Fruity Loops 8 and my new acoustic song – please help me figure this out!!

[alongthewaves]

Hopefully somebody can assist me. I signed up just to figure this out. I am trying to make a demo of my new song. I tried fruity loops years ago and decided fake instruments added to my acoustic weren't my thing but as time has gone by I feel I want more in my recordings and so ive returned to fruity loops. I have fruity loops 8. Here are the steps I took. First I came up with a standard 4 beats of the bass drum set to the tempo I like. Then I exported those 4 beats as a wave and looped them in cakewalk and exported that as a wav into a barebones recording program and used it as my metronome to record my rhythm guitar. Then I exported the rhythm guitar wav back into fruity loops. Here's where my problems begin.
First, I can't figure out the piano roll for the life of me. I would like to add a choral backing to my guitar to give the melody something special. So I make my plugin selection and highlight the cell next to the note I want. Then I draw it into the playlist cell I desire. Problem is I thought the piano loop would stop where the cell is no longer highlighted but it goes on for more beats then it should. This is driving me up a wall. This and it seems the drum loop in fruity doesn't loop perfectly. I reconstructed the loop I made in cakewalk and it seems to slow down slightly in one of the cells throwing off the entire flow. I don't know if that is because I recorded my rhythm with a loop originally made in cakewalk. I don't know but I was at it 3.5 hours last night and I hade nothing to show. I hope that's not too confusing. I really need to figure out this piano roll because I would like to add bass and some other instruments that require it. Thanks for any of your time. (im currently at work so if any of my fruity loops terminology is wrong, I apologize.)

 

[The Cancers]

There is a whole slew of things that could be wrong here. I have very limited experience with fruity loops, though the songs I have used it on, I have been successful in getting it to do what I wanted.
Two things to check:
1) is the global tempo setting in fruity loops the same as the one you recorded to? I know it might be obvious, but I had huge problems until I fixed this.
2) is the drum and bass loop you used exactly the right length? That is, does it start at 1:000:01 and end at 3:119:97, or something like that?
These might (emphasize might) be causing the problems with it not lining up exactly right.

As far as the notes going on longer than you want, this is pretty easily fixable by editing the channel settings of the instrument you are using (left click on the instrument in the step sequencer)

There are some forums out there dedicated specifically to fruityloops, many with video tutorials. You ought to do some more research before asking these questions, as the generality of the questions is gonna dictate general (read unhelpful) answers. Good luck.