Fruity NoteBook 2

A notebook. A simple place to write notes.

Every DAW should have this.

Fruity PanOMatic

Panning and volume with LFOs for each and an XY control.

I can’t really say it excites me much…

Fruity FailOMatic

Here’s what you’re getting with the LFO in PanOMatic. Pretty dirty for a simple Tremolo volume modulation!

It can be done much cleaner…

MTremolo is in action above. Look at how much cleaner it modulates. When you compare them you can hear the difference. The difference may not be noticeable otherwise, but once you start to learn to hear the difference in modulation capability you will grimace every time.

Fruity Parametric EQ

Yet another simple plugin. It’s similar to 7 Band EQ except you can change the filter’s Q (bandwidth) and frequency.

Uninspiring and not particularly easy to use.

Fruity Parametric EQ 2

The big boy. This is where the fun happens. An EQ with nice click-drag band control.

One of the best parts of PEQ2, is the display. You get a spectrograph-like display that shows colours for intensity rather than using the Y-axis to communicate amplitude. This makes it much easier to visually identify problem frequencies or just to see what’s going on when your ears aren’t doing it for you.

You get all the normal band types: high/low pass, high/low shelf, notch, peaking (bell style). The slope or Q can be changed with the mouse or on the right side of the EQ.

There’s an HQ mode to improve the high-frequency filters (particularly the low pass), which avoids that nyquist cramping that some people really dislike.

The actual filters used aren’t particularly special, and there’s no linear phase mode (which you rarely need anyway).

From a usability standpoint it’s an excellent EQ. From a features standpoint it’s rather bland, but it makes up for that in effectiveness.

Fruity Peak Controller

It’s awesome.

Fruity Phase Inverter

It INVERTS POLARITY. Not phase.

Ugh. Cmon guys.

Fruity Phaser

A phaser with a poor GUI, but 23 stages of gooey phaserness.

I didn’t expect to enjoy this, but it can get some nice oily sounds. Nice.

Fruity Reeverb

It just sounds bad. Metallic and clangy.

I don’t have much to say except that I can’t imagine using this reverb to make something sound bad. It’s just… it’s everything I dislike about reverbs. It sounds like you’re in a thin tin box trying to vibrate your way out of it. No. Please. No.

Fruity Reeverb 2

Slightly less awful. It at least has better controls.

It still has that metallic sound to it, but I’ve found that I can tame it a bit more and it’s less clangy in general.

I like that you can modulate many of the controls and get some more organic reverb sounds out of it. Particularly if you do something like setup a peak controller that turns down the decay time when the signal is high, and brings it back up on lower signals. Or just modulate the filters or decay time very lightly. You can get a more organic moving sound that way.

The M/S processing is nice. You can process only the parts of the signal that are identical (your “mid” channel) or the parts that are not identical (your “side” channel). So if you want to just add some space to a wide stereo sound without drenching it, you can process just the sides. If you want to have something pushed back in the mix you can work with the mid channel.

It’s another plugin that makes up for its general simplicity with a nice interface and use of the modulation capabilities of FL.

Fruity Scratcher

32-bit only. No review here.

Fruity Send

In the FL Mixer, you can link tracks, meaning you can send audio from any track to any other track.

Often you don’t want to do this as a pure clone, but instead you want to just send audio from one track to another.

Fruity send lets you route audio from your current track to any linked track, but there’s a kicker. Since Fruity Send is a plugin, it can ‘tap’ in to your signal anywhere you want (except post fader, but sends are normally post-fader so that’s not a big deal).

Fruity Send is fantastic. This is another feature that every DAW should have, but few have it. Being able to send your track out to another track from any point in your processing allows creative freedom that any engineer in an analog studio has had for decades. Why shouldn’t you be able to do this in your DAW? FL can.

Fruity Soft Clipper

A plugin that clips very lightly, but has no oversampling?

No thank you. Moving on.

Fruity Spectroman

Spectroman is an audio visualizer that’s just kinda… fun? It’s not useful, but it looks kinda fun.

Wavecandy is just better in every way. Unless you need something to throw on a second screen for fun, or use live, I guess?

Fruity Squeeze

Squeeze is a relatively unique distortion. It’s kind of like a clipper, but with an attack section similar to a compressor. There’s also a filter tacked on to the end to help relieve some of the harshness it can add.

I was unable to find use for this. It’s a neat idea, but I’m not sure where it fits in.

Fruity Stereo Enhancer

This processes the side channels and gives you a phase rotation on the L or R channels to emulate stereo on mono signals.

Simple. Useful.

Fruity Stereo Shaper

Another stereo effect that allows you to phase rotate AND mix the result to the opposing channel. There’s also a left and right channel delay.

The phase knob is fairly interesting since it can add some really unique stereo sounds (especially when modulated) that won’t ruin your mix in mono. It’s just an allpass filter that sweeps across the left or right channel depending on how you turn it.

Simple and useful, again.

Fruity Vocoder

Fruity Vocoder takes the left channel and right channel, then applying the spectral envelope (think like an analyzer) of the left channel to the right channel.

It requires some extra routing, and doesn’t do stereo vocoding which is unfortunate. There’s sufficient control for the filters to allow you to get a smooth or extreme sound, and the envelopes that control the filter response work nicely. The filter window also allows drawing of straight lines with right drag, which is useful.

I’d really wish it had a proper sidechain input rather than using the left/right channels. That’s a downer and makes it a lot of extra work.

You could make your own vocoder fairly easily in FLStudio that’s nicer than this and save it as a Patcher Preset. I’m not really a big fan of this guy.

Fruity WaveShaper

Fruity Waveshaper is great.

It’s a simple waveshaper with bezier curves and asymmetrical response (along with symmetrical).

The graph editor is fantastic. It has features for normalizing the curve, adjusting curves, analyzing audio, scaling, flipping and more. This graph is used in a number of places around FLStudio, but it’s at home here.

There’s up to 16x oversampling (very important for distortions to avoid aliasing) and a DC offset removal. DC offset can appear quite easily with some waveshaper curves so this is a necessary addition.

It’s worth spending some time with it Fruity Waveshaper and using it on some more subtle settings. You can achieve some nice results. Utilizing peak controller to modulate the pre knob can give you a dynamic distortion that responds to the input in a pleasant way.

Fruity X-Y Controller

Described here. It’s Awesome.

Fruity X-Y-Z Controller

It’s awesome for some folks.

Producer Only

These plugins are only available in the Producer edition.

Edison

Edision is described here.

I’m not a fan of Edison really. Especially the whole bit where edits end up causing your project to be filled with random audio clips all over from the ‘make unique’ hell.

Edison doesn’t edit the clip directly. To use what you did, you need to add it to your channel rack. Do this a few times and you’ll have plenty of verions cluttering up your channel rack.

Plus, it’s not nearly as fast or capable as other DAW’s editing capabilities.

EQUO

Not just a graphic equalizer, but a morphing one. You have 8 banks which you can have curves that shift between.

There’s also an analyse mode that will create the inverse spectral shape of the incoming signal, which you can use in a bank as desired.

It’s difficult to explain this one, so you’d have to try it out. It’s a rather unique effect to be able to morph and shift (from high->low or low->high) between multiple EQ curves easily. EQUO’s method of band splitting also adds something to the sound (which you can avoid with the ‘add’ button).

You can individually pan bands, and send specific bands to another track. The per-band panning along with the morph and shift functions can make some subtle but interesting panning effects that collapse nicely to mono.

I do wish there was a way to invert the curve shape easily, especially given how analyse works. It’s my only complaint really. Don’t sleep on EQUO.

Fruity Convolver

Convolution Reverb, but wow. What a nice one.

You can load any audio file in to it, but you generally will want to use impulses created for the purpose. Don’t let that stop you from experimenting though.

FL Convolver has an audio editor built in that’s very similar to Edison, except it’s way cooler in this instance. You can make all sorts of adjustments to your reverb sound from time stretching, fades, cut/paste, adding noise, equalization, blur (cool effect), reverse, etc…

Once you start exploring, a single reverb impulse can be almost anything you want. You can even make cool delays by chopping up your reverb.

There’s an EQ for the impulse, as well as a stretch knob, pre-delay and self-convolution. Self-convolution convolves the impulse on itself to create a really diffuse sound that can be amazing on large reverbs.

You get pan, volume and stereo envelopes along with a general purpose envelope that can be used for ducking and some other things (apparently, I can’t figure out how to use it?)

The built in spectrogram and dual views are helpful for imagining what the sound will be like.

Fun. Experimental. Solid.

I don’t think there’s any DAW convolver I have had as much fun with as Fruity Convolver.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

There’s 2 presets that turn it in to a linear phase EQ. It loads up an impulse that does this, and you just use the equalize window to have a linear phase EQ with nice bezier curve based filter envelopes. Awesome.

What a cool plugin. I haven’t even covered everything it can do, like make up for Hardcore’s anemic cab section.

Maximus

Oh hey there. It’s the multiband limiter/maximizer/compressor that should be here.

3 bands of Fruity Limiter like limiters. Except you also get:

• A nice knee/ratio/threshold graph with bezier curve for the knees.
• A fantastic display with multiple envelope options
  • This allows expansion, gating and some really cool compression curves
• Band Level display (click that circle next to it for the spectrogram display)
• Secondary release (smooths out the release to make things sound less dirty/pumpy sometimes)
• Mix control for parallel compression
• linear phase and IIR band splits
• Oversampling (to help deal with intersample peaks and aliasing)
• Per-band stereo separation controls
• A ‘Master’ band with all of these capabilities
  • Optionally the master band can be controlled by the mid band, rather than the output of the full MB compressor

I’m not big in to multi-band compressors for a variety of reasons, but if I was… this one is fantastic. Nothing in any other DAW comes close.

It’s worth making sure you get Maximus in your FLStudio purchase, if you do buy it. I’m somewhat hoping the Mac standalone version comes out soon so I can try it out with some other projects not in FLStudio.

I suspect that many people just grab various presets, but if you want to dig deeper you can do some great things with Maximus.

Vocodex

The easy vocoder, but also the more complex vocoder.

It includes multiple carriers, in case you don’t want to setup routing. If you do want to go in to routing you can do stereo unlike with fruity vocoder.

The envelope follower which controls the band change rate offers peak/rms modes with varying attack/release curves and times. There’s also a hold, which I enjoy having to give the changes a slurred feel.

You can have up to 100 bands with varying width and control the shape of the filter. It would be nice if this had some visualization just for fun, but it’s easy enough to set while auditioning.

There’s a really, really cool modulation section that can give you up to 5 detuned voices stacked on each other. Simple phrases can become monsterous sounds or light leads. The unison capability is super cool. I would like if you could control the formant morphing per unison to create a more ‘real person’ like chorus.

Various parameters have an envelope graph that let you adjust their level relative to the filter band displayed. Band panning, gain, envelope settings, modulator settings etc…

The main takeaway is how easy it is to get a cool vocoded sound by just selecting a built-in carrier and keyboard. If you just want that neat vocal sound, but you dont want to mess with routing a synth in, you can be up and going in seconds.

If you want to dig deep in to the vocoding and create a massive vocal sound. One of the best Vocoders on the market.

Signature only

These plugins are only available in the Signature edition

Hardcore

Alright. This is FLStudio’s amp simulator.

You get a bunch of pedal slots and… uh… hmmm. No amps?

There’s some cabinet models, but it really seems like you’re better off using fruity convolver to load up free cabinet impulses that you can find online.

I’m not going to go through all the effects, because no matter what I did I was unable to get a good sound of this. It sounds exactly like what most people would consider a ’90s amp sim’. It aliases, it has that fizzy sound, it has that weird high-end sheen.

For trying to use it on non-guitar tracks it still imparts this odd sound. I can’t pinpoint it, but it’s an audible high-end weirdness.

I’m sorry to the author (Maxx Claster), but I dislike Hardcore more than any other FLStudio plugin.

Pitcher

Autotuning and harmonizing.

This does your basic realtime auto tuning of input. You have easy controls for what notes it snaps to, how fast it snaps to them, how it detects them, and the formant shifting.

It also receives MIDI input and will pitch the live input based on that with up to four voices.

It doesn’t sound amazing, but it does work. The harmonizing and MIDI input is a useful addition that is an easy way out on leads and other non-vocal sources.

This is really more of an ‘effect’. If you want pitch correction then you’re better off with Newtone. I can’t really say that pitcher is worth the ‘signature’ upgrade price though.

Gross Beat

Gross beat is a unique ‘beat slicing’ plugin. I’ve tried to find things that can replicate what it does, but I’m unable to. There’s lots of glitcher plugins and beat slicers, but nothing quite like Gross Beat.

Gross beat takes 2 bars of audio and slices it in to 36 time slices and envelopes. From there you can use the graphs to reorganize the slices in realtime. On the graph you re-organize the captured buffer’s playback, and you can do so based on specific snap settings as shown on the left of the graph.

The way the graph works is explained well in the manual, but essentially you’re using it to either jump forward or back in time (or stop!) rather than playing the current buffer slice. The volume envelope controls the volume of those slices (along with an envelope that adjusts how quickly that happens).

The graph has many types of curves and quick shapes you can use. Creating neat buffer shifting and FSU sounds comes quickly and easily. Fine-grained control is available as well, especially with the ‘step mode’

There’s a bunch of presets for the volume and time envelopes that you can setup for MIDI control. There’s also ‘hold’ functions and a scratching clock. Great for live performers.

That scratching clock is important. You can rewind or fastforward the captured buffer in realtime to create scratch-like sounds. It can also be modulated (or linked to a MIDI controller as you desire).

You may not be in to all this buffer fun, but this can also be used as an effect. There’s some ‘flanging’ presets that show how you can use the time envelope to modulate things like a flanger. It can be used to add subtle character to chords as well, especially when used with patcher.

Great plugin.

Newtone