It’s time for when I do a mini-review of every single effect in FLStudio.
I’m not going to waste any more time with the foreword. Let’s do it.
Spoiler - Overall rating:
Jul 18, 2018 - It's time for when I do a mini-review of every single effect in FLStudio. Fruity Free Filter; Fruity HTML NoteBook; Fruity LSD; Fruity Limiter; Fruity Love. Fruity Parametric EQ; Fruity Parametric EQ 2; Fruity Peak Controller; Fruity Phase Inverter; Fruity. These plugins come with all versions of FLStudio. Mastering Plugins in Fl Studio 12: A Guide to Using Them A lot of times, mastering your music seems very challenging. The first thing I do is add 2 Parametric EQ's to the master channel. The first one is only for cutting the low and high frequencies that are inaudible. Thanks for reading. Please feel free to share, like, and comment.
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- Free for Everyone
- Fruity Mute 2
- Fruity PanOMatic
- Patcher
- Producer Only
- Signature only
- All Plugins only
STOP HERE
Look at how nice these images are.
FLStudio’s effects are mostly all vectorized. I took these images on a 5k iMac and due to the vectorization of the GUIs, they came out sharp and massive.
This is something that nearly every other DAW can learn from. No other DAW has such a collection of beautifully scaling effects.
END TRANSMISSION
These plugins come with all versions of FLStudio
Control Surface
Fruity X-Y-Z Controller
Described here. Also Awesome.
Patcher
Ever had this awesome idea for creating a multiband compressor or a Vocoder on your own? Routing gets crazy if you try to do that with tracks/effects slots…
Patcher comes to the rescue! You get modular routing of MIDI, Control data and Audio. You can easily do something like create a fully parallel 24 filter patch like I have in the image above.
Patcher integrates with control surface to help you simplify the UI to your beautiful patcher creation.
It can be a bit time consuming to create patcher patches, but once you do it you can save it as a preset and load it easily. Take a moment to create your ultimate multiband compressor with your favorite compressors and then add some controls that let you use it exactly how you want to use it. Now you have your own custom plugin ready to go.
Patcher is also an instrument, which means you can use it to create layered sounds or adjust your MIDI data as you desire and send it where you want inside patcher.
Patcher also lets you do some interesting routing things with the VFX controllers.
Patcher is just awesome.
VFX Color Mapper
This is what lets you split MIDI Channels (called colors or voices in FLStudio) out to different things that accept MIDI (instruments mostly).
It also lets you route channels to other channels.
That’s it.
I wish they’d not call them ‘colors’ though. Just call them MIDI Channels.
VFX Key Mapper
This is a transposer. You can transpose specific MIDI notes to other notes.
The main cool thing here is that you can have multiple assignments per note. So you could assign C to D E and G, then set it up so each subsequent press selects in a specific way (cycle, random, play all, gain compensated (average of notes to velocities)).
That can make for some really interesting chord progressions, or outright be a chord progression machine.
VFX Keyboard Splitter
Here is where you can create splits. You can map specific keys or ranges of keys to different outputs.
The unique thing here is that it’s not a pure ‘this note is this, and that note is that’ type mapping. You can have overlapping ranges where the velocities passed through. So C5 could be on all of the layers, but pass with different velocity for each if yo want.
You also have transpose per zone.
Each zone has its own velocity mapping curve.
The downside here is that I found it rather difficult to edit in the graph. (EDIT: This is because it defaults to snap mode. Turn off snap mode, and the pencil, for a better editing experience). Editing the Keyboard map is confusing how it adds/removes nodes. Moving nodes is difficult as well.
However there is a “manual mapping” mode that selects each zone one after the other. You press the highest key that you want in that zone and it creates the zone for you automatically. That aids the mapping a bit.
Once again, this has the cool graph editor.
VFX Level Scaler
This scales the velocity, release, pitch, pan and mod X/Y values for the input. You can create a mapping curve, multiply, offset or adjust the center value.
It also can ‘humanize’ (randomize centered around the input value).
It’d be neat if there was a way to split different velocities out to different outputs, but nope.
Razer Chroma
32-bit only. No review here.
Soundgoodizer
Maximus presets.
Alright. Well… maximus doesn’t suck, so this doesn’t suck by the commutative property.
Wave Candy
Visualization, but prettier. You get 4 modes
- Oscilloscope - your waveform.
- Spectrum - A spectrogram (like I’ve used already in this post.
- Meter - simple meter.
- Vectorscope - stereo visualization.
Wave candy is pretty fantastic.
The Meter mode has PPM, VU and Leq(a) and ITU-R BS.1770 modes which are exceptionally important for certain production modes. It happily can sit ‘on top’ of everything and you have a lot of control over how it looks. The VU and PPM modes appear to work correctly much to my surprise.
The Spectrum mode has a scale option (which should almost always be maxxed) with FFT resolution up to 8192 and proper pating (the dB range knob). It also has a piano roll on the left to help you identify notes. You can mouseover to see what note a frequency corresponds to in realtime too. Awesome.
The oscilloscope mode has proper interpolation, but it is missing parameters for adjusting triggering. Sometimes the sound you want to watch flies by too fast and you want it to align the center on some specific data.
The window seems to reset to ‘oscilloscope’ for me when I resize it. What a downer.
There’s plenty of options for colouring things and presets for that.
FANTASTIC. Good Job IL.
ZGameEditor Visualizer
All Plugins only
These plugins are only available in the All Plugins Bundle
Transient Processor
Transient processor does what it says on the tin. It helps you control transients and sustain of sounds.
There’s a nice graph that shows you what’s happening and 3 modes for attack and release. The transient processing goes through an adjustable high/low pass split, which makes it much easier to target transients.
One of the more interesting things you can do is turn the split freq down so you have a lot of low-end passing through. Now you can add some thickness to your sounds by using the release knob heavily, along with the drive control.
Transient Processor is fairly simple, but it is a competent transient processor. It looks clean too.
Overall rating:
Didier Dambrin is a genius. He’s the author of most (but not all) of these plugins. The feel of a single designer flows through these products. At no point did I ever feel like I needed to switch around how I expected things to work. All of the plugins feel like they are part of the same product line.
Yes, I rated this higher than Logic. I don’t think that FLStudio has the most amazing plugins in terms of adding ‘vibe’ or similar, but the workflow is superb. Getting things done in FL with the included plugins is easy. The GUIs all use similar widgets, graphs and displays. There’s rarely a time where you need to rethink how to use something. If you know how to use one, then you can use them all.
There are some holes in the offerings though. Hardcore sucks. FL could do with a better guitar and bass plugin suite. There’s no emulations or anything that adds that warm vibey sound out of the box. You can create it with the included products, but you’re in for some work. If FL had tried to add some analog emulations, but not added enough or were poor, I’d have rated it much lower. Their current offering shows what their focus and design goals are, and I respect that. I’ve rated it based on that context.
I would like a better algorithmic reverb option as well, but Fruity Convolver makes up for it.
On that note, Reeverb 2 is a good example of why I’ve rated FL’s effects so highly. It’s not a good reverb on its own, but it’s easy to use and with FL’s other capabilities it can be used to create something special. It’s just an integrated experience.
I REALLY like Wave Candy, particularly when put on the ‘current track’ (which follows your currently selected track). It makes metering easy and it has the necessary standards available to create deliverables that are expected in 2018+. It would be nice if the Wave Candy functionality was built in to every meter, but I can forgive it due to FL’s current track.
I won’t say that FL has the most amazing collection of effects, it doesn’t. I actually think that belongs to another DAW, but I do think that FLStudio has the most comprehensive experience. In the end that’s what matters. What gets you making music.
This post took 26 hours to research, screenshot, write and edit. Yes, it’s A LOT of work. If you appreciate the information presented then please consider joining patreon or donating!
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So you've mixed your latest production and it's time to master it? While mastering engineers are often the best option, if you want to master your own tracks in FL Studio here's 8 essential tips.
1—Cut Your Lows for Headroom
Try adding a low cut and cut everything below 40 Hz. This cuts out any inaudible frequencies that the human ear can’t hear and take up valuable headroom in the mix. So add a Fruity Parametric EQ 2 and then apply a low cut.
2—Use a Multiband Compressor
You have two multiband compressor options in FL Studio. The Fruity Multiband Compressor, or Maximus. I would recommend using Maximus as its features are more advanced. How Maximus works is that you have three bands (Low, Mid, High) where you can set the frequency range for each, and then also a single band master compressor on the effect. This gives you added control over your audio through the frequency range, plus you can gel the bands together with the single band master compressor.
For example, you could apply a heavier compression setting over the 0–200 Hz region where you bass and kick usually sit, and this won’t affect elements in the higher registers like the cymbals and hats. So decide where you want the band splits to be by soloing each band and then moving over to the right view to adjust the frequency amount.
And then you can see the result of the compression on each band by switching to the monitor view. So tailor the amount of gain for each band, plus the Attack and release times. What I find really cool is that you can even draw in unique threshold curves in the graph. It’s actually very easy setting the threshold this way on the graph.
I like to apply a harder compression on the Low band and increase this slightly. Then I apply slightly less compression to the Mid band. And then for the High band, I don't apply compression, just gain for a bit more high-end detail in the track.
With the Master band, you use this as a single band compressor to gel all the bands together. Just apply a subtle compression here to help even out the compression on the track.
![Fruity Fruity](/uploads/1/2/5/7/125751515/956784169.jpg)
3—Adding in Saturation
With Maximus, you can also add in some slight saturation per band, also known as harmonic exciting. With the threshold, you have two modes: Mode A or Mode B: and you can choose what percentage of the mode you want to add by moving the dial left or right from the center. With the ceiling dial, when you start decreasing this you’ll hear it imparts the saturation on the band.
4—How About Another EQ
After the multiband compression, you might want to make some EQ adjustments. If so, then add another Fruity Parametric EQ2. I sometimes find a slightly high EQ boost can help bring back some of the high-end detail that got removed through the compression. But this isn’t always necessary. So only use this if you find you need to do some EQ adjustments after the compression.
5—Some Reverb
What also helps to gel the elements together and give your track a sense of a space that it belongs in is to add some reverb. You can either use the algorithmic Fruity Reeverb2, or the convolution Fruity Convolver reverb if you want to use a real space. Less is more here. Too much and the song will become muddy. So drop the Wet dial to about 10% or less.
6—Hard Limiter
The last effect to add to your mastering chain is the Fruity Limiter. This will maximize the perceived volume of the whole mix, plus help prevent any clipping on your master output. Set the output to -0.1dB to stop it from going over 0 dB, and then increase the Gain to maximize the overall perceived level of your song.
7—Mixer States
What’s great about FL Studio is that you can save different Mixer states, and re-use them in other songs. So, for example, let’s say you’re mixing a whole album and want to apply the same mastering settings across the album, then you can use this technique. What you do is you go to the drop-down arrow on the top left of the Mixer window, then go to File > Open > Save Mixer State as…
Then when you go to a different song, you can navigate to the same menu and choose open Mixer state. This loads your master output state to the new song. You can also drag and drop these presets from the browser onto the master output channel.
8—Dither and Export
When you’re happy with your mastering, make sure to apply dither to your exported song Go to File > Export. Choose your format. Probably the best is to choose a lossless format such as WAV. Then give the file a name and click save. A Rendering dialog box will launch. Expand the quality section, and make sure to enable Dithering and HQ (High Quality) for all plugins to get the best audio results.
Conclusion
Those are a few handy techniques to use to get the best out of mastering your songs in FL Studio. Try them out in your next mastering sessions.