FL Studio Tutorial - How to create impressive piano flourishes in FL Studio

FL Studio tutorial explaining how to create great piano flourishes/melodies

I love listening to beautiful, dramatic piano flourishes. Sometimes I wish I could play like a real virtuoso and could compose the most magical pieces by letting my hands dance on the keys. Well, I guess I would not be sitting here writing the next tutorial if I was that good. But did you know that there is an easy way to achieve quite impressive and realistic sounding flourishes in FL Studio? Not? Neither did I, but then I came across a technique which is really easy. Some may call the technique cheating, but who cares? So let’s have a look.

Chord progression

First, we make a chord progression. I discussed a technique for doing this in the tutorial Making a chord progression and lead synth, so you may want to read through that first. I will go over it here as well though.

An easy way to make a chord progression is using the scale overlay technique (see the tutorial mentioned above). The scale I am going to work with is D-minor and below you can see this scale in the Piano Roll, drawn across two octaves (D-minor is composed of the notes D, E, F, G, A, Bb, C).

 

 

Now, after drawing the scale, make sure to check the Helpers | Ghost channels in the Piano Roll menu. See below:

 

 

Your Step Sequencer now looks like this (or similar):

 

 

Note that I use my Nexus plugin for this tutorial, but any other generator with a decent piano sound will do for our purpose. Also, make sure to turn down the volume completely (turn the Channel Volume know entirely to the left).

Next, insert a new generator.

 

 

Now, open the Piano Roll for the second generator (make sure you are in the same Playlist track). You will see the following:

 

 

Next, draw a chord progression, sticking to the (greyed out) notes in the scale. You see my progression below:

 

 

 

You can listen to the progression via the player below:

Next, insert another generator and copy your chord progression. An easy way to do this is using the Edit | Copy option the channel options menu (right click the channel with your chord progression). See below:

 

 

Subsequently, choose Edit | Paste in the channel options menu of the channel to which you want to copy the pattern. See below:

 

 

 

Open the Piano Roll for the third channel and duplicate your chord progression a number of times by first selecting it..

 

 

…and then pressing Ctrl-C (copy), Ctrl-V (paste) and Shift-ArrowUp/ArrowDown (move up/down) until it covers the next or previous octave. If all goes well, you should end up with the following:

 

 

 

If you now play this pattern you should hear the same chord progression as before, just a bit heavier than before. You can listen to it below:

Slicing note events

Next, click Slice in the Tools menu:

 

 

Now, the cool thing with the Slice tool is that you can cut note events. Simply position the Slice tool, hold down your left mouse button and draw a line through the note events you want to cut. You can slice vertically and diagonally. See below: 

 

 

The moment you release the mouse button the note events will be cut where the (blue) line crosses the note event.

Now, for our piano flourish, you should slice multiple times (8 times to be precise) as illustrated below. Later on you can try slicing in different ways, but for now try to stick to the tutorial.

 

 

After slicing, your pattern should look like this:

 

 

Now, make some variations in the note velocities as illustrated below:

 

 

Take especially note of the low velocity of the first note event for every bar. You want to set this low to avoid the first chord to dominate too much. Again, you can make variations the the above.

So, what we have now is our original chord progression and one that we sliced up into smaller note events. Play them separate and together and I think you get the picture. For the purpose of the tutorial I spiced my song up with some other sounds, but using the same chord progression. Listen to it below:

By using this method you can create some really awesome results. While the piano flourish we created in this tutorial is rather simple and quickly done, the sound is really interesting and inspiring. I am definitely going to experiment more with this technique to see how far I can go in simulating the piano virtuoso in me!

That’s all for today :) I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that you will use it to your advantage and create your own masterpieces! Happy composing!

Category: Arranging/Composing, FL Studio Tutorial