How to Play a One-Shot Sample Seamlessly in FL Studio

Sometimes you’ll run into a sound in the form of a sample that you wish you could play longer. You might have noticed that the higher you play the notes, the shorter the sample becomes. This is a common problem with short 808 or bass samples.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution in FL Studio by using Edison to create loop points that will continuously loop the sample seamlessly.

First, you’ll want to go to the channel settings of your sample and right-click the waveform window. Select the option and select “Edit in Audio Editor.” This will send the sample to an instance of Edison.

In Edison, click the bottom left dropdown menu. Go to the snap settings and select Zero-Point Crossing. This will allow your cursor to click on parts of the waveform that won’t click or pop when you create loop points. You can easily see the wave cycles in the 808 above. Each cycle starts from zero, goes up and down and back to zero. When creating a loop, you’ll want to start on any of the zero crossings and then click and drag at least 1 full cycle. Once you’ve highlighted to the cycle, use ALT + L to create a loop.

Play the sample with the loop option turned on by selecting the top left icon, next to the play button. You can improve the sound of the loop by moving it around and selecting different wave cycles for your loop points. The reason this doesn’t work on all samples is that you need a perfect wave cycle to create seamless loops. Otherwise, you’ll hear pops, clicks and abrupt changes during the looping of the sample.

You can save this as a new waveform and it will maintain the loop point information. You can also drag and drop the new waveform by using the drag icon at the top right of the Edison toolbar or directly drop into the playlist by clicking the icon directly below.

Another thing to keep in mind is that this may change the overall pitch of your sample. So you’ll want to tune it back with the channel pitch settings to fit your project. I recommend saving this as a channel state after you tune the sample to C. That way it will always match up with any of the notes in the piano roll.

Hopefully, this improves your collection of 808s and samples by giving them more opportunities to be used in situations where the sample didn’t last long enough.