The grid controller is one of the most successful instrument designs of the last twenty years, and it has been an Ableton-shaped object for essentially all of it. Novation’s Launchpad arrived in 2009 as a hardware surface for Live’s session view, and the reason it worked is that Live’s session view is already a grid — clips in a matrix, scenes in columns. The controller was a one-to-one map of something that existed on screen.
FL Studio is not shaped like that, which is why a first-party grid controller for it is a more interesting proposition than another Launchpad variant.
Novation’s own walkthrough of the range.
FLpad is a range of grid controllers for FL Studio, developed by Novation with Image-Line — and it follows FLkey, Novation’s FL-specific keyboard line, as the second product of that partnership.
Why FL Studio is the harder target
Ableton Live’s two views are arrangement (linear timeline) and session (clip grid). Session view exists specifically to be performed, and a grid of pads is the obvious controller for it.
FL Studio’s core objects are different:
- The Channel Rack — a vertical list of instruments, each with a step sequencer row
- The Playlist — a freeform arrangement where patterns are painted onto tracks, with far fewer constraints than Live’s scene-and-clip model
- The Piano Roll, which is widely considered the best in any DAW and is where most FL users spend most of their time
None of those is natively a 8×8 matrix. The step sequencer is the closest thing — a row of sixteen steps per channel, which maps onto two rows of a grid, or onto the full width with some scrolling.
So a grid for FL has to make a real decision: is the X axis time, or is it something else? On a Launchpad in session view, X is scene and Y is track, and time is handled by the global transport. A step-sequencer-oriented grid wants X to be steps within a bar and Y to be which channel — which is the Push/MPC drum-sequencer idiom rather than the Launchpad clip-launching one.
That distinction is the thing to watch for in any grid controller for FL, and it is the question the hardware has to answer.
Why first-party integration is worth more than it sounds
Any grid controller can send MIDI to any DAW. What first-party development buys is the display and the mapping being correct without you configuring it — pad colours reflecting channel colours, the grid following which pattern is selected, mode buttons that switch between the sequencer and the mixer and the browser in ways that match how the host actually works.
This is almost entirely a software achievement rather than a hardware one, and it is what separates a controller you keep from a controller you spend an evening mapping and then stop using. Novation’s Launchpad and Ableton’s Push both demonstrate it, and the reason there has been no equivalent for FL Studio is that it required Image-Line’s cooperation.
For FL’s user base — which is enormous, young, and skews heavily toward hip-hop and electronic production — the gap has been real. FL users who wanted hardware have mostly bought MPCs, Maschine, or a Launchpad they then fought with.
What to actually evaluate
Novation has announced a range, not a single unit, which follows the Launchpad pattern of a small bus-powered model and a larger one with more controls. The questions that will decide whether these are good:
Does it sequence, or only trigger? A grid that only launches patterns is much less useful in FL than in Live, because FL’s performance model is weaker and its sequencing model is stronger.
Is the piano roll reachable? FL’s best feature is its worst fit for a grid. Some controllers handle melodic input with scale-locked pad layouts; whether FLpad does is the difference between a drum tool and an instrument.
Does it work standalone? The Launchpad Pro and Mini have a MIDI out and some standalone function; a controller that is inert without the computer is a narrower object.
And does it work with anything else? FL-specific is a selling point and a risk. The FLkey line is usable as a generic controller elsewhere; a grid locked to one host is a harder purchase.
We will cover the range properly once units are in hands and the mode structure is documented rather than announced.