Recording Friuty Loops Into Pro Tools Using ReWire

A question I’m often asked by rookie music producer and engineers is; what’s the best way to use Fruity Loops for my music creation platform, but use Pro Tools for my vocals, instruments and final production platform?

I usually get the same story on how people love Fruity Loops as a sequencer platform but they have to spend too much time and sometimes extra money to get their vocals and instruments incorporated, and the project as a whole to sound professional.

First, let’s talk a little bite about Fruity Loops. When Fruity Loops first came out, after a couple of years on the market it soon became a great program for beginners and for advanced players in the music industry. With an extremely user friendly MIDI platform to work with, Fruity loops became one of the most popular software sequencers you could buy. But, through the years it kind of lost its steam in the industry to programs like Reason and Cubase. It then became noted for something that mostly only beginners would use, and if you were going to be professional then you would need to be on a whole different level. But now present day, Fruity Loops has out done themselves and has earned themselves the respect to rank right along with all the top dog music programs of the industry.

I personally enjoy and prefer working with Fruity Loops when sampling or working with any type of MIDI beats. But, when it comes to my final product I don’t even mess around with the thought of doing any of the tiny final touches or mastering in Fruity Loops. Even know Fruity Loops has mastering tools, I found that most of them are really just a lot of eye candy, a lot of bark but no bit. In fact, I found that some can even steer you in the wrong direction. This is where I will use Rewire and rewire fruity loops to Pro Tools. You can record in Pro Tools via MIDI or by audio track, and you can record each track individually or in the stereo left and right channel. My suggestion to you, to help make your life easier, is to record your Fruity Loops session into Pro Tools by audio track. Although Pro Tools is MIDI compatible, I still use the audio tracks to save me the hassle and open up my options. Now depending on what kind of project I am working on, and what my plans are once I am ready record into Pro Tools, will determine rather I will be recording just the Fruity Loops stereo track or if I will be recording each track individually. Recording each track individually has its perks. Recording individually into Pro Tools will allow you to use Pro Tools plug-ins, adjust automation, pan, volume control, and solo on each track from Fruity Loops without going back into Fruity Loops. This task can be tedious but in the long run it might save you some major headaches.






So how does the process of recording audio from Fruity Loops to Pro Tools work? Very easily, make sure Fruity Loops is not running and start up Pro Tools, I’m going to assume that if you have Pro Tools you know the basics, so I won’t bore you with the real simply things.

First crate an audio track and also create an instrument track. Go to the mix window and go to your instrument plug-in options. There you should find an option that reads instruments, then you should see an option to pick Fruity Loops. When you select this option; Fruity Loops will automatically come up and will be wired to Pro Tools.

Next go to the instrument track, go to input selector and select interface 1-2 (stereo), then go right below that to the instrument output selector and select bus 1-2. Once you have done that go to the audio track input selector and select bus 1-2 for the input, now right below that on the track output selector, select interface output 1-2 (stereo). Now you are routed correctly.

Now make both tracks record ready and make sure both programs have the same bpm’s, if they do not, make the proper adjustments to make them match.

Next, once all that is set, hit record/play in Pro Tools, this should prompt Fruity Loops to start playing as well and while Fruity Loops is playing Pro Tools will be recording. Once I am done recording the project using this process, I will then be ready to do vocals, final adjustments and mastering. There are many different mastering programs but I find that the Izotop is the best program for Pro Tools.

Now if you want to record each track out of Fruity Loops individually you will still only need one instrument track but you will have to create as many audio tracks in Pro Tools as you have in Fruity Loops. Use the record enable function in Pro Tools to indicate which track will be receiving the signal to be recorded, and in fruity loops use the mute function to mute all the tracks that you do not want to record at that time. Again this process can be a little bit tedious and can take up a lot of time, but if you find out somewhere down the road that something needs to be changed you will be in a lot better shape if all your tracks are individually recorded into Pro Tools.