Composing with the Piano Roll

When you want to make a melody for your song, you need a tool to help you compose it. The FL Studio piano roll is arguably the best piano roll in the market for composing melodies. The piano roll allows you to add melody notes, arrange them, adjust the inflection of notes, and easily move notes between instruments. Once you know how to use the piano roll, you’ll be able to compose melodies for any instrument.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Using the piano roll
• Composing great chord progressions
• Recording MIDI notes with MIDI instruments
• Exporting sheet music
• Using and exporting MIDI scores

Using the piano roll

The piano roll is the tool for composing melodies. The piano roll is essentially a piano with a timeline. On the y axis, note pitches are shown, and on the x axis, time is divided into a grid of beats and smaller increments of beats. Notes are displayed as horizontal bars, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.1 – Piano roll

Let’s talk about what the piano roll is great at. The piano roll is really good at taking a melody and mapping out the exact timing. It’s easy to generate chords and experiment with notes that complement your melody. It’s also good at comparing the timing of notes to other instruments playing in the same pattern and jumping between instruments. We’ll explore these in detail throughout the chapter.

If you need help with coming up with melody ideas, here are a few quick suggestions. I like to have a physical instrument nearby that I can use to experiment with chords or a melody. I...

Composing great chord progressions

A chord is when three or more notes are played simultaneously. A chord progression is a sequence of chords that sound good together and have a sense of movement throughout.

Understanding how to build a strong chord progression from scratch is one of the most valuable skills a composer can develop. It’s the foundational building block of songs. It’s usually the first thing that gets created, and it sets the rules for all instruments and vocals that follow. If you hear a song whose melody isn’t very interesting, usually a subpar chord progression is the culprit.

Let’s compose a chord progression:

1. Create a new music pattern.
2. Load up an instrument that can play multiple notes at once, such as the FL Keys instrument.
3. Add notes in the piano roll by left-clicking in the blue grid and creating a pattern such as the one shown in the following screenshot:

   Figure 3.16 – Adding notes...

Recording into the piano roll with MIDI instruments

MIDI is a way for software and electronic devices to pass music information from one device to another so that the new device knows what notes to play.

If you already know how to play live instruments, you may want to look into acquiring a MIDI instrument. If you have MIDI instrument hardware, such as a MIDI keyboard, MIDI guitar, or another MIDI controller, you can play notes on the hardware instrument live, and FL Studio can record the notes directly into the piano roll. This is a very efficient method of recording melodies and gives you the benefit of being able to go back and correct any mistakes you make.

To record notes with your MIDI instrument hardware, take the following steps. If you don’t have a MIDI keyboard, you can play notes by pressing keys on your computer keyboard as well, but this is less convenient than a designated MIDI device:

1. Create a new pattern and select the instrument from the...

Exporting sheet music

Traditionally, when learning to play music, musicians learn to read sheet music. Sheet music allows musicians to transfer a musical idea to another musician so that they understand how to play the song. To read sheet music, they’d need to learn a large vocabulary of symbols and syntax so that they could understand what the other musician is saying.

If you want to export your music in the form of sheet music so that a live musician can play it, select the FILE | Export as score sheet option. This will provide you with controls over the sheet music, such as the time signature and scale, as seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.31 – Export as score sheet

After clicking Start, a PDF will be created with the sheet music, such as the one in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.32 – Sheet music

For a trained musician, this sheet music may not provide enough syntax notation. If this is the case, you’ll need...

Using and exporting MIDI scores

The piano roll opens up the playing field for creating music for people who have not studied music theory. Reading music is now completely optional and not mandatory in order to make music.

If you wanted to copy music into FL Studio, do you need to manually write each note? No, there is a much easier method. You can copy MIDI notes directly into the piano roll just by importing them. Doing so will require MIDI notes to copy. You can get MIDI notes for almost any song just by Google searching the name of the song followed by the words MIDI notes. Once you’ve found and downloaded the MIDI notes, you need to bring the MIDI notes into the piano roll. You can do this either by dragging the file from anywhere on your computer into the piano roll or by locating the MIDI note file in the FL Studio browser and then dragging it into the piano roll or channel rack instrument. Once you’ve done this, the piano roll will populate with notes from...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned that the piano roll is used to compose melodies. We learned the steps to follow to create chord progressions from scratch.

The piano roll makes it easy to compare melodies played by accompanying instruments and to copy notes from one instrument to another. The piano roll also allows you to import and export MIDI notes and sheet music.

If you can learn to play the piano roll, it means you can play any plugin that plays MIDI notes. This is a big deal as it allows you to compose melodies for any instrument.

The piano roll will mean different things to you depending on the stage you are at in your music career. In the beginning, it will be a challenge figuring out how to use the tools. Once you understand the tools, you’ll compose simple melodies. At some point, you’ll realize that your melodies are bland and look to other people’s music and tutorials to figure out how to make your composition more interesting. You may...