Personal Frame

The process of creating this infographic went relatively smoothly; however, I was surprised at how long it took despite being a relatively simple graphic. Part of it might be due to my unfamiliarity with Illustrator, though I think that I just underestimated the amount of work that goes into creating graphics.

Deciding on a final color scheme was rather difficult. I wanted to work with the colors in the FL logo, but they aren’t exactly complimentary on an infographic scale. I went for a sort of industrial, metal plate look with light accents based on the logo and common colors in FL. I aimed for a graphically heavy infographic, but there’s also a ton of depth to FL Studio. In order to keep a clean graphic, I’ve listed some of the more complex aspects of the workstation as well as some references and tutorials below.

As for the software, I was very impressed with the capabilities of Illustrator. I never once ran into the issue of not being able to do something, only that I didn’t know how to do it.

Limitations

I only included one quote that referenced it, but there are several notable users that praise FL Studio for being good to get ideas down quickly. What isn't mentioned, is that in areas such as large scale projects and efforts to fine tune certain details of a song, FL Studio can be somewhat difficult to work with. The array of native plugins leaves some to be desired as well, though I'm on FL 11 so it may have changed by now. Other DAWs have more powerful methods of editing recorded clips compared to FL Studio's Edison, and project organization can get a bit messy with the window stacking and drop down boxes. Particularly for genres that involve a lot of live recording such as indie, rock, and metal, FL Studio gets outshined.

Technical Documentation

Quite a few of my references on the software are directly from Image Line's documentation. I borrowed the detailed Interface picture and tried to address the most noticeable portions of the UI. A similar process was done with the Piano Roll page, though I left out the diagram because it was labelled a bit too intensely. I referenced both the Step Sequencer and Mixer pages because it was difficult to concisely put what they do into words, and they are useful for learning them individually.

The Fruity Limiter and Parametric EQ 2 are both essential to mastering. I've included them here as an introduction to plugins and mastering.

Other References

Similar to Illustrator, if you can think of it, there's probably a video for it for FL Studio. I found this video to be the most effective at explaining how to create a sub bass, and is the setup for the EQ that I used on the graphic. To combat the issue regarding a lack of plugins, I've included a tutorial on how to add your own. The tutorial is for Native Instruments, though the process is the same for all plugins. This list contains tons of great, free plugins to start; I've personally used several and have been surprised by the quality. Lastly, I've included a cheat sheet to circumvent having to actually learn music theory :)

Final Products

I don't have any personal projects that I feel would fit well to the theme of this raid, though there's this entirely free VST (plugin) based composition here that shows some of the ins-and-outs of the software.

Citations

FL Studio / Image Line Icons included in Image Line Press Kit - Buttons for each function e.g. Interface, Mixer, etc. taken directly from FL Studio - Music Note Icon