Hey all,

I don't know if anyone on here uses FruityLoops but I recently had a collaboration with a guy who did and for building electronic beats it's incredibly fast. I was looking for some tips on how to approximate the workflow.

Basically you open a step sequencer and it's linked to a basic sampler. In Sonar you get a note per line, in FruityLoops you can drag a sample (like a kick) on that line. If there is no equivalent in Sonar I can live with my Maschine track template.

But mainly what interested me was that in FL you can easily paint separate parts across different tracks. For example if you have a hihat, a kick and a snare, you can paint them individually across three separate tracks. While I can easily paint the entire pattern with Sonar, I haven't been able to do it part by part. The reason I'd like this is because it makes it super easy to (for instance) drop the hihat, kick or snare out of separate parts of your arrangement.

I'd appreciate any insights, especially from someone who has used FL and knows what I'm looking for.

With FL Studio each sequence captures all the tracks - and thereby being able to exclude tracks is quite valuable, as an alternative to duplicating variations on sequences. But in Sonar the sequence is just a clip on a single track. The equivalent would be to drop certain notes from certain instances of a clip, and I don't think there is any simple workflow for that. I imagine the quickest workaround is to copy the clip and edit out the notes you don't want.
 
I don't remember the 'paint separate parts' feature in FL Studio, so in the past I had to do this much the same way as I would in Sonar - duplicate the sequence, edit out the bits I didn't want.

Sanderxpander
Basically you open a step sequencer and it's linked to a basic sampler. In Sonar you get a note per line, in FruityLoops you can drag a sample (like a kick) on that line. If there is no equivalent in Sonar I can live with my Maschine track template.

The closest you can come is treating Session Drummer like a basic sampler. Load the samples you want into the various drums, then use notes to  trigger those samples.

Or you could use a Drum Map to trigger a bunch of different synths from one MIDI track. Unfortunately that doesn't solve the original problem of being able to selectively have different instruments dropping in and out when the sequence is repeated, short of editing the copies.
 
Although I'm sure there's some tricky workaround using MIDI FX to drop selective notes, or using automation to silence individual instruments, or <insert your idea here>.

And while we're on the subject of step sequencing...don't forget about SONAR's unusual audio step sequencer capability, which I haven't see in any other DAW.

Wasn't there something like that in Cakewalk's Project 5 v 2.5 years ago?  MMmm, where O' where is Project 5 now??
 

Yeah the main missing thing is that in FL you can quickly paste/paint just a hihat, or a snare, or whatever. They each go on their own track. I know I can edit the piano roll but that takes out the speed and breaks inspiration a bit.

I've got FL Studio 11 open now and I can only find a way to paint whole patterns into the Playlist, not partial patterns. If I had 3 different patterns, one for each of hihat, kick and snare, then I could certainly paint those independently, and maybe that's what you mean, but that would be equivalent to having 3 separate clips in 3 tracks in Sonar, which can be done fairly easily. (They could all share the same drum map and therefore trigger the same sampler instance.)

Hi, Is it not possible to use CAL script to separate notes to track, and then bind notes to tracks? I seem to remember having done this in the past.
All the best.

Sounds like it would not be what the OP wants, namely a way to very quickly 'paint' out arrangements with some subset of instrumentation. Something that requires explicitly running a script to create new clips and then selectively removing some of them sounds quite cumbersome by comparison.