Welcome back to part eight of Feel the Beat with FL Studio. Next, we will look at recording MIDI and audio from external sources. If you have a physical MIDI controller keyboard already connected to your computer, you can use it to play the synth you have loaded in the sequencer and record new parts on the fly. Let’s make sure our controller is active.
Under the Options menu at the top, first make sure that enable MIDI remote control is checked. If not, you can simply click it to activate. Now, click MIDI settings and look under the Input section. If your controller is not active, you can highlight it and click the enable button here. We can close that window now and select the synth to play in our sequencer window.
To record, click the Record button at the top of the screen and then click play or press the spacebar. You can hit spacebar again to stop. If your recording is too long for your pattern, you might need to adjust the beats per bar for this pattern in the top left of the sequencer window and fill in your beat. Also, we can record audio through our soundcard from almost any source in the FL mixer. This is done through the Edison plug-in.
To record using a mic or an instrument plugged in to your soundcard, first open the mixer window. Choose an empty channel and select the input you want to record from the dropdown menu above the effect slots. Now load Edison into an effect slot. In Edison, make sure that an input is selected and click the record button. Now we can play the song and then when we start sending a signal, Edison will start recording it. Once you’re done, click stop in Edison and in FL. Now we need to edit our loop.
In Edison, we can select the exact region we want by clicking and dragging the selection ends. The Page Up and Page Down buttons, Zoom In and Zoom Out on the wave, and the Magnet or Snap button changes how accurate the selection is to the beat or the wave. Once you have a solid selection made, we can place it in the sequencer as a sample using the drag copy sample selection button in the top-right of the Edison. Just click and drag from this button to an empty space on the sequencer window and it should play in time with our pattern.
We can also take a loop of any instrument we are using the song already or of our entire song by placing Edison on any existing channel as a plug-in. It well automatically record whatever sound that channel is already producing. It will still need editing and we can save loops to use later by looking under Edison’s menu and choosing save sample as.
In our next installment, we will look at some of the different options for exporting complete songs or patterns for use later. Remember, there are ten parts in this tutorial. So be sure to check out the other episodes in the Feel the Beat with FL Studio series.
[Demonstration]
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