FL Studio keyboard shortcuts.
Transport, window and editing shortcuts that keep your hands on the keyboard. Mac and Windows.
Learn the tool letters first
The single-letter tool shortcuts are the biggest speed-up available in FL Studio, because they work in both the playlist and the piano roll and you switch tools constantly while arranging. P is draw, B is paint, D deletes, E selects, C slices, T mutes, Z zooms and Y is the playback tool. The pair worth internalising first is P and B: draw places one item at a time, paint drags out repeats, and knowing which you are holding stops most accidental duplicate clips.
Function keys move between windows
FL Studio is a set of floating windows rather than a fixed layout, so navigating by keyboard matters more than in most software. F5 brings up the playlist, F6 the channel rack, F7 the piano roll and F9 the mixer. When the screen becomes unmanageable, F12 closes every open window at once — the fastest way to get back to a clean workspace without dragging anything.
Undo works differently here
This trips up people arriving from other software. In FL Studio, Ctrl/⌘ + Z toggles between the last two states rather than walking backwards through your history — press it twice and you are back where you started. To step back through multiple actions, use Ctrl/⌘ + Alt/⌥ + Z repeatedly. If undo has ever seemed not to work, this is why.
Recording and playback
Space starts and stops playback and R arms recording, but the shortcut that saves the most time is L, which flips between pattern and song mode. Writing a part in pattern mode and then checking it in the full arrangement is the core loop of working in FL Studio, and doing it from the keyboard keeps you out of the transport bar. In the piano roll, Ctrl/⌘ + Q quantises the selected notes straight away.