FL Studio Tutorial - FL Studio Mixer

FL Studio tutorial explaining the Mixer.

In short, the FL Studio Mixer is the place where you can apply effects to the sounds from your channels. It is an extremely important feature of FL Studio. Understanding the Mixer – and more importantly understanding effects - is paramount to creating professional sounds and compositions. Now, I won’t do an in-depth discussion of effects in this tutorial nor will I teach you the fine art of mixing. I will leave that for some other tutorials (easy excuse I know…). However, I will explain the basic (not all) Mixer features to you (using some common effects). So after reading this tutorial you should be well on your way.

See also the illustration below:

 

 

You can route your channels to a mixer track (a so called insert track). How we do that I will show you later, but once you have routed a channel to the Mixer you can insert up to eight effects per track. Also, you can insert effects in the so called master track – those effects will be aplied to all audio in FL Studio before final output (coming from insert tracks and directly from the channels, as illustrated above). We will see a bit later that you can actually route the output of one insert track to another track (which is then called a send track).

But let’s not make things too complicated at first. With the above illustration in mind, let’s have a look at the actual Mixer view.

 

 

Wow, that’s a lot for such a small window. Indeed, it is, but I’ve inserted it here for reference purpose, so have a look at it but don’t stress about it. I’ll now go for a more ‘user friendly’ approach.

Routing a channel to a Mixer track

If you want to apply effects to your sounds in FL Studio you have a number of options. You can 1) insert effects in the Master mixer track (all audio passes through this track) and/or 2) you can route channels to a specific Insert track and insert your effects in that Insert track (in the FX slots).

I often use both. However, I usually start with routing my channels to individual Insert tracks and take it from there. If I feel I need some final processing of my sound before it blasts through the loudspeakers, I insert effects in the Master mixer track.

So how to route channels to Insert tracks in the Mixer? That’s easy. Have a look at the Channel settings dialog:

 

 

In the Mixer track selector you can set the Insert track the channel (or rather the output of the channel) will be routed to. Move your mouse over it until it changes into a double-arrowed pointer, hold down the left mouse button and move your mouse up or down. Below you can see that I selected Mixer track 1:

 

 

If you now look at your Mixer, you’ll see that Insert track 1 has been selected (it follows the value in the Mixer track selector). See below:

 

 

Insert track 1 has a slightly different color. Also, you can see in the titel bar of the Mixer that Insert 1 is the currently selected track. So, that is how you route a channel to the Mixer.

Adding effects to an Insert track

Next – and that is where the fun starts – is an explanation of how to insert effects. This is done in the FX slots of which you have 8 per track. Simply click the arrow (FX slot options) next to a slot and take your pick (choose Select in the menu). See below:

 

I chose the Fruity Reeverb effect. See below:

 

 

It has been inserted in the first FX slot of Insert track 1. Whenever you insert an effect, the relevant effect editor dialog will open as well (see above). You can always reopen it by clicking on the effect in the FX slot area (in my example, by simply clicking ‘Fruity Reeverb’ in the first slot I can open the editor dialog again).

Now, let’s have some more fun and add a second effect. See below:

 

 

I’ve added the Fruity Delay 2 effect. I am not going to let you listen to it here (as a matter of fact I suspect it sounds horrible). In this tutorial I am not trying to teach you what effects to use and in what order. That’s a whole different art class ;) The point I am making here is that you can sequence effects in FX slots. What would happen in the above scenario is that the sound from my Trance Lead channel is routed to Insert track 1. It will first be processed by the Fruity Reeverb effect and then by the Fruity Delay effect. And remember, if I would put some effects in the Master mixer track, the sound would be processed even further before being send to the loudspeakers.

Enabling/disabling effects and controlling effect (mix) level

Use the FX enable/disable switch to switch an effect on/off without removing it from your FX slot. To control the mix level use the FX level knob. If you have multiple effects you can control how prominent they are in relation to eachother via this control.

Using effect presets

Many effects have a number of presets that you can play around with. For example, to acces the presets for the Fruity Reeverb effect, open the FX slot 1 options menu and choose Presets. See below:

 

 

It is nice to play around with these presets a bit and see how the various controls in the effect editor are affected. Other than that, learning how effects affect your sounds is mostly a matter of practicing and  listening. The great thing is that the sky is the limit. Even after years of using FL Studio I still stumble upon new sounds merely by playing with effects!

Muting, panning and fading tracks

To mute an entire Mixer track, use the Mute switch. The Panning knob and the Level fader can be used for panning the sound of the track and for controlling the output level.

Arranging your tracks

Especially when you have many channels that are routed to many different Insert tracks (actually, there are 64 of them – try to use the Mixer track scrollbar), it can be difficult to remember what Mixer tracks you use for what purpose. However, there are some nice features that can help you to keep track of your tracks ;)

You can rename tracks and give them a different color. To do this, right click on a track and choose Rename in the menu. See below:

 

 

A little dialog will popup in which you can type a new name and select a color (to do the latter, click the little grey box and a color picker dialog will popup).

 

 

Below you can see I changed the name (Kickdrum) and color of my Insert track 1:

 

 

I will go a step further and select an icon for the track as well (same menu, but choose Set icon):

 

 

Ok, I think I stop for now. I’ve not discussed every item that I introduced in the first screenshot (for example, Send tracks), but I will follow up on that. The purpose of this tutorial was to get you started ;)

Hope this FL Studio tutorial was helpful to you. Feel free to leave any comments. Happy composing!

Category: FL Studio Basics, FL Studio Tutorial, Mixer