This week we go with another tutorial, and this time I chose to show you “Gated Fm Flanger Leads”. Flanger leads have been used in psytrance a lot back in 2002-2006 and now they are back in use.
Plugins needed: – Xfer Serum – Soundtoys Echoboy – FabFilter Pro-R – FabFilter Pro Volcano – FabFilter Pro-C2 – Flanger (any with manual option)
First, open serum, and do few setups – Connect LFO1 to OSC A Volume, and make the curve as you like – Turn on the filer, and choose Band 12, and put Drive to 45% – Turn on Sub OSC and put the level to zero, octave -1 – In OSC A , from modulation menu, chose FM from SUB and put around 37%
Now, we need to connect Chaos1 and Chaos2 LFOs to modulate Cutoff For those who don’t know about Chaos LFOs, these are the “random” LFOs that are used a lot in psytrance. You can control those LFOs from the “Global” tab in Serum. To set them up, go to global and chack all 3 checkboxes on Chaos 1, and rate put to 1/16 note. Chaos 2, check the S&H checkbox and rate put to 2.5khz
Global
Now we are going to move to the Matrix section, where all the magic happens. A matrix is a place where you can see all the modulations and where you can control them. As we already connected manually LFO1 to OSC A Volume, it will automatically appear in the Matrix tab. But we can also add some modulations from the Matrix tab. So go to Matrix and in the second slot add the Chaos 1 as Source and Cuttof as a destination. The amount I used is 37, but you can play around and find a nice position for yourself. In the 3rd Matrix slot, chose Chaos 2 as a source and OSC A – A Vol and amount set to 30. What this will do? As we already created a gate, with this setup we will play a bit with a sustain of the OSC A volume. This kind of trick is used a lot in faster Psytrance productions such as Ajja, Outsiders, Tristan ….
Matrix
Now we move to processing of the lead. We are going to add Flanger, Delay, Reverb, and compressor.
First, add a flanger (with manual mode) and draw automatization of flanger as you want. I drew from zero point to maximum in 16 Bars
4 hr in the studio with E-Clip
After flanger, add delay and reverb. I used SoundToys Echoboy as a ping-pong with 25% wet and both sides have been 1/8dot.
Reverb I used FabFilter-R, with 20% wet and 1sec decay.
For more movement, I used FabFilter Volcano. Insert Volcano and set it up to band 12 filter, add an XLFO from modulation menu and connect it with a cutoff. In XLFO make 5 steps and glide set on left (-1.000) and from sync menu, chose 1/2. on the end just set the mix to 50% and we are ready for the last plugin.
Last in the chain is FabFilter Pro-C2, the compressor with the easiest interface and pretty transparent sound. This time we will just compress the mid part of the lead, to be more precise, we are gonna compress only what goes in mono. Why compressing only mono? We know that kick and bass are mostly mono, so, therefore, we want to be careful about mono sounds that we drop in. This technique is really good to prevent some peaks from hitting the midsection of our mix where we have a super loud kick and bass. That’s why we are going to compress this lead on in the mono section. So add FabFilter-C2, the threshold you shell set to compress 2-3 dB and in the ‘stereo link’ section you shell move it totally on right. And we are ready to go.
That’s it for this week folks, see you next week with another blog