FL Studio Tutorial - Installing VSTi Plugins

FL Studio tutorial explaining how to install VST plugins.

You may have heard of the terms VST and VSTi and that FL Studio willingly accepts plugins adhering to this standard. Wow, sounds great, but how exactly does that work? Where do I find such plugins and how do I make sure FL Studio recognizes them? This article will show you how.

VST is a standard allowing digital audio workstations – like FL Studio – to be extended with instruments and effects. There are both commercial and freeware plugins. I advise you to scan the market for free plugins and try some of them before moving on to the commercial ones. While many freeware plugins do not produce acceptable sounds (this is somewhat subjective as the line between what is acceptable and what is not will shift as you go along, believe me), some free plugins are really good and truly add rich sounds and sound tweaking capabilities to FL Studio.

Go ahead, search google by clicking the following link: http://www.google.dk/search?hl=da&q=free+VST+plugins&meta=&aq=f&oq=

You see, there is a lot out there. I continued and had a look at VST 4 Free and tried to find some nice plugin I could use for this article and – who knows – for my compositions.

To make your life easy, you can download the plugin I found by clicking here: Prova VSTi plugin

This plugin offers a Grand Piano sound. One visitor said:

Probably the best free piano module available. Obviously lacks overtones or sympathetic resonance like resource hungry multi-gig samples but sounds more realistic than mda, 4front piano, or most soundfonts

It sounded interesting to me, so I downloaded it.

Ok, we’ve got the file, so what do we do now? Well, as this is a compressed file (zip), you will need to unzip it first. When I did this it gave me the following file: Prova.dll. Cool, so now we have a file with a .dll extension.

The next thing to do is place it in an appropriate place so FL Studio will be able to recognize it. The default location for VST plugins is C:\Program Files\VstPlugins. Your folder may be located somewhere else. If you do not know where it is, just search for the folder name VstPlugins.

You now simply place the Prova.dll file in this folder.

Next, start FL Studio and choose Channels, Add one, More… in the menu.

This will open the following dialog:

Do you see the little Refresh-button in the lower right corner? Click it and choose Fast scan (recommended).

You should now see the new plugin (Prova) appear in red. Check the checkbox in from of it and close the dialog by clicking the [x] in the upper right corner. This should do the trick. Let’s check it.

Cool, it’s there! To complete the story I added it and clicked on the channel. This is what the Prova plugin will show you. If you see the same you should be in business.

Hope this tutorial was helpful to you. Feel free to leave comments. Happy composing!

Category: FL Studio Basics, FL Studio Tutorial, VST