OK I finally took a few minutes to ask my friend with FL Studio how the piano roll and sequencer works there and realized what all these little FRs are about
For anyone confused by this (I was), when people say “send a part to piano roll” “with no automation” what they’re looking at as an end goal is FL Studio’s Step Sequencer.
Differences in FL Studio’s Step sequencer.
- Each lane represents an instrument, not a note
- you can have an instance of a very lightweight sampler on each lane by just dragging a sample into the lane.
- They essentially use automation to automate the “note” of the steps using a graph much like our pattern automation.
- because each lane represents an instrument, you can open an individual lane in the piano roll TEMPORARILY to change the individual notes and then go right back to the Pattern editor view
Here’s a manual that explains it:
https://www.image-line.com/support/flstudio_online_manual/html/channelrack.htm
Here’s a video of someone using it in the context posted here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ods3U4P2gjI
For anybody wondering when we’ll get there, this is pretty different than the current style of the pattern editor so it may not happen quickly. If you make an FR about making the pattern editor more like FL Studio’s then at least they’ll have an idea of the end goal instead of bite sized FRs taken out of context.