You can, however, rely on it for quickly putting down ideas as they come to you, and there is a lot to be said for that. If you tend towards more organic sounds, you may well find that FL Studio falls too far short. If you’re mainly interested in creating synth-based tracks on your slate, you’ll be playing with this app for a good while. I really wanted Fruityloops Studio to be amazing, and it’s so close, it’s almost painful. Again, for the first time user, this may not be such an issue but over a little time you will quickly come to wish for a greater flexibility.

You can have both effects on both tracks, or one effect on one of them. This means that if you want delay on the drums, but reverb on the piano, you are simply out of luck. You can apply the effect to the whole mix, or apply it only to those tracks which have been flagged for processing. Short version: you cannot apply a given effect to specific tracks in your piece. While the effects themselves are actually well implemented, the scope with which you can apply them is not quite on the same level. Working on the final mix is when you are likely to encounter the last shortcoming of FL Studio. Even the final mix is relatively easy, given that you can quickly access the volume and pan control of each instrument from the first of the whole-score views. Quickly shifting between moving notes, placing new ones, copying patterns and altering the length of the tones became second nature and I would have to admit that this may well be ‘the fastest way from your brain to the speakers’. Suddenly, using a touch screen to create music is not just a fanciful idea – you can actually do it.Īs stated before, the interface took a little getting used to but once I had become accustomed, editing tracks was an absolute breeze. Bear in mind that this can be a problem with a hardware keyboard and a midi-capable PC and you realize that the devs really have produced a very polished product. Similarly, when entering music via the keyboard interface, it proved very accurate and placed the notes pretty much exactly where I had intended them – without using the available quantize feature. Very occasionally it would glitch, such as when loading a new sound into an existing sequencer track, but on the whole this app impressed me as capable and robust. FL was able to play the current song, switch between different screens, and even save the track without interrupting the playback. Bear in mind, this is on an Acer A700 which, despite the quad core processor, can often falter with more heavyweight apps. Ok, so that’s a fairly serious limitation (and there’s another one, albeit less serious, to follow) but I would be remiss if I did not point out the areas where FL Studio excels – and these really do lift this app above the other options out there.įirst of all: the lag and stutter which so many other DAW apps suffer from. You can paint with the colors that FL Studio provides, but nothing more. It’s also not possible to record audio as any part of your piece, or even to import pre-recorded tracks. If only I were able to load up more sounds, I could easily forgive this in the hope that something will come along to fill the gap – or, even better, I could create my own instrument and share it with others. Only two sounds form the horn section, neither of which were what I was aiming for, both of which standing out as ‘the wrong sound’. The Oceans 11 pastiche was where FL really hit the rocks.

The closest I could get were some electronic bloops of the kind found on the old DX7 – very 80’s (and not in a good way) and not at all what I was looking for.

Digging through the list of sounds, I could find nothing by way of usable, semi-ambient pads. Once the main parts were in place, however, I felt the need for a nice atmospheric pad or two, just to give a little background. For ‘Cars’, FL provided most of what I wanted.

Fl studio 11 price