Familiarizing yourself with the working environment of your DAW can help you work faster and more efficiently.
That is why in this article I have compiled what I consider to be the shortcuts that every music producer working with FL Studio 20 should know.
Although at first it may be difficult to remember them, it is recommended to put them into practice when you are producing music in your FL Studio, you will see that you will quickly learn them by the mere fact of putting them into practice, which is ultimately how you really learn.
To make them even more convenient, I’m going to organize the shortcuts by sections so you can visit the ones that interest you the most.
Contents
Step Sequencer
- F2: This is used to quickly change the name of the pattern we are in. If we have just clicked on an instrument (plugin) what we will change will be the name of that instrument.
- +/- (Addition and subtraction buttons): Press these buttons to move to the next or previous pattern respectively.
- Click central mouse wheel: If we have the pointer over the name of an instrument or a pattern and we click with the central mouse wheel we will also get the corresponding window to change the name.
- Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V / Ctrl+X: Copy, paste and cut, of course. The interesting thing is that we can copy the notes of several instruments at the same time to another pattern, simply by selecting the instruments we want as follows:
In the image I have selected only one instrument (Sampler in this case) but you can select as many as you want. Then Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste.
Piano Roll
- Ctrl+A: Select all the notes of that instrument. It is very useful if we want to make a modification to all the notes simultaneously, like moving them for example.
- Alt+Q: Quantize. With the notes selected, Alt+Q will quantize them, i.e. move the notes to the nearest whole note position. You will get a small window where you can adjust the way and precision of the quantization. This is very useful because when recording the notes many times they will not be perfectly adjusted to the score, to the tempo, due to the latency of your card. Quantizing will make it perfect.
Playlist
Ctrl+B: With the pattern or patterns that we want selected we press Ctrl+B and we duplicate it automatically after the selected ones. Super useful to “lengthen” the duration of our production for example.
+/- (Addition and subtraction buttons): In this section these two buttons will also be very useful as they allow us to change patterns quickly.
Ctrl+Mouse wheel: We zoom. If you look it increases the section where we have the pointer, if we move the pointer it will zoom in that new zone.
Right button on “Playlist-Pattern X”: Where X is the corresponding pattern number. This will open a very nice window with all the patterns, instruments and channels we have in the project:
Atl+T: We create a “Time marker” annotation in the playlist. Useful to better organize the structure of the production, pointing out for example where the choruses start.
These keyboard shortcuts, together with F5 to open/close the Playlist and F9 to open/close the Mixer, are the ones I use the most. In future posts I will post more FL Studio tips that I’m sure will be of great help.
FL Studio 20 Shortcut list
Press Ctrl/Cmd + F to activate Search field
Press Ctrl/Cmd + (+) or (-) to maximize or minimize content
