Getting started in Fruity Studio (written for v6)

Configuring Fruity

The first thing you'll need to do after installing is configure the software. choose options/audio.

Fruity has come a long way since i started using it, and now we can select much better sound quality algorithms under the interpolation setting. Sinc depth 256 is about as good as it gets, but this will use up to four times the processing power over 6-point hermite. Unless you've got an Intel Core 2 Duo processor clocked to 3.5 GHz you will not be able to complete a full, high quality song with Sinc depth 256, you'll run out of resources. I recommend you start every new track at 256 so you can work on much of the basics of a song with the highest audio quality and then scale down the settings as and when you run out of CPU power.

Under output choose your audio card and ASIO (obviously) and if you have a decent card you'll be able to get down to 10~20ms which is more than acceptable when working with software only.

Under 'file settings' you should track down all your samples or project files so they are easy to find in the file browser on the left hand side of the fruity interface. Select your VST folder if you plan to use third party plugins.

At this stage you will need to tell Fruity which plugins you want available to you. For configuring your FX list go to:

• FX (top right), then you'll be in the mixer, then do the following:

This will bring up a new window:

Select all the plugins you really like, but only your effect plugins, not your instruments.

For adding your instruments you need to do the following:

• Channel / Add one / More / repeat the above but select all your synths etc.

This should be enough for most users, but if you have external hardware or midi controller keyboard you'll need to configure this under 'midi' and the manual should be able to help you with this.

Starting off

When you first start do this: File / template / empty. You'll only have to do it once and it will remember. It simply gets rid of the four channels with crap samples in place.

I'm the first to admit that the interface is fiddly, but once you get used to it there is no going back. I'm going to take you through how i start off a new song, and this should pretty much explain where all the main features are around fruity's interface.

Let's start with some drums. There are two main ways put down your midi data, the step sequencer and the piano roll

The above image is the step sequencer and it's highlighted in red. This is an old relic going back to when fruity was just a drum sequencer, but its still useful for getting some very basic jobs done extremely fast. The step sequencer is absolutely perfect for creating your entire drum beats spanning over several channels. Below is a clear example of how this can be used, and i'm sure anyone who has a little experience in dance music can already hear the simple beat created below.

Under the step sequencer is the channel settings, which show themselves when you click in a channel, in this case i've clicked the 'hi-hat 2' box. Check for yourself all the options here, but i recommend you skip almost everything fruity offers here, like the filter etc, as they are not very good. Of course, the envelope will come in useful in situations like say, a kick that extends for too long, so you envelope off the end part of the kick to make it tight.

You will notice in the top right of the channel a small pale green square with FX written underneath. If you double click this you'll be take to the mixer channel for this specific sample.

Above you can see i changed hi-hat 2 to mixer channel four, and in the mixer window channel 4 is highlighted. On the right you have eight slots for effects (which can be VST effects from the likes of waves, etc) and EQ settings, which i never use because they are poor quality. You can route the audio of a channel to another channel extremely easily in fruity. If you return your eyes over to channel 4 you will notice the main volume slider, below this a small orange arrow pointing down. If you wish to route channel 4's audio to channel 5 you simply click channel 5's little greyed out arrow.

The image on the left shows this process in motion. At this stage you will have the audio of channel 4 on both channel 4 and five, doubling up the volume, this is traditional routing but i've never found it useful. You can stop this and make the routed audio the only one you hear by right clicking like this:

The main reason i use routing is to take 2 tracks which have effects on into a fresh mixer channel where i can add more effect to all those grouped. For example. A kick and a bass both share the same frequency space and unless you're careful will clash. Let's imagine you have your kick on channel 1 and the bass is on channel 2. You've created what you want, but they are clashing, you add EQ effects on both channels and start to iron out the frequency responsible for the clash. Now you want to beef up the energy between the kick and bass, making them sound connected, or fluid. The best trick is to route the kick (channel 1) and the bass (channel 2) to a new channel, lets say channel 3, and add something like a compressor. Can you think of an easier method of taking two unrefined sounds, refining them in real time then routing them into there own channel to be compressed together? I can't. THe main benefit for doing this will be to give phenomenal, controlled energy to the bottom end of your songs. The compressor i recommend for this trick is TC Works Compressor deEsser, its one aggressive compressor.

OK! at this stage you should have picked up many of the features of fruity Studio, but nothing like what you would have in Cubase, so now lets move on and explain the major parts of fruity Studio.

Advanced basics

Lets add a VST synth, in my example i'll use V-Station. Click Channels / Add one / V-Station

THis is what you should end up with. If you click on the brown 'v-station' button it will always bring up what you see above, and at this stage you'll want to put down a nice synth line in your song, i guess.

In the menu areas you'll find this block of options. Click the button that says PR, this will open the piano roll, and should be very familiar to most people. I don't think this needs much explaining so i'm not going to cover it in any detail, what i will cover is how to automate any knob you see in any VST synth or effect.

Before i explain this, a firm understanding of the 'playlist' must be gained. It is unbelievably simple and ingenious and puts Cubase to shame, from a dance music perspective of course.

In this box you can see two buttons saying 'PAT' and 'SONG'. Lets refer to the track above with four channels including v-station. Imagine you write out all the drums and a synth line, that would be a complete PAT (pattern), but you can create many patterns which can be used at any time in a song.

The image on the right shows that we have selected song mode, which means when you press play it will start playing whatever is in the playlist, not the pattern. To get the playlist up simply right click the SONG button. You'll notice Pattern one is high lighted. Lets take a look at what Pattern 1 actually is.

What you started is Pattern 1. Now lets go back to the playlist and highlight Pattern 2 and then come back.

Everything you wrote down is no longer present. All the channels remain to be used by any Pattern, but what's written does not, if this sounds confusing it will be come clear in one moment.

The playlist is where you place all the patterns into a full song. If you were to press the play button now while in song mode it would start playing what you wrote in pattern one, then pattern 2, then 3, then 4, then pattern 1 and 5 together, then pattern 1, 5, 6, 10 and 12 together. If this still sounds strange open up fruity and test it out. It will come to you.

OK, automation. Lets say you want to turn the cut off frequency for v-station at bar 17, you can see where bar 17 is in the above image, its exactly when pattern 1 and 5 start playing together. you simply click on any pattern you wish to use at bar 17, in this case pattern 14.

Now close the playlist window and do the following; This is a tip on how to quickly find the parameter you want to tweak without trial and error. click and open up v-station, turn the knob you want to automate, in this case the cutoff, then do what is shown in the image:

This will bring up the window for automation the cutoff and you can do something like this:

you can visualize what would happen, the cutoff knob is at half when it starts and slowly creeps up to 3/4 maximum ad then back down again - a typical trance thing to do. On the playlist it will look like this:

You can clearly see how long that sweeping cut off automation lasts here.

This concludes this beginners guide, there is a whole lot more to fruity studio, but i feel new comers will be put off by not knowing how to do the most basic of things, and that's what this guide is all about.

If you have any questions or would like to know how to do something not explained in this guide, you can email me at:

james_jwb@hotmail.com

copyright 2006.