They say melody is one of the most important elements in a song. Without a great melody, your song won’t feel alive and cannot connect with the audience.
If you are a FL Studio user (or else you won’t check this article out), we all can agree that FL Studio has the best piano roll compared to the other DAWs in term of workflow.
But are you sure that you’re using to its max potential?
Let me show you my TOP 5 life-changing shortcut keys to be used in the piano roll.
1. Ctrl + Up/Down Key
Let’s say that you writing a melody for your song but it sounds too low in pitch, this is the time when this shortcut key comes to play. You can easily switch the octave of the melody with this shortcut key.
2. Shift + Up/Down Key
This one is quite similar to the first shortcut key but a little bit different. This shortcut key is used to transpose the melody in semitones. You can easily transpose the melody up or down one semitone using this shortcut key. You can see the melody got transposed down 1 semitone as I used this shortcut key.
3. Ctrl + A
When you want to highlight all the notes of the melody, you’ll probably right click and drag the timeline to highlight all the note just like what’s shown in the first picture (I used to do that before discovering this shortcut key). Now all you have to do is to press 2 keys (Ctrl + A) on your keyboard. It’ll automatically highlight all the notes for you.
4. Alt + V
If it seems familiar to you, that is because I mentioned this shortcut key before in the previous article on how to stay in key while writing your melodies. This shortcut enables ghost channels in your piano roll. To fully know how this shortcut key works, click here to visit the previous article.
5. Ctrl + Q
If you’re a classically trained musician, you might prefer to write your melody by playing with your MIDI keyboard. The notes recorded might get a little messy and they’re all over the place. One way to fix this is use this shortcut key to quantize the notes. After quantization, the notes will be snapped to grid.
What’s your best shortcut key to use in the piano roll?
Share it with us in the comment section below.
Thanks for reading and have a great day.
Your W. A. Production team
PS: Want to learn FL Studio Shortcuts in a more efficient way? Check the Inside Audio FL Studio Shortcut Mousepad. More info here.