DISRUPT AUDIO WORKSTATION - Part 2: Phonic Transmutation In FL Studio with cutspace

DISRUPT AUDIO WORKSTATION

Part 2: Phonic Transmutation In FL Studio with cutspace

In this Lux Cache tutorial series, we invite our favourite producers and sound artists who develop their work outside of the popular digital-audio-workstation meta - offering their unique perspective on software & hardware techniques in digital audio, to reintroduce outsider thinking and new challenges into music production. In this chapter, avant-garde sound artist 'cutspace' reveals his unique method of Phonic Transmutation & FX Reorganisation. Using FL Studio in ways that defy convention, he guides us through uncharted sonic territories, sharing insights from his experimental journey and challenging the norms of digital audio processing.

This tutorial is available as both a Patreon text post and a preferred .pdf document format. We ask you kindly to not share Lux Cache content outside of the Patreon, our contributors rely on your donations.

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CONTENTS

1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE TECHNIQUE
   1. THE PROS
   2. THE CONS (AND SOME WORKAROUNDS)
   3. OTHER DISCLAIMERS
3. SETUP
4. THE PROCESS
   1. OVERVIEW
   2. SYNAPSES
   3. ELABORATION
5. POST-PROCESSING AND CLEANUP
   1. DE-CLICK
   2. DC OFFSET CORRECTION
   3. PAD-IFICATION OF AUDIO
   4. FRANKENSTEINING AUDIO
6. INTRODUCTION

In this demonstration, I will analyse a method I like to use to generate intriguing, improvisational textures in FL Studio: my DAW of choice. It gets a bad rep in electronic music circles for reasons that at times feel self-contradicting. Some producers describe it as “overly simplistic” and geared more towards “beat-making” (apparently a pariah to those that occupy the sacred halls of the intelligentsia electronica). Others berate FL as confusing, an assault on the eyes, and possessing “too many controls and options.” Frankly, I think that a lot of these critics are speaking outside of their wheelhouse.

But setting these tired “DAW wars” aside, I find that the (over)abundance of controls that FL uniquely provides can be exploited a great deal in music productions. In the same vein as an improvised guitar solo or free-form visual art piece, sound design in FL studio can be spontaneous, visceral, and fun; we can discard any fear-mongering pretensions of surgical, elaborately dialled-in multiband compressor settings. The way I see it, having a highbrow scepticism for phase-cancellation or audio aliasing artifacts is a real nothingburger when the musical output is otherwise exciting. In fact, a lot of these artifacts and music production no-no’s can be precisely the exciting thing about our music.

In addition to highlighting some useful texture generation techniques, a secondary objective of mine is to demonstrate that FL Studio (and any DAW), with the right curiosity and attitude, can be used to produce exciting, quality (electronic) music. As with any undertaking, there is no by-the-books way to do anything, and we needn’t pay mind to the naysaying nerds.

1. THE TECHNIQUE

The principle behind this technique involves the rapid permutation of various effects plugins on a select mixer channel to generate artifacts, while recording the audio output into a recording tool on the master channel of your session. The reason for using FL Studio to accomplish this is a straightforward one: on any mixer channel within FL, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to re-order effects plugins up and down within a signal chain. This simple structural feature presents a great opportunity to achieve countless artifacts at ease, and we will dive into some examples to see how this works.

🎥 REARRANGE.MOV

THE PROS

Simplicity:

One very apparent benefit of using this technique is that it is simple to do. After selecting a number of different effects plugins you want to comprise your effect stack, you only need to spam your scroll wheel to instantly achieve some pleasant artifacts as you record the output.

To save some time between setup and recording, you can save any desired effect stack by right-clicking the mixer channel, and clicking File → Save mixer track state as… After saving the mixer track preset to a folder of your liking, you only need to drag and drop the preset back into the mixer channel for any future sessions.

(Saving mixer channel in FL Studio)

The simplicity of this trick works in another way: the audio or midi input into the mixer channel can also be super simple. In fact, once you’ve added more than four or five effects plugins on your mixer channel, the output audio will likely be very intricate and dense, so utilizing simple audio or midi input is oftentimes preferred to something more elaborate.

Versatility:

This technique is also highly customizable, and you can achieve very different results depending on the component plugins you wish to use. Want something ambient and atmospheric? Be sure to include some delays, shimmers, and dynamic filter effects in your signal chain. Something more ASMR-like and textural? Experiment with impulse response, short-decay room reverbs, binaural spatialization, and other stereo imaging plugins.

Choosing your plugin roster for an effect stack can be a matter of your own taste and preferences, but it always helps to have a bit of intentionality and purpose behind the plugins you choose. At the same time, though, feel free to experiment and you might be pleasantly surprised as to which plugins yield interesting results.

Cohesion:

The last benefit of using this hack is a bit difficult to describe without demonstration, so I’ve included an example with three variations below. Essentially, by using a simple phrase or idea in combination with this trick, you can produce various distinct ideas that are still similar in flavor.

For example, when using a time-based effects plugin, in conjunction with other effects, on a melodic idea, you might achieve some musical phrases that are more difficult to conceive naturally. This can be a great way to achieve cohesive and interesting yet distinct musical phrases that can be built into a longer track.

🔊 SIMPLE MELODIC IDEA + 3 VARITIONS.WAV

THE CONS (AND SOME WORKAROUNDS)

Time-consuming:

Although it is fun to practice using this method in production, it can take a bit of time to generate ideas. When I use this FX displacement procedure, it can take me anywhere between a minute and five minutes to generate some ideas. During a session, this amount of time can be enough to mentally separate you from certain long-term considerations you might have for a track, as it is natural to get too focused on the details.

Therefore, I suggest that one pursue these sound design techniques in sessions outside of composing their track, so as to establish some potentially needed distance between the detail-specific attention required for sound design and the broad-overview attention needed for composition and structuring a piece of music. When working on a track, it is often desirable to have various of these sound design sessions in your arsenal so it is easier to work them into a piece, rather than partitioning your faculties across many different roles.

Furthermore, with any music production technique, it is easy to get caught up in the monotony of the process. It is therefore imperative to try out different things in this workflow so as to not get discouraged by the motions of the process. Remember: there’s a great degree of flexibility and customization using this system, so use this to your advantage.

CPU-intensity:

Utilizing this technique can be a bit taxing on your CPU’s resources, as your computer has to carry out a bit of computation to work out the output as effects become rapidly rearranged. As a disclaimer, I carry out this technique on a 2019 MacBook Pro, with an Intel Core i5 processor (now quite obsolete compared to other products on the market), and it works mostly fine for me. However, your mileage may very well vary depending on your machine’s specifications, so it is an important consideration to bear in mind.

Since the objective of this technique is to generate interesting sounds and textures, a certain level of resolution in your DAW may not be a priority at this sound design stage. As mentioned in a previous tip, it’s also best to utilize FX displacement in a separate session from the main arrangement.

If your setup is not the best, here are some adjustments you can make to carry out this technique as smoothly and efficiently as possible:

• Adjust the framerate resolution in your project file
• Flatten any midi track to audio if using a VST as your primary sound generator (works well if a dynamic, time-based, or stochastic patch isn’t being used)
• Use less CPU-intensive alternatives for certain plugins on the effects chain
• Reduce resampling quality, framerate resolution, buffer lengths and Pulse-Per-Quarter (PPQ) timebase settings under the Audio settings of your project
• Enable multithreaded processing and disable FL studio animations

(Many of these adjustments can be made here)

There are various other methods that others have enumerated at great length in order to provide your CPU more leverage to carry out complex tasks.

DAW-Exclusivity:

As mentioned before, the kinetics required to rapidly displace FX make FL Studio an ideal DAW for this sound design process. Although it is certainly possible to rearrange the order of FX in other DAWs, “scroll wheel displacement” allows for a certain ease of effect recombination that (to my knowledge) is simply not as easy in other DAWs. Hopefully, this becomes an area of exploration for other producers and the same technique can be applied in a DAW-agnostic fashion in the future.

OTHER DISCLAIMERS

Limiting:

As this technique depends on the use of multiple effects plugins, it is highly advised that your effects chain is calibrated so that the output signal is sent to a limiter before the audio passes through to your recording device. This is advised especially when gain-staging with multiple distortions, overdrive and other effects that introduce a spike or increase in amplitude to your source audio.

I cannot overstate the importance of protecting your hearing when making music, and one should also practice great discretion and care, by taking periodic breaks to reset the ears.

Organization:

Inevitably, sound design in this way will result in many lengthy audio files which, when saved to .wav or .flac audio file formats, will require a lot of space. Though I suspect most producers probably understand this, it’s worth reiterating the importance of storage solutions such as external hard drives for keeping track of sessions.

One other useful tidbit is that it might be helpful to organize folders based on the types of sounds or effects used so that they can be easily referenced and utilized in productions. For example, it could be beneficial to have folders devoted to (certain types of) melodies and separate folders for percussive or drum elements created. Proper labelling and organization go a long way to keep the process of making more detailed music smooth and easygoing.

Cleanup:

Although we will get into this later in this lesson, a little bit of cleanup on your audio files might be beneficial for the purposes of the track. Moreover, certain tidbits of the design session might be worthwhile to save as a one-shot in your samples folder – see the POST-PROCESSING AND CLEANUP section for more on this.

1. SETUP

The setup process for this trick takes a little bit of patience but is simple in its essence. First, start adding a variety of effects onto a mixer channel. This can be done both deliberately or at one's own whim. You might like to have the default mixer state with certain plugins deliberately turned off or not. When you’re happy with your mixer channel setup, you can save the mixer track (as explained above) into a folder so that it can easily be dragged and dropped in the future.

On the master channel, insert a limiter (e.g. Fruity Limiter), and place your recording tool right after that. FL’s native recording and audio editing device Edison is an excellent choice for such purposes.

When you have all your effects set up, you can either draw up a musical sketch with your sound generator or drag and drop a piece of audio into the playlist, and route either your audio track or midi track into the mixer channel containing your FX chain. Your setup is now complete.

🎥 SETUP WITH LIMITER.MOV

1. THE PROCESS

Overview:

When you’re ready to start your sound design session, go to your recording device on the master channel and start recording, and then hit the play button to playback your audio or midi. As your audio is recording, go to the mixer track channel containing your effects stack, and begin.

You can displace your effects randomly with the scroll wheel by hovering over the mixer channel inserts, and scrolling up and down. You’ll hear audio artifacts begin to generate. If you have some effects plugins turned off in your stack, turn some on and off at whim, or blend them in parallel. Sometimes, if I am comfortable with how a certain plugin sounds and works, I’ll open it up from the mixer channel and adjust some of the parameters before going back and spamming my scroll wheel some more.

When you feel as though you’ve collected enough audio to work with, hit stop from the playlist view above. Open your recording device from the master channel and stop recording. You have now completed your sound design session, and you can save your session to an appropriate folder, or drag it directly into the project.

🎥 PROCESS DEMONSTRATION.MOV

Synapses:

Now I will go over what I consider when setting up an effects chain. Once again, there is no right or wrong way to do this (wrong ways are encouraged as a way of discovering new and exciting ways to manipulate audio). Because of this, it would be more useful for me to go over which effect pairings have particularly pleasant synapses, by which I mean, which effect pairs sound great as they cross over one another as their order becomes displaced.

• Time-Based FX + Delay
  • Ideal effect pairing for locomotive, and percussive stuff; the synapsis that happens here has the certain quality of sounding strangely off-kilter but also still in time, so really useful when composing something rhythmically dense and dizzying. Try experimenting with the stereo spread on the delay as well: the stutters will try to glue the audio to one spot in the stereo field as they pass underneath the stutter effect but will ultimately submit to going stereo again as they cross back over.

🔊 TIME-BASED FX + DELAY.WAV

• OTT Compression + Sample Reduction
  • Sample reduction can really mangle audio but lack a certain potency. OTT fixes that problem by squashing the daylights out of your signal. As these two effects cross over each other, the result can be pretty demented.

🔊 OTT + SAMPLE REDUCTION.WAV

• Granular FX + Dynamic Filters:
  • This combination of FX works wonders for creating quick, sputtery flourishes to embellish a mix. Granular FX introduces a lot of staccato droplet-like sounds, with the dynamic filtering grabbing various portions throughout the frequency range. Scrolling through and displacing these FX somehow manages to contribute to how pointy and jagged the resultant audio sounds.

🔊 GRANULAR FX + DYNAMIC FILTERS.WAV

There are so many other great effects pairings, and this tutorial could easily double in length when discussing all the interesting interactions of effects, and their applications. But hopefully, this demonstrates and encourages you to think about sound design from this framework.

Elaboration:

Sometimes, it is desirable to have control over certain parameters within an effects plugin while displacing the entire effect rack with the scroll wheel technique. Say, for instance, we want to adjust the delay time on a delay plugin, but displace our plugins at the same time. Or maybe we want to displace our effects while also adjusting the mix level of a half-time effect.

These actions are not feasible to accomplish simultaneously in the method I’ve outlined. Fortunately, with a bit of know-how, we can devise a useful solution to this dilemma.

Patcher, a native FL Studio plugin, is an incredibly powerful and highly underutilized plugin. If we’re crafty enough, we can devise a schema to adjust individual plugin parameters while rearranging our entire system.

Here is what Patcher looks like when we open it in its default state. Note that this can also be opened up in our effects sequencer, but for the purposes of refining our sound design technique here, we will open an instance of Patcher on the mixer channel instead.

(Patcher in its default state)

Let’s build that dynamic delay patch as an example, going over two ways of doing so. First, right-click inside the grey space under the Map tab of patcher, and let’s add our delay, by clicking on Add plugin → Fruity Delay 3. (Note that there are two different columns here, divided Generators from Effects; you will have to look under the Effects column to find the plugin).

(Fruity Delay 3 inside of Patcher)

Once loaded in, you can observe that an icon of the delay plugin is included in the Map region, with an arrow going to it to indicate that the incoming signal is processed through the delay, and that the plugin’s output goes out to FL studio. This visual representation is a really helpful reference for keeping track of how our signal is being processed.

Now let’s open the Fruity Delay 3 plugin by clicking on the icon of the plugin inside the Map region. You should be greeted with Fruity Delay 3: looking right at you as if you were to open it inside the mixer channel. As you can see, you can modify the controls in the same way, as you have essentially loaded an instance of the plugin inside Patcher.

(Opening Fruity Delay 3 inside of Patcher)

How can we adjust the plugin delay time while we finagle the sequence of our other plugins? For this, we’ll need to activate the desired parameter we wish to control. With Fruity Delay 3 open, right-click the time control, and select the option Activate.

(Activating the Time parameter in Fruity Delay 3)

With that, the delay time parameter is activated and can be read by automation controls. You will notice that there is a red dot icon next to Fruity Delay 3 on the Patcher surface: this will be important very shortly. In our case, we will now be using Fruity Peak Controller to handle this automation internally within Patcher – without having to draw any automation curves within the playlist view.

In our Patcher Map surface, let’s right-click, and click Add Plugin → Fruity Peak Controller (under Effects). Now we have a Fruity Peak Controller in the Map region, in addition to our delay plugin.

(Fruity Peak Controller and Fruity Delay 3 inside of Patcher)

This new plugin we added is a really useful controller for targeted automation. It’s commonly used to conduct volume sidechain automation by reading an input signal and outputting an envelope which is then sent out as a volume automation to some other target. However, you can also generate automation curves inside Peak Controller internally without a sidechain signal. Let’s see how.

On the Presets tab up at the top, click and select the Randomness tab. You’ll notice now the pseudo-stochastic automation curve within the plugin’s envelope region. Before we can use this plugin to target another plugin parameter, however, we have to prime it as an external controller.

(Selecting Randomness preset for Fruity Peak Controller)

Let’s go back to the Patcher Surface. Once there, right-click the Fruity Peak Controller icon and select Outputs → Controllers → LFO. Now, you will notice a red dot icon next to the Peak Controller icon.

(Priming peak controller as external controller)

At this stage, the only thing left to do is to connect the Fruity Peak Controller and Fruity Delay 3 plugins by connecting the red dots by clicking the controller’s red dot, and dragging over to the delay plugin’s red dot. The peak controller is now using random automation to target the delay plugin’s time parameter. You can verify this by opening up Fruity Delay from the Map tab and observing the random walk.

🎥 DYNAMIC DELAY SETUP.MOV

Let’s reiterate why this is important. Whenever it is beneficial to have a plugin that is randomly being adjusted over a plugin that’s held in a static state, we can just replace the plugin we would normally use in the mixer channel with a patcher preset containing the plugin as well as the Peak Controller. Now, as we move plugins and resequence them within the mixer channel, the plugins will also have their own internal movement independent of user action. This will allow us to generate more complex, intricate artifacts when we go to record our output.

Note that for the purposes of our example, we used random automation within Peak Controller. Random automation is useful in that it provides a lot of unusual results that would otherwise be difficult to achieve manually.

But this may not always be ideal for our purposes. What if we want to have a parameter be controlled by a gradual sweeping motion, for example to blend the mix-up and down on a Halftime effect? Let’s go over another example within Patcher to see how we can achieve this.

Let’s go back to the mixer and open another instance of Patcher. Within the Map region, let’s right-click and Add Plugin → HalfTime (under Effects). Now we have an instance of HalfTime within Patcher (note how Patcher is able to support third-party plugins in addition to FL native plugins).

(Instance of HalfTime inside Patcher)

To modify the parameters of third-party plugins, however, we’re going to have to take a slightly different approach. Instead of opening the plugin and activating the appropriate control as we would for a native plugin, we have to instead right-click the HalfTime icon, and select Inputs → Parameters → Mix.

(Accessing parameters of third-party plugins inside Patcher)

When doing so, notice how all the editable events within the plugin emerge as a total list. Depending on the complexity of the plugin you wish to modify, you might have to look around a bit until you’re able to find precisely the control you’re looking for.

Anyways, we now have the red icon appear next to HalfTime, and we can then add Peak Controller to the map the same way. Let’s open Peak Controller, and instead of selecting the Randomness preset above, let’s adjust some of the controls within the LFO region.

Notice by default that our parent function shape is a sine wave. In order to make the automation visible, we need to increase the value of the Vol parameter to adjust the ceiling of the envelope. As you dial up on the volume, you’ll notice that the automation curve will begin to emerge. Here are a couple of other useful parameters you might want to know about within Peak Controller LFO:

• Base: this controls the minimum, or floor, of the automation curve
• Tension: this controls how steep the curves are within the automation curve at various inflexion points
• Speed: this controls how fast the cycles occur within the random automation – with lower values meaning a faster speed and higher values meaning a lower speed
• Shape: this controls what the parent function of the automation curve will be (you can select between sine, triangle, square, saw, and random)
• Phase: this is used to adjust the phase of the automation curve

Once we’ve adjusted our sine automation, we can arm it as a controller once again by going to the Map and selecting Output → Controllers → LFO. From here, we link the plugins and we should now have an effect with a mix value that gradually sweeps up and down.

🎥 DYNAMIC HALFTIME SETUP.MOV

1. POST-PROCESSING AND CLEANUP

When we complete a sound design session, there might be some important adjustments that need to be made in order to have our sound design be more useful in production. I’ll briefly go over some of the considerations I like to make.

De-Click:

One apparent aspect of audio generated using this technique is that it is characteristically clicky and poppy. Personally, I really enjoy this tactile quality to the audio: it gives everything a surreal, hairs-on-end sensation. However, this may not suit our needs all the time.

Whenever we desire smoother, cleaner, and more uniform audio (e.g. for the purposes of mastering), we will probably want to apply some de-click to our audio before utilizing it within the session. This can be accomplished in many ways; Audacity is a fantastic free software for audio editing that can be used to accomplish just this.

However, most of the time I like to handle all my touch-ups in-session; I generally gravitate towards iZotope’s RX 8 De-Click plugin, and adjust the various settings for click-widening, algorithm, and sensitivity until I find that everything sounds how I like. Note that this plugin does introduce latency to your session, so I like to render the audio with ideal De-Click settings before utilizing the final sound design in a track.

DC Offset Correction:

Depending on the plugins used in the effect rack for this sound design technique, there may be a fair bit of DC offset in the final audio, which may introduce skew to your audio’s center image in the stereo field. Again, this may be a desired quality that we wish to embrace. However, if this isn’t what we want, most DAWs have a simple switch in an audio editor which we can use to correct any DC Offset issues.

(Selecting Remove DC offset in audio editor)

Pad-ification of Audio:

FL Studio’s Edison is a fantastic audio editing utility that can perform a lot of powerful functions at ease. One great trick is applying the Blur function within Edison on audio to create lush pads.

Using the Blur function on our output audio can be incredibly ideal, for the sole reason that the audio from our sound design is highly stochastic and improvisational, so creating a pad out of this will create a highly active, intriguing, and ever-evolving pad.

To do this, double-click your design session audio within the playlist view and right-click the waveform, selecting Edit in Audio Editor. This will automatically create an instance of Edison in the mixer with the audio loaded in. From there, select the teardrop icon labelled Blur, and this will bring up some additional controls, which we can dial in and preview using the Preview button. Usually the default settings are fair enough for my purposes, but whenever you’re finished calibrating your settings, select Accept.

The waveform in Edison has now been transformed into a pad, and we can click the Send to playlist as audio clip / to channel button to plop the blurred audio into the playlist for use.

🎥 TURNING AUDIO INTO PAD USING EDISON.MOV

Frankensteining Audio:

Most of the time, unless we are really deliberate, there usually tends to be a confluence of semi-repetitive ideas in our output audio, with some beautiful snapshots located within. It therefore might be useful to comb through our audio within the playlist, and cut various parts out that we like.

From there, we can either save individual moments as samples within our samples folders, or take these moments and stitch them together into a brand-new audio file. This works brilliantly for all types of audio: from melodic ideas to percussive ones. This can go quite far in giving your audio a fresh, kinetic, and improvisational feel while striking out any over-the-top nonsense that we might wish to exclude from the end result.

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This concludes the demonstration of my sound design process. Though I have been quite systematic in this demonstration, I hope that others are encouraged to dissolve some of the rules and replace them with their own: the spirit of this technique is to encourage you to enjoy sound design in a lively, free-spirited way.

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cutspace is an avant-garde sound artist and experimental producer who has collaborated with artists such as xang, marlon dubois, ian and more. Their recent project ‘2022: the Morningseeds can't help but Blush into thick verdures of Anguish.’ is available now on Bandcamp.

You can follow cutspace on Instagram @untilisayitsover & find their work on their LinkTree.

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