Posted in: Piano by XPlained on December 4th, 2011 | 0 Comments
Ever listen to a hard rap song with a nice snare roll transition. Well this quick tutorial will show you the things you should and shouldn’t do to make a nice snare roll.
First, you need to make sure that you have you notes on half step, if you don’t know how to do this, you do it like so:
a) Get your snare sound, preferably a short and quick snare, like a dirty south snare. 
b) Then, right click the sound, and click “Piano Roll” 
c) Once in the piano roll, look at the top left corner and you’ll see a magnet, click it. It will bring up a menu. Select “1/2 note”. This is the snap menu and it asks you how you want the notes to snap on the piano roll grid. 
What this does is it makes it were on the piano roll, instead of following the lines, you can move a note half way between the lines. This is necessary for a good snare roll.
Randomly place notes in (on C5 of course, but you can have the pitch going down or going up, but you can also just leave it on C5.) You can have fun on this part. There is no said way to do this, you just create it from your imagination. BUT, normally, snare rolls build up. So towards the end of the bar, it should be getting faster, but you can make this variate.
This is a good example of a snare roll: 
But if you want some thing really pro, you can move to 1/6 notes, but you have to use your judgement to make it match with the rhythm of the beat, and you’ll have to zoom in once to do it easily. (Look towards the far top right of the piano roll window and you’ll see the scroll bar. Look at the right of the “right arrow” button and you’ll see a button with a square in it, click it and hold it, then drag upwards just a tad bit until you zoom in.)
Here’s a good example of a snare roll made with 1/6 notes zoomed in once: 
Hopefully this tutorial helped you ! If you liked this, you might wanna check out my YouTube channel and listen to some of my beats made in FL Studio and in the future I plan on releasing video tutorials along with the ones I have on my old channel.
(my current) www.youtube.com/devandalz(my old one) www.youtube.com/acoxproductionz