10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music Soulja Boy, Sonny Digital, 9th Wonder, and other producers discuss the influence of the program that went from a porn game company coder's side project to a building block of the sound of modern music. RJ By Reed Jackson December 11, 2015, 10:44am https://www.vice.com/en/article/rnwkvz/fruity-loops-fl-studio-program-used-to-create-trap-music-sound 1/20 10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music Images by Christopher Classens Deep in the bowels of YouTube lies a very standard denition video of Atlanta hip- hop artist Soulja Boy touring his home studio. Dressed in a baggy white T-shirt and yellow gold jewelry, the baby-faced rapper shows off a rinky-dink microphone, a small MIDI keyboard and not much else. With a slight smirk hinting at the impishness that at one point raised the ire of several prominent hip-hop gures, Soulja Boy then goes on to explain that all of his big songs, including his chart- topping smash “Crank Dat,” were actually created on his laptop. The rest of the equipment came later. ADVERTISEMENT “[‘Crank Dat’] probably took me like ten minutes to make, and everyone know I made like 10 million dollars off of the song,” he says. “People were like, ‘Man, you used this demo version [of a software program] to make this song that went number one and made all this money.’” Although he namedrops the software quite a few times throughout the video, the fact alone that he references a “demo version” of it would give most millennials enough of a hint to know what he’s talking about. After all, it was the accessibility of the popular beatmaking program FruityLoops that rst drew an entire generation of kids to it in the early 2000s. With a quick click on le-sharing applications like Napster or Kazaa, we were allowed access to a full-scale music generator, albeit a https://www.vice.com/en/article/rnwkvz/fruity-loops-fl-studio-program-used-to-create-trap-music-sound 2/20 10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music version that we couldn’t always save. You didn’t have to buy an instrument or an MPC; you didn’t have to know how to read notes. All you needed to do was drag together colorful blocks of sound to create compositions. It was easy to use but sophisticated, an entry point for anyone with any sort of music production ambitions. Soulja Boy Shows How He Made Some Of His Hits Off Fruity Loops & Makin … “A lot of these guys have reached out to me and said… ‘Dude, you made it possible for me to sit in my bedroom and do something that t my budget,” producer 9th Wonder, an early high-prole user of the program in his work with Little Brother and Jay Z, told me over the phone. The low cost of FruityLoops, its straightforward interface, and the simple fact that it was software and not hardware made it appealing to users—if also a target of critique. At the time the in-studio video of Soulja Boy was shot in 2009, he was enduring a barrage of hate for the simplicity of his music, which had been downloaded millions of times. But being the most reviled rap act of the moment—Ice-T had dubbed him the killer of hip-hop—seemingly gave Soulja thick skin. Rather than use the video as an apology, he uses it as a declaration, proudly asserting that he indeed does make https://www.vice.com/en/article/rnwkvz/fruity-loops-fl-studio-program-used-to-create-trap-music-sound 3/20 10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music beats using his computer, in only ten minutes, on a program that he doesn’t even own. He puts a cherry on top by proclaiming that it all results in “hits.” “I didn’t have money to buy beats from other producers,” he recently told me. Six years later, he’s still using FruityLoops, now called FL Studio, and those ten minutes have been cut down to ve. “I was forced to make them myself,” he said. “I’d be making beats everyday when I got home from school. I had to have made over 150 in a couple of months.” One of those turned into the number one song in the country and a major record deal. Soulja Boy’s narrative of using FL to go from relative obscurity to stardom is not unique: Many others, including heavy hitters like Hit-Boy, Metro Boomin, Young Chop, and Hudson Mohawke, share similar story arcs, evolving from hobbyists to producers for artists like Drake and Kanye West. In this sense alone, the program could be regarded as an incubator for new pop music, serving as a training ground and sharpening producers’ skills over the past 15 years through its simple workow. But its inuence extends beyond just the talent it’s spawned: Since its release in the late 90s, FL has helped shape the actual sound of music across a number of genres, from hip-hop to electronic music to the mainstream pop they lter into. In particular, its one-of-a-kind step-sequencer (those little chiclets of color on its interface) is what southern beatmakers used to help develop the “trap” sound, which is now everywhere. The sequencer lends itself to the creation of the stuttering hi-hats—when the digital cymbals alternate between eighth and 16th notes, establishing a rolling effect—that producers like Lex Luger used to dene the genre. That broad style of hi-hat is currently in vogue, becoming the building block of other hip-hop subgenres like Chicago drill and ltering into music from artists like Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Miley Cyrus—not to mention hip-hop mainstays like Gucci Mane, Chief Keef, and Future. The producers behind those artists often wear their usage of FL as a badge of honor. Atlanta’s Sonny Digital, for example, is unafraid to admit that “all of the https://www.vice.com/en/article/rnwkvz/fruity-loops-fl-studio-program-used-to-create-trap-music-sound 4/20 10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music biggest hits”—his resume includes Future’s “Same Damn Time,” 2 Chainz and Kanye West’s “Birthday Song,” and iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday”—were made on the program. He, like so many others, originally downloaded a “cracked” version of it to explore its capabilities before purchasing the real deal. He’s stuck with it ever since, despite now having access to any piece of equipment he could ask for. In his eyes, FL taught him a majority of what he knows about music. “It opened so many doors for me,” he explained to me. “That was just a whole new breakthrough for us.” He also credits the program for being “any age-friendly” in the sense that anyone, regardless of their expertise, can use it to create something special. Roc Nation’s Jahlil Beats shared a similar sentiment. When I breached the topic with him on the phone, he was in a studio using the software to lay out les to prepare for a show with EDM god Skrillex that weekend. Similar to Soulja Boy, he touted the fact that he can knock a beat out in under 15 minutes at, citing FL’s smooth workow as a major advantage. “You can grab all the instruments at once and throw them right together on the grid,” he said, “and just click away.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/rnwkvz/fruity-loops-fl-studio-program-used-to-create-trap-music-sound 5/20 10/3/2020 The Story of FruityLoops: How a Belgian Porno Game Company Employee Changed Modern Music Jhalil’s father was the one to rst introduce him to FL—also a cracked copy. He now uses version 10 (it’s up to version 12) to create monstrous instrumentals for songs like Meek Mill and Drake’s “Amen” and Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Boy.” For both Jhalil and Sonny, FL serves as a tool to create hits—which is something it originally wasn’t anticipated to do. Didier “Gol” Dambrin, the program’s Belgian-French creator, is the rst to admit that. To him, it started out as a side project while he was working at a Dutch- Belgian software company called Image-Line that focused on adult games such as Porntris. FL was meant to be a simple application for building MIDI loops that had a “visually appealing” display. It was intended to be fun, simple and not much beyond that. “It hadn’t started very seriously,” he admitted to me over email, in a rare interview. “It was absolutely nothing like what it is today.” Growing up in the 80s, Gol (a nickname derived from an old online alias) was part of the rst generation to have access to home video game consoles and computers. He was infatuated by the machinery and eventually fell in love with coding, which he learned through gamer magazines that published full encryptions of games in their pages. One time, he took a code from the arcade classic Breakout, which involved using a rectangle-shaped paddle to knock a ball into Technicolor blocks that would evaporate upon impact, and warped it into his own creation, turning the paddle into a small character.