A Guide to FL Studio's Fruity Flanger
Fruity Flanger will give your audio that spacey sound similar to someone singing a single note while opening and closing their mouth. This tool is particularly popular with DJs as a transition effect. When mixing from one song to another, a flanger is placed on the outgoing song, and it seems to widen and dissipate from the mix when combined with lowering volume levels.
In FL Studio, the Flanger is a great way to add body to your sound and make it move within the mix. While DJs use it to transition between songs, you can use it when transitioning between a chorus and a verse or any number of places in your projects.
The Flanger takes the input signal (the track on which you put the Flanger) and creates multiple slightly delayed copies to cause phase cancellation. So specific frequencies in the signal get removed because the sound wave is canceled by a sound wave that is an opposite shape at particular points.
It is hard to imagine that two sounds can create silence, but that is what phase cancellation is all about. When you have two identical waveforms playing, they will make the sound louder, but if one is inverted, then all sounds will cease. There is a lot of math involved, but it's good to have a basic idea of what is happening with this plug-in and why it makes the incredible sound that it does.
The Delay knob will determine the minimum delay between the copied signals, so if you want a separated, wild sound, raise the delay, but for a crisp flanger, keep it at 0. The Depth knob modifies the flanger delay, so increasing this will give your effect a chunkier sound. The Rate is the modulation speed of the effect, and you can hear the difference by turning this knob while running the effect.
Phase will allow you to manipulate the stereo sound of the effect. Using a lower setting here will give you a stereo sound that is simple and barely noticeable, while increasing it will create a widening effect on your audio. Damp will pull out some of the higher frequencies of the final output when you increase the value, and Shape will determine the shape of the oscillation. So if you want a choppier, more abrupt flanger, move this setting more toward the Triangle (TRI) setting.
Feed will set your feedback amount, but be careful when boosting this one because it can easily cause clipping when not appropriately adjusted. Invert Feedback and Invert Wet will invert both of their respective signals and allow you to create a different sound, depending upon the other settings of the Flanger.
These two settings are good to experiment with, but leaving at least one turned on will ensure that you still get more of a flange effect instead of a chorus effect. The Chorus effect will produce a copy of the original signal that is slightly delayed and has no modulation. Dry and Wet are the output volume controls for the Flanger effect (wet) and the original (dry), while Cross is a version of the wet signal with its left and right channels inverted.