turn the latency up because it became impossible to even play in the timeline. It would play it at effectively quadruple time and sound like a garbled mess. Generally I have the latency turned all the way down. I think the only way to effectively do it is to mix down the beat itself and then put it in the timeline as an audio file. I couldn't imagine trying to rap over a beat with 40ms of latency. It would effectively work like a speech jammer. At that point though, you might as well mix down and transfer to a program like Cubase that's much more suitable to recording vocals.