Music
FL Studio & Pirate Culture
Rendering local specificity to the software enterprise that changed music-making globally
A piece of software that came to define music-making in the current millennium has its roots in a company that developed games associated with something else that continues to set trends today: porn.
Piracy isn't something you speak about unless you are the feds. It's something you do: A lifestyle, a state of mind, an approach.
Maseru was tax haven-like in the early 2000s -- slow and quiet, off-grid, but with a thriving underground culture of exchanging stuff: Dubbed cassette tapes, 'illegal' MP3s, cracked software.
The cats who were operating on the scene didn't quite get the 'illegal' part. They would, consciously and otherwise, shift the goalposts to subvert the definitions of illegality and copyright infringement. It was Russia on a small scale, minus the skinheads, with tzars who passed time searching for torrents on-line.
Hence, the copies of Fruity Loops that landed up on hard drives were all illegal. The files of early beats that emerged from the software-as-breakfast-cereal DAW wound up on 1.44-inch floppy discs (because flash drives weren't always around and when they did come, were priced above what most pockets could afford).
Fruity Loops' first iteration was compiled in 1997 and released as a free beta in 1998. It was masterminded by Didier “Gol” Dambrin while working for Belgian software developers Image-Line. The company was fixated on adult market-facing games like Porntris and Private Investigator.
"While working on the company’s next game, a shoot-em-up style alien invasion set in New York City called Eat This, Gol was also starting to develop the first version of FruityLoops on his own," according to this article.
So, a piece of software that came to define music-making in the current millennium has its roots in a company that developed games associated with something else that continues to set trends today: porn.
Very...fitting.
However, the early beatmakers in Maseru like Full Metal Jacket, Vortch 0.9, Frozen Slosh used a different set of tools. The former employed the tru-skool method of programming drums on his keyboard's sequencer, tracking that onto tape, then programming the melody while letting the drums play, and tracking the result onto another tape. Reading about the process makes one feel exhausted, so imagine having to do it.
The latter two worked on Melody Assistant, fashioned as an 'easy-to-use' interface with 'powerful capabilities'.
There is nothing easy about software that required one to grasp music theory. There is nothing attractive about music-making software with shitty drum sounds and with no potential to input an external sound library.
The Fruity Loops appeal boiled down to its affordability and ease of use, and its ability to accommodate samples. It was the anti-thesis to the hip hop world-led MPC propaganda peddled by 'the greats' -- the likes of Pete Rock, J-Dilla, Just Blaze, and so forth.
But the early 2000s had many other alternatives. There was EJay, which Maseru heads gravitated briefly towards, but quickly put down due to its lack of flexibility; there was Cakewalk, which was hella confusing to use, in line with Cubase and Nuendo, and with pre Mac-only Logic Pro; and there was Reason, which was moderately easy to use but required a lot of hard drive space for them extra nooks and crannies.
Image-Line adopted the FL Studio name following a lawsuit.
The mainstream press is quick to praise Soulja Boy for employing stock sounds for his breakout hit. Garage, grime and dubstep producers, too, would resort to these very stock sounds to craft their scene-specific signature tunes.
"Early 2000s was Tracker and Acid Pro in particular...I started on Acid and did a bit on Scream Tracker, and then moved to Reason when it came out," says UK-born electronic music producer Jumping Back Slash, whose current release is the Morena Leraba-guesting seven-track EP, Animals.
A sign that one was new at FL Studio was through beats that employed the stock sounds, so that shit didn't fly either. The rap world didn't give two shits about it for a long time.
Around 2004, the only question that mattered to music heads in Maseru was whether one preferred FL Studio or Reason for production. Debates -- engaging, but ultimately pointless -- would rage for hours on end. The FL'ers would centre ease of use, while the Reason'ers would propel the 'better sound quality' narrative.
Rewiring was how the more level-headed cats went about it: Use the expansive sounds from Reason's library, and funk that up with sampled drum sounds from self-built libraries in FL Studio, in addition to the software's plug-in-friendly features.
2004 was also the year that the rap world discovered that 9th Wonder produced Jay Z's "Threat". The following year, it emerged that Dizzee Rascal used Playstation sounds to program the beats on his debut masterpiece, Boy in da Corner. Those early moments led more people to embrace low-entry software. Them cats and others made it okay to not have any hardware around while making music; to manufacture everything on-board and in-house, in a way.
In a recent interview, the gqom lord DJ Lag stated that he still relies on his Windows OS laptop and FL Studio, alongside some nifty plug-ins, to make music. "I'm still old school," he said, unaware of the irony.
Irony, because the praise heaped upon FL Studio was never the norm. Hence, the software speaks to myth-making from one generation to the next; villains of the past are gentrified and put in shiny packs that future generations can enjoy without the discomforts of being called out for relying on stock sounds.
