So after a ~2 month hiatus, today I finally started a new track.

How to use a Roland MC-303 with FL Studio as a drumpad

This was posted on my old blog, but then I moved to tumblr. And import RSS feed apparently means “import anything on that shit from now on”, so it did not move all my old articles. This thing could really use some editing rewriting, but you and me both know that is very unlikely to happen. To prevent at least some knowledge from being lost forever, here’s the original article:

For those who don’t like to read walls of text, here’s a little video to get you excited:

I’m not using the 303’s built-in drum machine, but rather use it to control (drum) channels in FL Studio. You can do this with any midi-keyboard, but I find the keys rather large to use as drumpads. The keys on the 303’s keyboard are much smaller and ideal to use as drumpads. Here’s how I hooked up my old MC-303 Groovebox to control FL Studio.

What you need:

• a copy of FL Studio
• a midi to USB device (like the M-Audio UM-1)
• a Roland MC-303

Hardware set up:

Download the drivers for your midi/USB device and install them.
Plug the UM-1 into your USB port on the pc and the midi plug(s) into the midi ports on the 303.

When plugging into the USB port, the USB LED should light up.When the midi cables are plugged into the 303, play some notes on the keyboard. Every hit should make the MIDI IN LED light up.

On the 303, you will have to make sure that the selected part sends the note data to your computer (the 303’s midi-out port).Select the part (which one doesn’t really matter, we’ll use 7) you want to use for your drumpad. (make sure the “PART SELECT” button on the left top of the 303 is lit)

Press the button for part 7.

With part 7 lit, hold the SHIFT button (lowest left button on the 303) and press key 14 on the keyboard. Underneath it in a black box you can read OUT ASSIGN

1. The screen now reads P-7 INT.
2. Rotate the black dial to set it to EXT.
3. Hit EXIT.

The midi signal of part 7 is now sent to the midi out port. Good work.

Software setup:

Assuming windows likes the driver and the installation went smooth, open up FL Studio.

In the midi settings panel (F10 key), there should be a listing “USB Audio Device”.
Highlight it, and enable it by clicking the little orange LED underneath the listing. (The controller type is “generic controller”).

Now, when you hit the keyboard on the 303 again, the selected channel (most likely the default Kick drum) will sound with every stroke on the keyboard.

Success!

Organizing the drums:

Now we want to make this a useful drumpad.

NOTE Once you get used to the next steps this is easy, but certainly it can be confusing for beginners.

For this tutorial, we’ll assume you have 4 sounds; Kick, Clap Hihat and Snare.

1. Right-click any channel and select the “Insert »” menu option. This will give you a list of generators, select the top one called “Layer”.
2. Now, click the Layer to reveal it’s Channel Settings panel.
3. Move this panel next to your pattern editor so you can see both side by side.
4. With the channel settings panel open, select all 4 drum channels. Do this by click (and hold) ing the first channel’s selector and drag down to the last drum channel.

Now that you have 4 channels lit, go to the (Layer’s) Channel settings panel.

You’ll find the “Set Children” button, go ahead and click it

Now, click the down arrow next to the “Layering” heading and select “Split children”.

Once this is done, you’ll have 4 buttons starting at C-5 up to D#5 to control the kick, clap, hihat and snare.

More success!

Final steps

First, the tricky part..

Using the current setup you can drum away, but there are two little annoyances:
First off, I’ve come to notice that unfortunately, the sounds are pitched up as they would when controlling just a single channel with the keyboard. We want to keep all drumsamples in their root note. Thanks to www.warbeats.com’s youtube video I can explain to you how to do this.

By doing so we can also fix the issue that your drumpads are now very close to each other, which makes drumming a bit awkward. Both annoyances will be a thing of the past very soon.

We are going to assign each Child Channel it’s own key on our 303 keyboard.

NOTE Why what works below works how it works is a bit of a mystery to me, but just follow the steps and you’ll see that it works.

1. Select the kick channel, revealing the Channel inspector. Open the second tab, “INS”. In the bottom is a virtual keyboard.
2. In the bar above the keyboard, click the C-4, and the little area above the key will light up lightly orange. You are now creating a range of notes this channel will respond to. Try it by clicking another note, you should now see a larger orange area. This is the area the channel will respond to.
   
3. For now, lets just make a 1-note range, by clicking the C-4 twice.
4. Right-click it and it becomes a more saturated orange. Doing this will ensure the sample only sounds on this key hit.

Now go to the Clap channel, and follow the above, and repeat this for every channel you want to control with the Layer.

The Snare drum is now triggered by the E-4 key

In the video you’ll notice that I have mapped the 4 kicks to the far right (C-5 - D-5) and the snares to the left, because that’s the way I drum (left hand hits snaredrum). Whatever you do, I suggest experimenting with layouts.

Lastly, go make some beats!