It’s still tough to beat FL Studio when it comes to, well, playing with stuff – in a tool in which that play can get very advanced indeed.
There are some great new toys here:
Distructor is a new pedal-style distortion and multi-effects plug-in. What’s especially nice is you get four slots, each of which can be assigned to one of four modules. There are different distortion models and then filters, chorus, and speaker cabinets. Those different distortion models (Blood overdrive, Soft Clippor, Harmor, Distructor, and Crusher) each have their own various algorithm choices, so this thing is deep. And the filters give you every shape you would want.
This reuses some existing FL stuff, but in a very nice way, and you can mess around with all the different bits and re-route them. In fact, it occurs to me that this is really what the scattered distortion and cabinet devices in Ableton Live probably should have been. Advantage, FL on this one.
If you want to go even crazier, the amp/cab bit is based on Fruity Convolver. So you could instead of limiting yourself to Distructor alone, chase the Distructor plug-in with Fruity Convolver and then load any impulse you want for some serious mayhem.
The Euclidean Rhythm Generator lets you fill in patterns with this now weirdly ubiquitous mathematical means of generating symmetrical rhythms, which work well as polyrhythms and in techno. Right-click a channel, and choose Advanced Fill.
Control Voltage is a new Fruity Voltage Controller for integrating with analog gear. It works with any DC-coupled interface – which now includes those affordable MOTU boxes I looked at recently for a low-cost solution. (Or just use a Eurorack rig with an audio interface inside it.)
“Burn” MIDI. Got an interesting pattern coming out of the Arpeggiator, note effects, or other plug-ins? Now you can right-click the channel and record to MIDI. Yeah, this already works in DAWs like Logic Pro, but it really fits the FL workflow perfectly.
NewTime time warping. Warp, quantize, and groove shuffle audio. This is a far cry from the early days of FL Studio where everyone seemed to be making terrible trance tracks with only the default step sequencer options in the main view. FL now gives well-known, much more expensive DAWs a proper run for the money.
Oh speaking of mangling audio – the Fruity Granulizer now has a display and visualizations so you can see what you’re doing, so together with NewTime, you can mess with sound really easily.
Plus there are tons of other improvements – convert playlist tracks to audio, “don’t show this in the future” checkbox for popups, and a ton of little details. (FLEX has a modulation speed for reverb time, for instance.)
Both Image-Line and SoundCloud sent me press releases emphasizing that you can upload directly to SoundCloud from FL. I have a feeling if you have the patience to read my writing, you already know how to upload to SoundCloud, but … now you know.
More importantly, Image-Line continue their lifetime free updates tradition – think of it as the reverse of horrible subscriptions in certain pro graphics apps. The subscription model: pay continuously, see updates that you mostly don’t want. The FL Studio model: pay once, see updates you want, continuously. (You need a supported account, but it can be worth it.)
The latest – and there’s a lot of it:
FL Studio 20.6 released [Image-Line news]