How To Vocode in FL Studio - Vocodex Tutorial

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm gonna be showing you how to vocoder inside FL studio it's really straightforward effect so let's just get right into it one of the reasons I like vocoding is that you can use it in a wide variety of ways you could go really extreme with it think of like in the 80s with Phil Collins or you can use it in a more modern way or a more subtle way think about the way that like Zedd produces or love where it's just used as an incredible thickening trick I'm gonna give you a quick before-and-after right now so we'll be taking a vocal from sounding a little bit like this nice with the light of you burning bride visiting goes to sounding like this and the last example before we get into it is just to show that you can use it as a thickening technique so you can just sit it behind the main vocals just make them sound really wide and thick nice with the light of you burning bride visiting goes you only need three things to do this technique and that is a vocal which I have on the playlist a synth and then a mixer channel with the vocoding plugin loaded on it so let's just go back to the start I have the vocal which I've sent to a track on the mixer it doesn't have to be tracked to just as long as it is sent to a track on the mixer in my case I've got a scent to track to which is just here now the next track on your mixer has to be the synth and this is going to determine how the vocoder harmonizes that original vocal so I have a synth on the playlist and if I open up the channel rack I'm using serum and I'm sending it to track 3 which is the next channel along from the vocal I'm using serum because I'm really familiar with it but you can use any synth and I like to start with something like a saw wave or a square wave something that's quite buzzy with some brightness to it and then will modify it from there but I'll go into more detail soon in my pattern I have serum playing the particular chords of my song but when you're vocoding depending on the application you could pick whichever chords you like and I'll demonstrate that in just a minute but for now I've got the basic chords of the song here so if I were to play these two along together it would sound like this [Music] by visiting goes which is you know no good but we've got that big saw wave sitting underneath now that was sent to three which was the next one along from the vocal and then the the third one along from there is where I'm going to put my vocoder so I go to the effects chain I just select a new plug-in and I'm gonna select vocoder acts which is in the miscellaneous plugins section so VOC codecs will load up like this first things we're going to do with it I'll just take this down and I'm just going to uncheck all of these boxes and I'm going to take out of draft mode because I want to hear it in full quality but if your computer is not so great you can keep that on draft mode there the important thing here is modulator and carrier so the modulator in our case is going to be the vocal the carrier is going to be the synth and we have to select these inputs so right now these are set to zero you can't scroll up and down it's just zero or nothing but what we're gonna do is go back to the vocal channel on the mixer I'm going to turn down its input to the master so now if I press play the vocal doesn't go out to the master I'm going to go down to the vocal coach an alight click and select sidechain to this track simple like that so no volume just a sidechain now we're going to do the same thing with the synth I'm going to just select it on the mixer I'm gonna turn down its input to the master and I'm going to right click and select sidechain to this track so no volume just a sidechain now in the vocal decks plug-in we can select our modulator and carrier now there's a little symbol here with the mouth and some keys to help remind you which is which but scroll up when you're inside this box scroll up at the mouse 4-1 and scroll up for two you can also right-click and you can actually see what the mixer channel is called which means you know there's no way to get confused at this stage synth carrier vocal mod now if I turn everything back on in the playlist and press play this will be the result and that really is 90 percent of the effect so now I'm going to go into optimizing it and making it sound as good as possible first things first we have a wet level so you can turn up the overall level or down humor there's a sound good izing fader here so you can sort of compress a lot I tend to just leave that alone the next to faders let you pass some of that vocal or some of that synth signal through and there's like a high pass and a low pass here so if I just take away the high pass and push up the vocal you'll hear the main drive vocal cutting through a little bit more of you running bride visiting and the same of the synth [Music] again I tend to leave this alone I just like having that fully wet vocoder and then I'll blend it in later now I'm going to cover three or four of the controls that make by far the biggest difference to how this sounds so firstly the order here typically a lower order is gonna make it sound more like a synth and a higher order is gonna make it sound more like the original vocal so let me just play around with these here [Music] so on the lower side it sounded more buzzy more like that saw wave on the higher side it sounded more more like a human still a robot and then the band distribution so how many bands it's all split in two right now it's on 47 that's just what it started with if I take this down it's gonna sound more like a synth if I take it up it's gonna sound more like that human voice so if I take it all the way down and put the order on the lowest it's gonna sound just like a synth pretty much if I put it all the way to the top and if I put the order to the very top with the most amount of bands it's gonna sound as realistic as possible and at this stage there's no rights or wrongs usually I like having sort of a low ish band distribution and then a medium order and this is kind of like my preferred sort of starting point about fifteen or sixteen bands and an order of two I think that's a good place to start the next thing I like to adjust is the attack and release so I'll just let you hear the difference right away I keep minimum time selected and I just push the attack and release up a bit it gives it this really metallic feeling and I think it smooths out the whole the whole signal so to speak and the last most critical control is this bandwidth control here when I adjust this it's gonna make things sound really resonant and sharp or just really buzzy and smooth now overall you'll hear the difference so really between the attack and release times the band the order and then the band width this really gets you most of the control you want in the plugin there are of course more controls in this plugin and I find that the best way to like really learn them is to play around with them and also press f1 when you press f1 with the plug-in open it will open up the manual you can open up the parameters and it will briefly explain what all of them do and also how how it works for instance it says noise adds noise to the carrier input this can help improve speech intelligibility by preserving sibilants you know knowing things like that can really help you so I often find you know people find the manuals can be boring but the FL Studio manual is incredibly well written by Scott and as often you know it's a little bit humorous and it really does help you out but for now that should get you sort of 95% of the way there with your vocoding and you know you can check boxes and uncheck them and just always listen to what sounds best to you that's really what's going to guide it and another thing I want to show you is that the synth you use makes a really massive difference to the way it sounds so if I open up that serum patch again right now we've got a load of high end and if I were to say filter it I'll show you how much of a huge difference this makes to the sound when I filter it all of the high end naturally goes away from the vocoding signal and then for instance say i turn on another oscillator and I turn on say frequency modulation from this oscillator this will dramatically change the original source sound and it's gonna sound crazy you know any of those could be the sound that you want to go for so really definitely experiment around for the synth you're using the last thing I want to talk about for those that are more detail oriented is that the notes here don't necessarily dictate the notes that the vocoder actually produces and you don't have to play full chords and I'll explain myself really quick because I know that people already wanted to comment basically this tells the synth what to play and the audio that is output from the synth is dictating how the voll code harmonizes and veau codes so if I were to open the synth and pitch the synth up and down the MIDI hasn't changed but the vocoder will change I'll show you [Music] so I just wanted to remind people that potentially your synth patch might have might be you know a couple of semitones up you could be putting in the right notes into the piano roll and not getting the right notes out so I just wanted to remind people that the notes you put into here don't specifically output on the other side it really depends what your synth does with these notes and I know that's quite particular but I just want people to know that is it's not like you're picking which notes the vocoder uses although usually it can be just as simple as that and while we're on the topic of the notes you don't have to use the chords you can create different harmonies for instance let's just put in a couple of different notes in the scale and see what this sounds like and what's also cool is that your original vocal doesn't have to follow the same chords either so in this part of the vocal performance the vocal doesn't follow that chord progression I don't think we can be I don't think we can be friends that is not the same chord progression that this follows however if I just blend these together [Music] and it just follows it and harmonizes it with the original vocoder so there's there's pretty much limitless possibilities here and you can also just select sing notes you don't have to make it a melody so if I just delete some of these notes here and it's not harmonizing a chord anymore it's just a single note there's just so many things you can do with this effect and remember that once you've placed vocal decks on the mixer you can of course just add other effects you can add EQ you can add reverb Xand delays so you could delay and reverb your vote codes so let's just put this to a load of reverb for instance and make it sound like really really distant and just different so there's really no rules for this but I hope that basic amount of setup has really helped you and if you are looking for any other videos to do with FL Studio I have a whole playlist dedicated to FL Studio 20 and FL Studio 12 with a wide variety of different videos on mixing production recording so I hope those help you out too anyway I hope you have a great day and I hope to see in the next video - bye for now you

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 614,999

Keywords: how to vocode, how to vocode in fl studio, fl studio vocoder, vocodex, vocodex tutorial, fl studio 20, fl studio vocal, vocal processing, music production, vocoding, zedd vocode, lauv vocode, vocal effect, how, to, vocode, 3 steps, perfect, fl studio tutorial, fl studio basics, in the mix, in the mix channel, bets music production, music production lesson, In The Mix, easy, fast, professional

Id: Lo2Km8K06fU

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/NFeruch]

Yo I fuckin love your content! Feel free to post here any time!

[u/scrubdzn]

Thanks, Michael!

[u/[deleted]]

Finally a good Vocodex tutorial, thanks man.

[u/toxygen]

Your tutorials are like a playground, man. We get to see every single thing that happens when you mess with every single setting. It's really cool

[u/[deleted]]

Love your content, keep it up!

[u/bigteisty]

Thanks bro!

[u/Shut-the-fuck-up-]

Just commenting to say I love your channel and the quality content you put out man. You have taught me so much over the past 2 years I can’t thank you enough.

[u/nenupzdc]

Thanks bro!!!

[u/N1XT3RS]

Got a great death growl going from this, thanks!