Beginner to EXPERT | FL Studio Mixing Tutorial

Posted by Carlin Hines on Sep 12, 2024

Step 1 - Organize Tracks

When you begin mixing in FL Studio, it's important to organize your tracks visually because this will save you headaches when mixing lots of tracks.

I recommend going into the channel rack and highlighting all of your sounds, then hitting CTRL + L to auto route and auto name your tracks within the mixer.

From here, you can move tracks around in the mixer using the ALT + [Arrow] shortcut.

Once your sounds are aligned near one another, you can highlight them all with CTRL + Left click + Drag , find a new (unused) mixer channel and right click the up arrow at the bottom of the mixer channel and "Route to this track only".

All your highlighted tracks will then be routed to one group (bus) mixer channel.

Color coding is optional but it does help quickly identify sounds and their purpose.

Step 2 - Turn Stuff Down

Against popular belief, turning your sounds down is almost always MORE beneficial in the mixing process than just cranking sounds into clipping.

There's no hard rule but most the time sounds are too loud.

The best way to manage a sound's volume, in my opinion, is from within the channel rack.

This is because volume edits from the channel rack occur BEFORE the rest of the process like adding plugins and even the fader on the mixer channel.

My trick is to turn my headphones up, so that sounds seem too loud, and this forces me to turn stuff down until it's balanced.

Step 3 - Edit Groups of Sound

Mixing becomes easier when you turn 50 tracks into 4 tracks, we do this by grouping sound into key groups like: Vocals, Bass, Drums, Instruments

Now, we took a complex thing and made it simple. It's a lot easier to make decisions on 4 tracks than it is to make decisions on 50+ tracks.

If you need to do sidechain compression, it's easier now because you can sidechain the kick to all of the bass elements and sidechain the group.

Step 4 - Edit Individual Sounds

After editing the group of sounds THEN you can zoom in and fix individual sounds that don't blend with the group.

Here's where soloing tracks can help, sometimes snares have low end we don't realize or ghost frequencies in sounds we didn't notice because of the group.

Step 5 - Add Harmonics

If your mix feels thin, it's probably because you don't have enough frequency content. To add more frequency content you will need to utilize harmonics. (If you don't plan to add more instruments to the mix)

Harmonics are simply multiples of a frequency. If a sound has a fundamental frequency of 100 Hz, and we want to add the second harmonic, we'd add 200Hz.

200Hz is a multiple of 100Hz.

By adding 200Hz, we now have 2 frequencies 100Hz and 200Hz, therefore making the sound thicker and more full.

Harmonics simply add more frequencies to the mix to fill it out in the same way concrete is used to fill gaps in the street.

Step 6 - Edit Stereo Image

When you have all your sound organized, leveled and harmonically rich. You can check your Mid signal and side signal for frequency clutter.

Most the time, you will have build up from 200Hz - 400Hz on the sides. This area tends to get cluttered due to sound selection and all plugins aiming for wider sounds.

If you track still feels thin, you can try boosting the low mids from 200Hz-400Hz on the sides, this will add a "warmth" to your track and make it feel blanketing.

Step 7 - Make it LOUD

Last step is just get it loud. You can do this by adding soft clipping, more harmonic distortion, and limiters.

There's no one way to do this, it depends on the track and how loud you want it to be.

Personally, I think people make their songs WAY too loud which takes away from the head bobbing effect we call "dynamic range" without a difference in volume from the peak to the RMS (crest factor), we just have flat loud, non-moving music.