Welcome to lesson 12 in the FL studio’ tutorial series.
This lesson continues our set of lessons on adding and managing content in FL studio,
in this lesson, we’re going to focus on how to add and use layers in your pattern and song structures.
Using layers you can come up with a variety of really powerful sounds and textures the traditional use of a layer is to create a situation where one score controls more than one sound instrument or in FL studio terms more than one channel,
moving beyond tradition we’ll explore more advanced tricks that we can accomplish using layers,
to create a traditional layer scenario let’s first add a layer to a channel in our step sequencer,
then let’s also add any sounds that we want to use to make up the layers that we’ll play along with the score we create,
here I’ve added synth and a bass instrument.
Now you’ll need to connect the other channels to the layer channel, a process known as setting children,
to do so click on the layer channel and its channel settings menu should appear with the layers channel settings still visible you will need to also select the other channels by right-clicking their select light,
then hit the set children button on the layers channel settings menu once the children are set click on the layer channel to select it as the active Channel and then play your typing or MIDI keyboard,
you should hear and see that all instruments and sounds you set as the children are playing at the same time,
any score you create in the layer channel will be played by all the children of the layer.
Some of the special features of the layer include the random feature which will cause notes to randomly play different instruments in the layer alone,
If your layers are composed of several drums as I’ve previously set up here another nice feature is under the drop-down arrow menu named extra layer functions and is called split children,
this option will send each layer to its own single key on the keyboard and will then function much like a sound font,
if you incorporate visual plugins such as Chrome that comes with FL Studio into a layer you can add visual effects to your performance that’s in time with the other content in your layer.
Now you should have a means for adding layered content to your patterns and compositions.
Thus ends our lesson on layers.
