Basic guitar chords in FL Studio

[wary shuttle]

Is there a fast way to input basic guitar chords in FL Studio?
I would want the exact notes to show up on the piano roll as would happen from the guitar strings in the same octave as the guitar would have in standard tuning for each chord.
Seems like there has to be a fast way to input this and if there isn't one, then I should make it myself because I'm a programmer.

[wanton socket]

there isn't, by default, but you technically could with the stamp tool by making your own stamps for it

[wary shuttle]

ok how i do that

[wanton socket]

it's easy to do luckily, little bit of folder diving, give me one sec

so, do you know what the stamp tool is?

[wary shuttle]

first i heard of it is just now 😄

[wanton socket]

the stamp tool is a piano roll tool located at the top left, by the musical note icon (next to Snap to Scale) and what this does is you can pick a stamp, say, Major 7, then when you draw in the piano roll, it will draw the notes of a major 7th chords in whatever note you set, easy enough to follow, try it yourself

luckily, the way fl's piano roll tools work, is they use what's called .fsc files, or fruity score files. these are like midi files, but fl studio uses these types of files to function some of it's tools, it's a proprietary format that saves them time and implementing more of these score files

you can actually make your own score file, if you click the drop down menu in the top left corner > file > save score as, and again it basically functions like a midi file

[wary shuttle]

OK but because of the nature of stringed instruments like guitar, there's more going on than just transposing the chord. Different chords get different numbers of strings that can play on guitar for them

[wanton socket]

so, if you navigate to this directory

C:\Program Files\Image-Line\FL Studio 2024\Data\Patches\Scores\Stamps\

you'll actually find all of the files that the stamp tool relies on, as .fsc files. if you drag and drop one of these into the piano roll, you will see it sees the notes built on C and then it just applies that score file to the note you clicked in

so, what you could actually do, is create a score file, that sorta follows the same format as one of these stamps, but voiced the way you want, for example you'd play like, a root, fifth, octave for a power chord right, so you'd probably write some notes like this, save it as a score file, and it will appear in the stamp menu

[wary shuttle]

like if you go from E to D on guitar, you can't just move the all six strings of E down one to D, which only gets four strings.

[wanton socket]

BUT, do not do this in the installation folder where we found them, instead save this file in the user data folder, which is here C:\Users\Alec\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Presets\Scores

[wary shuttle]

I guess I'd have to make one for every guitar chord I want to use. yikes.

[wanton socket]

so if you were to make a folder in the stamps folder, in the user data folder called "guitar voicings" or whatever, then save the score file there, then it will show up

[wanton socket]

don't make it for every chord, but rather make it based on the voicings

the voicings and interval make up is what's important, not the actual key itself

saves you time

[wary shuttle]

I am thinking to take a programming approach to this, like to find a dataset of all the guitar voicings and then convert them all at once programmatically.

[wanton socket]

yeah so for some reason this is not working give me a sec

[wary shuttle]

another idea i had considered was making a custom piano roll input control in FL Studio but their API seems to be too limited to allow doing much with that.

i know of this dataset here of guitar chords although the format of the data makes it super awkward to work with https://archive.ics.uci.edu/dataset/575/guitar+chords+finger+positions

[wanton socket]

ok so like

here for example

this is a simple fruity score file on C - G - C

root fifth octave

i have this file in this folder

which then shows up in the stamp tool here

and then when i stamp it in, there's my voicings

so, you could make all the typical common shapes for guitars as score files, save them all in this folder and have access to them

do you know how guitar chords work?

[wary shuttle]

Um ... kind of? I play a little guitar, did a lot of piano when I was younger, but could never become able to sight-read music because of low vision and my grasp of music theory, while not completely non-existent, is a little weak.

[wanton socket]

do you know what stencils are?

[wary shuttle]

not in this context. i mean, obviously i know what stencils are for drawing on paper

[wanton socket]

yeah the paper kind

so think about this. there's 12 notes we have, and we have 4 basic chords, major, minor, augmented, and diminished, with that math, how many kinds of chords do we have?

[wary shuttle]

what about 7ths? like my songs use B7 a lot

[wanton socket]

for the sake of simplicity we'll just talk about triads

[wary shuttle]

ok 12*4=48

[wanton socket]

technically, yes you are correct, but practically, no

i mentioned before that, intervallic distance is the actual building block of the chord, rather than the notes themselves

a major chord for example, consists of a root note, followed by a major third, followed by a minor third

so, instead of thinking of the notes individually, if you think about the intervals that makes them up, that reduces the work you have to think about chords

does that make sense?

i mention stencil because, if you think about it, the way a chord is structured, is like a stencil. the outline of the shape is there, you just need to actually fill it to see it

but, you could put that stencil on anything technically

so, when it comes to guitar chords, yeah there's sooo many different ways to place your fingers on the guitar and form a chord, but you can boil all of it down to the same shape, just repeated over and over on different positions of the neck

[wary shuttle]

the trouble is, on a guitar with standard tuning, you have that low E string which is the lowest you can go, while in the piano roll, you can go lower than that, and it's not clear exactly how far to the next note what you click on the piano roll needs to be to match what a real physical guitar can do

[wary shuttle]

oh, yeah, so i'd need a lookup table to get from what i play to the voicing to the stamp ??

[wanton socket]

it is true that, we could technically place our notes anywhere, but you can just follow that limitation mentally when you go to write the notes, the stamp tool is just there to do that for you

let's take a simple guitar chord for example, let's take open C yeah?

[wary shuttle]

k

[wanton socket]

this is how we'd play it on guitar right

[wary shuttle]

right i kno that one of course 😄

[wanton socket]

let's think about the actual notes being played here
C - E - G - C - E

do you know about barre chords?

[wary shuttle]

no or at least not by that name

[wanton socket]

so i have this written in the piano roll like this right this is our open C translated to a piano roll

[wary shuttle]

OK I looked it up. Yeah that's like how to play an A major chord on guitar

[wanton socket]

right

but instead

instead of having the open notes

you "barre" the fret you need

it's the same shape

well, it's a little different but

but like, this is a major barre chord, depending on where we barre our finger, will determine the key

so, this same shape, can be used to make every single major chord on the guitar

depending on where you put it

[wary shuttle]

except look, that has five open strings, while E major has six

[wanton socket]

buuut, if you put this shape here, on the 7th fret, then you get E major

basically, if i did this

now it's E Major

if it did this, it would be C Major

[wary shuttle]

OK but I was wanting to get the ... uh ... basic E major, not a super high version on fret 7

[wanton socket]

the open chords will have their own special voicings, they sorta exist in their own little world

so, all the basic open chords, will have a slightly different voicings than the barre voicings

[wary shuttle]

meaning this one of course

[wanton socket]

so it's probably worth to have in their own folder

[wanton socket]

right, but even this, check this out

if we just barre our finger somewhere else higher, we can change the key

like this. we can count the open strings, as if they're the "0th" fret

[wary shuttle]

OK so ... basically I'd need to attach filenames to each chord shape, then plop them onto the root note to get the right voicing. and i'd need to either memorize or have a lookup table to get from "This song goes G, C, D" to "i need this stamp then that stamp then that stamp" ???

btw not tryin to argue here, just tryin to understand what you're getting at

[wanton socket]

no i completely understand, i did not intend this to turn into a music theory / guitar theory explaination lol

but, i just wanted to stop you from wasting time

[wary shuttle]

oh yeah well thats good

i get that i wouldn't want to make way more of these stamps than are actually needed

[wanton socket]

i'll make you an example pack

with all the basic open chords

since we have unlimited freedom in FL Studio, vs a real guitar, it's important to be conscious of like, what's realistic, that is, if you're planning on 100% making playable songs or realistic sounding midi

[wary shuttle]

yes both of those are what i need for sure.

at the moment I'm trying to accurately transcribe stuff i can actually play but in the future i would also like to be able to write stuff for a better guitar player than i am. most critical is it actually being realistic ... sounding realistic is more of a nice-to-have.

FL Slayer gives you this little picture of a guitar and my thought is ... why can't they just do that but for the fretoboard so you can click on it?
I think the third party plugins RealStrat, RealLPC and RealGuitar did that sort of where you could click on the frets to preview the sound but seems like that'd be nice to have as an input interface for notes in the piano roll regardless of which sound you're using.

but if i can't have that or at least not right now then sure, whatever other solution works would be much appreciated @wanton socket

[wanton socket]

so, i went through and made .fsc files for 12 basic open chords, it's not all of them but most of them, went based off this chart

please put this zip and unzip in this folder

C:\Users\username\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Presets\Scores\Stamps

should look like this

then you will see the stamps here after you've restarted FL

i wrote down the quality of chord, and the open string shape it was based off of

this lets you just, put the shape down where it was originally based off of, but also lets you experiment with putting them wherever you want

[wary shuttle]

OK thanks, I can give that a try but also, I use this exact B7 a lot ... how would I get to that

[wanton socket]

i'll make one for you

[wary shuttle]

oh thanks

[wanton socket]

you could also just take one of the dominant shapes and put it to B

but this voicing is slightly different than the others

here's a small example using a decent library, already this is gg ez music writing

this was actually really fun to do. i love messing around with FL's features like this, very underrated and useful, thanks for the opportunity

[wary shuttle]

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\ seems to be as deep as that actually goes. guess I have to make the rest by hand

[wanton socket]

yeah if you haven't saved anything then there probably wouldn't be anything there

but if you follow the folder names exactly it'll work out

[wary shuttle]

i like to keep my stuff as reproducible as possible because i switch computers every few years like everyone so i'll have to write all this down somehow

[wanton socket]

yeah the data folder is pretty important, especially if you plan to do more custom fl stuff like this with fl's tools in the future

[wary shuttle]

btw how do i mute that stupid bot telling me i am gaining experience towards nothing for talking on a discord server?

i mute the #→⚡bot-actions channel but it doesn't seem to actually stop it

also who the hell thought it was a good idea to gamify talking with experience points

i seem to have a lot of stuff in my Stamps menu but am not sure what it all means. it doesn't seem to be the specific shapes you made

[wanton socket]

there's already stuff in there by default

if you haven't already restart fl real quick

make sure your folder structure looks like this

C:\Users\username\Documents\Image-Line\FL Studio\Presets\Scores\Stamps\Guitar Voicings\Open Chords - Basic

[wary shuttle]

oh i forgot i had changed my user data folder

that's why this no work, lemme move it over to the actual location i have

i also gotta update my fl studio to latest for htis

sure would be nice if programs like this were smart enough to save things in the lowest version of the file format that supports all the features you're actually using but oh well

i got it working, thanks @wanton socket

[native prairie]

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