Creating Your Own Instruments and Effects

In this chapter, we’ll learn how to create effects with sounds, transform samples into playable instruments, and create custom instruments and effect chains that can be reused in other projects. We’ll start off with a relatively simple effect called glitch effects, and work toward more advanced effects such as Patcher.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding what glitch effects are
• Creating glitch effects with Gross Beat
• Creating instruments with DirectWave
• Creating custom effect chains with Patcher
• Using Patcher presets
• Using VFX Sequencer to create arpeggiated patterns

Understanding glitch effects

Glitches are the sound of audio device failure. When a hardware music player fails to work, various sounds can occur, such as stuttering, scratching, stretching, and reversing. When unintended, these indicate that something went wrong. When intended, glitch sounds can be a creative tool to make your sounds feel more artificial and more mechanical.

Glitch effects can be used in a lot of situations, such as the following:

• Transitioning between one song section to another
• Fading instrument sounds in or out
• Creating movement within a sound

Here are some of the best glitch plugins on the market:

• FL Studio’s Gross Beat. Included with FL Studio Signature Edition and higher. We’ll learn how to use Gross Beat in the upcoming pages.
• Izotope’s Stutter Edit, available at https://www.izotope.com/.
• dBlue’s Glitch 2, available at https://illformed.com/.
• Sugar Bytes’s Effectrix...

Creating glitch effects with Gross Beat

Gross Beat is a plugin for creating effects such as beat-synced glitches, stutters, repetitions, scratches, and gating effects.

The easiest way to understand what Gross Beat does is by using it on an audio sample:

1. Add an audio sample to the playlist.
2. Route the audio sample to an empty mixer track.
3. Add the Gross Beat plugin to the mixer channel. Open Gross Beat. You will see a screen similar to the following:

   Figure 10.1 – Gross Beat

   The left side of Gross Beat lists the time and volume effect presets. The right side contains a visual grid allowing you to draw and modify time- and volume-based effects.

   Gross Beat contains two types of effects: time-travel envelope effects and volume envelope effects. Time-travel effects play with the speed of the audio playthrough. You can speed it up, slow it down, or reverse it with precise control. Volume effects control the level of the audio. They can be...

Creating instruments with DirectWave

DirectWave is a native FL Studio plugin sampler. Among other things, it allows you to take any single audio sample and generate additional pitches for the sound. Let’s create instruments with DirectWave:

1. Add the DirectWave plugin to the channel rack.
2. Locate an audio sample you’d like to convert into an instrument. This works best with one-shot samples or sampled instruments. You can find a list of samples and instruments intended for use in DirectWave in the browser, under the Packs folder.
3. Drag the sample or sampled instrument into DirectWave in the channel rack, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.13 – Gross Beat sequencer

If you want to quickly swap out one sample for another, you can do so by clicking on the sample in the browser with the scroll button on your mouse.

Once the sample or sampled instrument has been dragged in, DirectWave will open, as shown in the following...

Creating effects with Patcher

Patcher is an FL Studio plugin that allows you to chain instruments and effects together. Patcher allows you to create your own custom instrument and effect chains, link everything together, and save them for reuse in other projects. Patcher is related to modular synthesis. Modular synthesis is where you have individual instrument and effect components and link them together to connect everything.

Patcher can be loaded into the channel rack or onto a mixer channel. If loaded into the channel rack, you can load instrument plugins and Patcher will play the instrument using MIDI notes sent to it from the piano roll. If Patcher is loaded in the mixer, it’s intended to be used as an effect rather than to play MIDI notes. In the following examples, we assume that you want to use Patcher as an instrument and accept MIDI notes, and have loaded Patcher into the channel rack:

1. In the channel rack, load up Patcher. Open it up and you’...

Send any instrument to Patcher

There’s a very easy way to send any VST plugin into Patcher using the Patcherize option. This will allow you to easily start creating chains of instruments and effects:

1. In order to send an instrument into patcher, first load up an instrument in the channel rack.
2. Right-click on the channel rack instrument and select the Patcherize option as shown in the following screenshot.

Figure 10.25 – Patcherize

Patcher will open up with the instrument loaded, ready to go.

Figure 10.26 – Instrument sent to Patcher

You can even send non-native plugins into patcher using the Patcherize option. In the following screenshot, I show an example where I sent a non-native FL Studio VST synthesizer plugin I purchased called SynthMaster into Patcher.

Figure 10.27 – SynthMaster

We’ve learned how to use load instruments in Patcher; next let’s check out Patcher’s presets...

Exploring Patcher presets

Patcher contains a variety of powerful presets that are worth exploring.

1. In the channel rack, load up an instance of Patcher.
2. In the top-right corner of the Patcher plugin, select the Presets dropdown as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 10.28 – Patcher presets

These presets are customized versions of Patcher. There are lots of Patcher presets and I recommend you browse through them. First on the list of presets is Aeropad. Aeropad is an ambient pad generator. Select the first preset and load up Aeropad and you’ll see the following:

Figure 10.29 – Patcher Aeropad

At the top right, you’ll see a tab called Presets. Anytime you want, you can save a custom preset of Patcher for easy reloading later on. Saving a custom preset will remember the exact knob and effect position of your patcher instance.

At the top middle is a tab that says Help. By selecting this, you’ll...

Using VFX Sequencer

VFX Sequencer is a powerful MIDI sequencer plugin that runs inside Patcher.

In general, an arpeggiator plays a series of notes whenever it receives a MIDI note. For example, you could play a chord, and the arpeggiator could then cycle between playing notes inside the chord. A sequencer is an advanced arpeggiator giving you lots of control over how the note patterns are created.

VFX Sequencer allows you to generate MIDI notes for any instrument. Let’s explore VFX Sequencer:

1. Open up an instance of Patcher in the channel rack.
2. Inside Patcher, right-click and select the option Add plugin:

Figure 10.35 – Add plugin in VFX Sequencer Patcher

3. Locate VFX Sequencer and select it. You’ll see that VFX Sequencer is added to patcher, as in the following screenshot:

   Figure 10.36 – Patcher added VFX Sequencer

   You’ll notice by default that VFX Sequencer doesn’t output audio...

Summary

In this chapter, we started with how to come up with creative sound effects by using glitch effects with Gross Beat. Glitch effects are an excellent way to create variation when transitioning between one section of a song and the next or simply to add interesting rhythmic sequences.

We learned how to create our own instruments from samples using DirectWave. Finally, we learned how to create our own instrument and effect chains with Patcher. We learned about various presets available in Patcher. And we learned about creating arpeggiating MIDI sequences using VFX Sequencer in Patcher.

In the next chapter, we will learn about intermediate mixing topics and sound design plugin effects.