You will have to experiment as it is different for every case. If the ratio is 1.0 the compressor will do nothing in my projects the ratios range from 1.3 to 2.1. This is why we selected inverted the louder the Peak Controller Signal (the louder our sidechain kick) the lower the threshold.īefore doing any sidechaining we need to set the ratio and the attack and release times in our Fruity Compressor. So, what have done once we accept these settings? We are telling our Fruity Compressor to lower its threshhold when there is a positive Peak Controller signal. Right click on the threshhold knob in the Fruity Compressor and select "Link to Controller". It is time to connect our Peak Controller to our compressor. If we do not put the compressor last, gains from the distortion effect will probably counter any volume reduction that our Fruity Compressor worked so hard to do! Always put your sidechain compressor as that last effect in the chain! If we do not put the compressor last and the distortion plugin comes after the compressor, there is a good chance that the distortion effect will create harmonic contect or a serious boost in volume. In most other cases, when you have effects plugins on the synth you want to make sure that the Fruity Compressor you are using for sidechaining is the last effect in the chain.Ĭonsider the contrary let's say we are sidechaining a bass synth with distortion. In this case I have no processing or FX on the synth channel and the compressor is the only thing in the effect chain. Now let's load up the Fruity Compressor on the synth channel. This alters the shape of the curve used to map the volume peaks to the peak controller values. The peak tension is that little green line to the right of the volume knob. In my case I have increased the peak tension to +40% as personal preference. It is fine to leave the default settings as they are. Since we are not sending the sidechain to the master it does not matter anyway. This is only for users who want to hear their sidechain kick for whatever reason. Sometimes you hear people saying that once you load the Peak Controller you have to click the unmute button. This is going to internally route our sidechain kick to our compressor later. Now we are going to load the Peak Controller on the sidechain channel. Setup the Peak Controller and Fruity Compressor The waveform view is great for visualizing how much our synth is sidechained and what our sidechain signal looks like. To switch between the two views, press Alt+W while viewing the mixer. My mixer is displaying the waveform instead of the volume level. In this image you can see the sidechain kick being played in its channel, but since its send-to-master knob (selected in red) is set to zero, there is nothing coming out of the master channel.Īlso a quick note. Essentially, we are making it so that the sidechain channel does not send to the master. To mute the sidechain channel we select it in the mixer and turn the knob that appears above the routing arrow on that master channel to zero. Note that we do not want to hear the sidechain channel. This will automatically route the cloned kick to our kick channel, but intstead we are going to route it to channel two, our sidechain signal channel. In my pattern editor I cloned my kick by right-clicking on its name and selecting "Clone". This is going to require three mixer channels: one for the kick, one for the kick's sidechain signal and one for the synth.
Sidechain fl studio free#
This method will give us more control over the shape of the sidechain envelope and will leave our volume sliders alone so we are free to automate as we please!įor this tutorial I will sidechain a synth to the kick drum of the track.
There are many ways to sidechain in FL Studio but this method allows for the most control and does not require you to sacrifice any functionality.įor example, the method of sidechaining using the volume slider and the Peak Controller prohibits you from automating the slider anytime you are sidechaining.
Sidechain fl studio how to#
This tutorial will show you how to sidechain compress in FL Studio using the Fruity Compressor and the Peak Controller.