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Some producers won’t even use swing at all and find that simply shifting the notes in time is enough to add the groove they are looking for. It’s effectively the same as moving a note further to the right on the piano roll. The Shift knob delays when the sound plays. When you cut out those fades, it can produce a snappier, punchier sound and will change the spacing between notes. This works great with percussion with long tail fades. The more you move the knob to the left, the more volume gets cutoff from the lower levels of sound in the sample. The gate will cutoff the sound depending on the volume threshold you set.
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There you will see the section labeled “Time.” All three of these knobs will affect the groove of the sound. If you want to change any of the individual swing percentages of a channel, select the wrench tool in the channel settings. Use your ears and let the feeling of the swing move you until you find the groove you’re looking for. At 50%, you can still hear a difference with even 1% of change with the swing knob. This will change the “pocket” that a rapper or singer will write their lyrics to and will give some flexibility in the number of syllables they use within each bar of the drum pattern. I find this formula allows me to subtly introduce movement in the groove, while still keeping the overall drum sequence pretty tight to the grid, which can help in some genres where rapping is involved. I personally will leave the kick and main snare on the grid and highlight the rest of the percussion, and set these to 50%. One tip that I like to do is to go into the drop-down menu of the channel rack and select “Set Swing Mix For Selected.” This allows you to change how much swing is applied to the channels you’ve selected. Don’t forget that you can resave this MIDI as your own groove template and reuse this in later project through the quantizer.īy increasing the swing knob on the channel rack, you will exaggerate the note spacing of these settings. You’ll notice that some of them will apply velocity changes, which is also a huge factor in groove and the human feel of the drum pattern. Definitely try out some of the other presets. You can adjust the start time, duration and sensitivity of the quantization to further humanize these settings. If you click the preset folder or the drop-down menu, you can even access a template called “16_MPC1” and “16_MPC2,” which are both based on the original MPC swing settings. In FL Studio, you can actually import MIDI information as a groove setting by sending your MIDI into the piano roll and pressing ALT+Q.
#Fl studio swing piano roll software
However, while the traditional MPC settings are famous for their sound, the swing settings have changed overtime depending on the DAW, software and hardware device. What was more interesting, were the in-between settings that allowed for a more imperfect groove, which gave a more human element to the groove. A setting of 50% would make each note equal, while a setting at 66% produced perfect triplets. In a nutshell, it delays the even numbered 16th notes within each group of 8th notes.
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The MPC is famous for its signature swing and has been copied over the years to be used in many DAWs, software and hardware. When hardware step sequencers were introduced, one man stood out above the rest for his invention of swing and quantization on drum samplers like the Akai MPC. The most common feature people use to achieve this in FL Studio is the Swing Knob, which is located on the top right of the channel rack. Humanization can bring back the movements that traditionally were made with our bare hands and insert them back into the music we digitally create in our DAWs. This is why humanization has become such a big topic in the music production community. With the introduction of DAWs, it has become common to find beginners making drum patterns that are seemingly lifeless or emotionless because of the static nature of tools like step sequencers and piano rolls.
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I’ll also re-emphasize some of the ideas from the first blog. In this blog, I want to go over the overall swing and quantization, which gives rhythm and life to the music and makes the listener want to physically move with the song.
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