Lessons

Lesson Info

Routing & Using a Peak Controller

We were throwing in the vocal stems and trying to hash out a little bit of an arrangement and we're getting we're getting there um but I think at this point it's a good it's a good time to start like getting my sounds all of my sounds routed here into the into the mixer and start maybe e queuing processing, cleaning up and getting getting things to kind of gel together a little bit more um so um we're going to go in and we're gonna take a look here at at our pad out all of our patterns on dh audio clips and everything really kind of needs a place in this f l studio mixer so that howard like on ly solar the master we don't even hear anything everything need the place everything needs a channel um so I'm going to start here at first with the drums and I do believe that there is actually some a routing already happening because that's the way my default if l studio pattern is man full studio project looks like um we'll go into this massive cord, which I'm not one hundred percent sure that...

we're going to keep through this whole thing, but I must go down and here it is okay that has a place already okay? We're going we're going down to, um this moderate base that has a place that's good, massive sub as we can see it's on lee coming out of the master here which means that it's going to need to be on its own channel so that we can process it and give it its own effects so brain and click on this massive subject and we get our channel settings and this is where we will do all the rounding this little this little guy right here I'm gonna put you know, for organizational purposes I'm going to put it right next to the baseline that it's mimicking so that they kind of stay together on the mixer as well so I'm gonna just put it right here on channel sixteen and I'm gonna call this sub and so now all right it's coming through there um we're going to do the same thing too um actually we're going toe throw in a queue on here what I like to d'oh because uh there there may be a chance that I might put another effect on here by the way f l studio works is so each channel has eight effects slots that you can use for each channel and the audio runs um sort of cascades down so the audio comes from one goes into two than into three than into four so audio like if I were to put an e q here it would go into the queue out of the queue and then into the next effect here some what I'm doing to the sub is I right now is I want to roll off the based similar to what I showed you with this with this track and so going to actually put in a queue it on eight because I thought it's kind of it's kind of the last thing that I'm going to do this so I'm gonna put the e q r the parametric you two right here I'm gonna play it and take a look and you can see how hot it is in those sub frequencies that you don't even hear and the reason why I'm rolling in office because first of all, you're not going to hear it and second of all, it's it's adding volume to the overall track and it's going toe clutter up the base a lot, and so the first thing I'm going to do is create a ah, um hi pass and I'm going to roll this thing off down at say like thirty three hurts why thirty three hurts? I don't know it's the lowest frequency that I've found that I can that I can hear below thirty three hurts it just sounds like just rumble like there's really seem to have any context and so and I've sometimes found that a roll off it right around thirty three hurts just has a little bit of a sweetness to it, so um so I'm really an offered thirty three hurts and you can see that the, uh the signal's not quite as hot down there down there below it so um I'm gonna keep going down make sure everything's got its own channel so this contact instrument with the flute looks like it's actually got its own channel it's been routed so that's good um beautiful thing about ethel studio well it's not that beautiful but when you click on a chance no it actually showed jumps to the track that it's already routed to so that's coming nice so okay all right, everything we got here is ah is routed now one thing I'm going to do um is ah I'm going tio show you a trick that it's if you're familiar with a side chaining basically side chain compression is is so compressors have um pacific explain this the best way um compressors are able to adjust the volume level of uh of audio going into it based on certain perimeters like lake of it's too loud it'll turn it down and if it's too quiet it will turn it up really, really basic explanation of a compressor but some compressors have, um thing called a side change hurt and that routes the audio that is an insert that allows you to route audio from a second source into the compressor and then you can uh you can compress the audio for one thing based on and on the third thing on the second thing so but it's really popular in electronic music it allows people teo for instance the most popular thing is like when you're playing ah vocal track and then kick drum hits it like you decreases the volume of the vocal while the kick drum is at ending and it creates this pumping breathing sort of sound um I have another process that emulates this sort of thing using ah tool nfl studio called the peak controller and basically what the peak comptroller does is it turns continuous control our terms volume data into continuous controller data which can be assigned to anything else in the program so for instance, we're going to use a very typical application we're going take the volume of the kick drum turn everything on not everything just is for instance they baseline and kick trump ok, I must do this almost every all the time with with kick drums and bass line because typically um the kick drums and bass lines compete for the same sonic frequency space and when they hit at the same time you're getting louder spikes in your master volume and that makes it uh mixing a little bit difficult and so one way to combat this is by throwing this here pit controller on the kick drum and by so by default the peak controller is muted and so you won't hear any audio coming through but if you click on this is on me it's that um meets the controller um p controller has to main features right? It's got it can send data out of it based on the audio level coming into it and then also has a built in l a foe so these are the controls for the peak coming into it and these are the controls for the l a faux part of the peak controller but for right now we're not going to talk about the elephant we're just going to talk to about the peak part of it now has three meters this first one is the input I for input um the second meter here is the peak that's coming into it and the third meter here would be the telephone and if I were to change it, you'll see that the meter is shown is responding to my turning the elephants but we're not going to mess with that like I said so um as we're seeing there's uh, input and the peak are responding to it, you know what I'm going to do is I want this volume level here to control this this make this ah cue here, right? So the kick drum is going I want the kick drum to control ah perimeter of this parametric e q like this this band right here, I want this band to respond exactly to the kick drum. And in doing this, it's going to make the sub frequencies of this baseline sort of disappear on lee for the duration of the kick drum. Basically, the baseline is dodging the kick drum and making your brain focus more on the kick drum on the baseline is a very subtle thing, but at the end of the day it makes your mixes. It makes the mixed down a whole lot easier. Your overall volume of your song can be just that much louder. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the peak controller so that the base is where I want the, um e q to rest and right here we're saying that it's ah, fifty basic. Basically, this would be one hundred percent. This would be zero. This would be like, right in the middle. So I want the base to be I mean, this would be yeah, I want this to be a fifty percent right. And you can see up in this read here. It shows that it's fifty percent on him. And then this volume level when I I wanted tio. Duck bring this level down by say I don't know I'll have to play around with it but it may be minus eight d b or something like that I don't have a duck around here um the volume works in increments of to I think two hundred percent so we got minus two hundred percent and plus two hundred percent right if I went two one hundred percent right here that would mean that this is ducking all the way and only wanted to do it about half the way so I'm going to adjust the volume here to about maybe sixty fifty nine percent right now tio link this to the peak controller I would right click on that gay knob choose link to controller and then I have this remote control settings window um I'm going to link it to an internal controller meaning that it's a controller that's built into f l studio um and I have a drop down of controller of internal controllers that I've loaded into f l student right now there's only one the peak controller on dh I have different settings of a peak and lfo together just the peak or just the telephone and I just want to pick so I'm going to choose that she was except and now when I play it this frequency is now being controlled by the kick trump it's pretty sweet little trick and uh it's it really helps on mixed down I can assign anything in the in this whole program to this peak controller I can have you know, multiple bands here being linked to that peak controller if I wanted to and unnecessarily wants to do that but I could do that if I want to turn it off of the controller choose none except and what's not controlling it um so I'm going to link this peak controller to this I did it to the sub and I think I might also do it here tio to the sub frequencies of this baseline to just just to be unsure or something like that to controllers um alternatively I'm going to dio I'm going to do another peek controller type of thing to this uh to this massive court but this time instead of doing it to aniki I want to do the whole volume of this particular instrument there's multiple ways that I could do this I could link the peak controller to the channel volume I could link the controller to the track volume or I can create something here and lincoln to that um typically I prefer to have any kindly if I'm going to duck the whole volume of an audio track to the kick drum I'll create a new instance owes thirty balance it's called fruity balance it's ah basically um it's got it's just a simple volume and uh panning controller but um so I'm going to create the volume here by default is that doesn't even have, like, a real readout, but it's somewhere around there and I'm going tio create another peek controller on the kick drum this one's going to be fifty I can even rename it so that I can find it in the drop down list and use it again fifty percent minus I think it was like sixty something this one's going to be, say, seventy percent country creative control here I think I think I'd actually determined that eighty was the resting level of that for the balance, so I'm gonna call this one eighty percent when this sixty or whatever um so when I right, click on this volume I know linked to controller, and now I've got two different pick controllers and the drop down I mean she's eighty one sixteen and now e have actually set people told her to do what I wanted to dio so eighty my nose without without the ducking, this would be straight, constant sits over the mix really, really tightly, even with from when I when I made a solo these two together hey, turn on the dogs one thing I noticed I didn't do was route the vocals, so um I want I have a multiple vocal tracks here I've got like on the nose ten or something that here I want them all to be right here on channel on insert twenty three so what? I'm going to dio rather than route each individual one which I could d'oh I could actually uh click on the track that I wanted to go to this drop down men neo aiken say link selected channels and as you saw by right clicking and dragging allows me to select multiple channels at once or do select them at once I'm gonna go link selected channels to this track if I chose starting from this track it would go one on each track successively after this one track I want them all to be on this one channel so now all the locals coming just wait so that's the controller and um e everything has its own channel things they're being kind of ducked I'm going to let's see here so now everything is in its right place what I'd like to do here then hearing something with this baseline like it's doing the same thing straight through and it's interesting but it's not really interesting enough toe hold up through the entire song I mean if it just repeats and does the same thing up to here and then it changes to this and you know it's just not that interesting so what am wants to do is create um some nuances to kind of keep keep it interesting straight through so it's not just a looping baseline um so what I'm going to do it here is start adding little bits of nuances in in chunks to kind of kind of bring it all together humanized it a little bit you know um so what I'll do is um so this here I'm actually gonna start naming these tracks a cz well um at this point of of cleaning things up I was like, you know, name everything with theme that bubbles maybe something a simple is that you know and so on I'm not going to name all of them for you right now, but this would be my massive this is my baseline this is my kick drum and my flute if you wanted to color them, you could even click in here and she was a color but I'm not going to at the moment um all right. So, uh to select it's hard, it is one of the bugs of f l studio is like if you have a track above something and you have a track above something below something it's hard to select a range of tracks, so what I typically do is insert a track above it so I have room to do this because if the track is above it, I want this option isn't even you can't do that so and sort of track so I have something blank above here and I'm just going to start maybe in chunks of eight bar chunks I'm going to merge these baseline pieces together, right? And I'm gonna start go into this moderate base here I'm gonna start adding tiny bits of nuances and also turn off this massive court for a moment zoom right and quantifies the steps that I can see where the notes are but if I if you hold all that you can snap it from these steps and basically the notes that I'm picking on me and I'm listening first for notes that I think that sound good, but also, you know, I know that mostly of white notes we're going to work okay? And then once I think that it sounds good enough all moving to the next part next, like eight bars merged them together on dh continue doing this somewhat of the same thing, do it differently, but same idea um also, uh, trying not to do too much at the same time. So, like, if I have this flute thing going on, I might not do some kind of picking guitar solo sounding thing because the flute is taking space wait, so now when we listen to the two together, we've got something that is something a little bit more human, a little bit more rich um, this type of, you know, programming paired up with some automation could actually sounds really interesting. Wait around with it. Yeah, so as you can see, when I'm yeah, yeah, yeah, you mentioned earlier that nfl studio will record when you're like playing something in, is it record when you're just goofing around with the knobs like that as well? Yes, yes, I definitely will on dh. So basically, when I did this when I did this tune, um, I went in and through all these little nuances, knowing that later, I'm going to take another pass and, like, actually record myself doing this with these thiss sort of automation with the baseline. Um so all of that, so I'll show you ah, quick example, but then all I'll show you some of the various steps that I went through pulling this whole thing together. Um, not just like I showed you with the surface model kind of kept I mean, when I showed you with this massive modulation, it was tied with the massive cord. Um, I'm going to do baseline automation, and I'm going to tie it and keep it next to the baseline channel, right?