Ring Modulation

Ring Modulation is  a strange effect where two audio signals are multiplied together, instead of added together. It sounds friggen weird. Sadly, most VST ring modulators suck.

Parallel Compression

Parallel compression is just splitting the drums (or whatever) of track into two paths, leaving one very light and dainty and dynamic, and squashing the living balls out of the other.

Moving Mixer Tracks Around and Other Stuff in FL Studio

There are a lot of features and functions in FL Studio that aren’t immediately obvious and aren’t mentioned that much, but are very useful. Finding these things is a great joy to me. Pressing Alt+left arrow or right arrow with a mixer track selected will move it around.

Making Your Own Cheesy Robot Drums

A lot of people use drum machine samples for drums in their music (TR-909, 808…) and stress out because their 808 kicks aren’t phat enough and stuff. But really (really!), everyone has heard these sounds, and it might be fun to make your own new and unique drum cheese sounds. If being new and unique scares you, feel free to keep searching for the phattest 808’s evar.

Faking Stuff in Sytrus

Sytrus has additive oscillators that let you do pretty much whatever you want with the waveforms. Sytrus can also analyze a single-cycle audio file and construct a waveform from it. This opens up a lot of possibilities for faking things like complex real instruments inside of a subtractive synth. Most decent samplers will let you do the same thing, but whatever. I’m going to make a cello sound in Sytrus, and then do crazy things to it with the filters.

I’m Just Going to Rant About SynthMaker

This is going to be a boring post. SynthMaker is a modular-type audio environment where you can make your own synths or effects by connecting a bunch of little things together. It’s like Reactor or SynthEdit, and a version comes with FL Studio (woo!). It’s perfect if you have large chunks of life to waste, and smaller chunks to waste on writing about it. Today, I’m going to talk about the specific problem facing me today in SynthMaker.

Uber Supersaws in Sytrus

Supersaw. It’s the sound of growling drum n bass, cheesy anthem trance and southern hip hop, maybe. A bunch of saw waves stacked up and slightly detuned, going in and out of phase with each other. Technically, it’s called unison, and it doesn’t have to be saws. Maybe someday the pulse of modern music will consist of  supersquares. Ha, bad pun. Sytrus has a lot of really cool unison features that let you really tweak the buzzing cutting apparatus.

32-bit Audio is Cool, Sometimes

I haven’t posted anything in a while, so to start things off again, let’s talk about something that’s pretty dull, but has huge implications. The importance of 32-bit audio. To make it better, there will be probably be a sheep metaphor. This won’t be an incredibly in-depth article, but I’ll let you know what you need to know to make good stuff. This article totally sucks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Multilinking Controllers in FL Studio

Multilinking controllers was a new feature in FL 7 or 8, I don’t really remember, but it’s pretty much just an easy way to link a bunch of knobs on a mid controller to things inside FL Studio. The multilink controllers button looks like a joystick. After pressing it, teaking controls in FL Studio and then pressing it again, you can easily link those controls to knobs or whatever on your midi controller. That’s sort of fun, but there’s an even better, way more awesome thing this can do; Override Generic Links.

Chopping One-Shot Drum Samples Out of a Break And Making a Kit in FPC With Them

Chopping up a breakbeat in the Fruity Slicer or Slicex or Recycle etc. and rearranging it is a lot of fun. You can make the break your own, instead of just looping it. Even better, making one-shot drum samples from breaks and making huge velocity mapped multisample drumkits will let you mix and match between breaks and get relatively more realistic results. I was going to make a video about this, but I can’t be arsed, so I’m just going to put up a crapload of pictures. WordPress is pretty annoying, because it likes to format pictures on the page randomly and never does what you want it to do.