To mix vocals in FL Studio, start by evening out the volume. Then tune the vocal with NewTone, cut the lows with Fruity Parametric EQ 2 and control the peaks with Fruity Limiter. After that, tame harsh S sounds with Maximus, add a reverb that ducks while the singer sings, and dip the beat about 2 dB under the voice.

That’s Max’s whole chain from the video below. Every plugin in it is stock, which means it comes with FL Studio, except one free extra that’s optional. Here’s how to mix vocals in FL Studio step by step, with his settings and a screenshot from the video for each click.

Max’s stock FL Studio vocal chain, in order

A vocal chain is the list of effects your vocal runs through, from top to bottom. This is Max’s, in the order he uses it. The numbers on his mixer track above match steps 4 to 8.

1. Even out the volume with automation, then consolidate and normalize the clip.
2. Clean up breaths, mouth clicks and background noise.
3. Tune the vocal with NewTone.
4. EQ with Fruity Parametric EQ 2: cut below about 100 Hz and dip the low mids.
5. Compress with Fruity Limiter, at a ratio around 5:1 and up to 20:1 for heavy accents.
6. Add OTT at about 20% (free and optional, but not stock).
7. De-ess with Maximus, using its high band from about 6 kHz.
8. Add reverb with Fruity Reeverb 2, ducked by Fruity Peak Controller.
9. Sidechain the beat so it dips about 2 dB whenever the vocal plays.

Two of these depend on your edition of FL Studio. Maximus comes with Producer Edition and up, and NewTone comes with Signature Bundle and up. The free trial has them all.

Step 1: Even out the volume before any plugin

Max starts before a single plugin. He says the first thing in a high-quality vocal mix is a high-quality recording, and the biggest part of that is a volume that stays even through the whole song. Your compressor and de-esser react to how loud the vocal is, so an uneven vocal gets uneven treatment.

Play the vocal and watch the meter. Where a line comes in too loud, turn it down. Max pulls one loud part down by about 4 dB, and where a line drops, he brings it up a little (1). To draw this, right-click the volume knob of the vocal’s channel, choose Create automation clip, and shape the line.

Close enough is fine. Max says it doesn’t have to be perfect, but this step is crucial.

Consolidate and normalize the clip

Now select the vocal clip in the Playlist, press Ctrl+Alt+C to consolidate it, and click Start in the window that opens. Consolidating renders the clip and its volume changes into one new audio clip (2) and mutes the old one.

Double-click the new clip’s title bar to open its channel settings. Turn on Normalize (1), which raises the whole clip as loud as it can go without clipping. While you’re there, check that TRACK points at your vocal’s mixer track, because a new clip goes to the Master by default.

Step 2: Clean up breaths, clicks and noise

Listen through for breaths and mouth clicks you don’t want. Max’s advice is to decide on each one whether you want it or not, and in his example vocal he found nothing worth removing. Some breaths are worth keeping. A breath before a line sounds natural, so turning a loud one down with the clip’s volume often works better than cutting it.

For steady background noise, like a fan, traffic or a computer, Fruity Limiter has a simple noise gate. A gate turns down everything quieter than the voice. Turn GAIN (1) to the left for more gating, then set THRES (2) above the noise but below your quietest words. Set it too high and it chops off the ends of words.

Step 3: Tune the vocal with NewTone

Pitch correction pulls notes that are a little sharp or flat onto the right note. FL Studio’s built-in pitch corrector is NewTone. To open it, click the small menu in the top-left corner of the vocal clip and choose Pitch correct sample.

Max calls it extremely easy to use. CENTER (1) pulls every note toward the middle of its pitch. VARIATION (2) smooths out wobble, so the notes sound even more perfect. TRANS (3) changes how fast the voice moves from note to note. Too much sounds robotic.

You can also pick your song’s scale in NewTone’s menu and turn on Snap to scale (4), so any note you drag lands in that scale. When it sounds right, choose Send to playlist as audio clip (5) to put the tuned vocal back in your song. How much tuning a voice needs depends on the singer, and our guide on how to tune vocals like a pro goes deeper.

Step 4: EQ the vocal (cut the lows and the mud)

An EQ (equalizer) turns certain frequencies up or down. Low frequencies are the deep rumble in a sound, and high ones are its hiss and air. Max always adds Fruity Parametric EQ 2 next and does two things with it:

• Band 1 (1) becomes a high-pass filter at about 100 Hz. A high-pass filter cuts everything below that point, so the rumble and noise are gone.
• Band 2 (2) takes the low mids down a few dB, so the line slopes gently down toward the bass.

He says this makes the vocal sound less like somebody recorded it for a podcast. How far to go depends on your mic. Trust your ears. One useful trick is to push the high-pass up until the voice sounds thin, then bring it back down until the voice gets its body back.

Here’s a rough map of where things live in a voice:

• Below about 100 Hz: rumble and noise. Cut it.
• 100 to 300 Hz: mud and boxiness. Dip it a few dB if the voice sounds heavy. For female vocals this range sits a little higher.
• About 5 to 8 kHz: harsh S sounds. Max’s de-esser starts near 6 kHz.
• 10 kHz and up: air. A small boost adds shine, but too much gets tiring.

Step 5: Compress the vocal with Fruity Limiter

Look at a raw vocal and you’ll see random peaks all over the waveform. That’s just how voices are. To make every word clear and easy to follow, you need compression, which turns the loudest parts down so the loud and quiet parts sit closer together.

Max opens Fruity Limiter and clicks the COMP tab (1). He lowers THRES (2), the threshold, until it only grabs the peaks. Then he sets RATIO (3), how hard those peaks get pushed down, to about 5:1. Sometimes he goes up to 20:1.

Which one depends on the sound you want. A lower ratio keeps the vocal more dynamic, and a high one gives the squashed, modern sound. Max picks a high ratio for the rapper in his example, because the rapper hits a lot of loud accents. Aim at the peaks, and stop once the vocal sounds even.

If you need a lot of compression, split it across two compressors in a row so each one does part of the work. That sounds more natural than one compressor doing everything. There’s more in our guide on how to compress vocals.

Step 6 (optional): Add OTT for a modern sound

To make the vocal sound more modern, Max adds OTT next, a free multiband compressor from Xfer Records. Multiband means it splits the sound into low, mid and high parts and works on each one, pushing quiet details up and loud ones down. That glues the vocal together even more.

He mixes in only about 20%. He likes the color it adds, but it’s optional, and it’s the one plugin in this chain that isn’t stock. It’s the slot marked 6 in the first screenshot.

Step 7: De-ess with Maximus (no extra plugin)

Compression and OTT bring up harsh S sounds. Those sharp S and SH sounds are called sibilance, and a de-esser is the tool that turns them down. FL Studio has no plugin called a de-esser, but Max says “you definitely don’t need any third-party de-esser.” The best one, in his view, is the one you build yourself in Maximus.

Open Maximus and click HIGH (1), so you only work on the top band. Turn the HIGH frequency knob (2) until that band starts at about 6 kHz. Then pull the band’s curve (3) down so it squeezes only those high frequencies, and listen to the S sounds shrink.

Every singer’s harsh range is a little different, so move the frequency until it catches their S sounds best. Max adds two warnings. Don’t overdo it, or the vocal loses its brightness. And set the threshold so it grabs only the harsh sounds, never normal words. Maximus also has de-esser presets you can start from.

If one harsh frequency still pokes out, go back to your EQ, find it, and dip it a little. That’s exactly what Max does after adding OTT. Our post on 5 easy ways to treat vocals in FL Studio has more ideas.

Step 8: Add reverb that ducks out of the way

Reverb puts the voice in a space, like a room or a hall. Max is blunt about the usual way of adding it: “the worst thing that you could do to your vocal is just put the reverb on it.” Plain reverb blurs the words until nothing is clear.

His fix is to sidechain the reverb to the dry vocal. Sidechaining means one sound controls another. Here the vocal turns the reverb down while the singer sings, and the reverb opens up in the gaps.

On the vocal’s mixer track, add Fruity Peak Controller after your other effects, then Fruity Reeverb 2 after it. The Peak Controller follows the vocal’s volume, but it mutes the sound passing through by default. Switch Mute (1) off, or the reverb hears nothing. WET (2) is the reverb’s level, and it’s the fader you’ll link next.

Link the reverb to the vocal

Right-click the WET fader and choose Link to controller. Under Internal controller, pick Peak ctrl – Peak (1). Then open Mapping formula and choose Inverted (2). Click Accept.

Inverted flips the link, so the louder the vocal gets, the quieter the reverb gets. Now the reverb hides every time the singer sings and fills the space when they stop. Max says that’s how you have to do it, every time. Then set the overall reverb level by ear.

Step 9: Duck the beat about 2 dB under the vocal

Max calls this one more crucial step. Without it, the chorus sounds like one beat and one vocal simply dropped on top of each other. Max puts it this way: the vocal and the instrumental are “not talking to each other.” The fix is to let the vocal push the beat down a little whenever it plays.

Make a clean copy of the vocal

First, make a copy of the processed vocal without its reverb. Bypass the Peak Controller and the reverb for a moment, select the vocal clip, and press Ctrl+Alt+C. Keep Enable insert effects (1) on, so the copy keeps your EQ, compression and de-essing, and click Start (2).

Consolidating mutes the original clip, so select it and press Alt+Shift+M to unmute it, then switch the reverb back on. Give the new copy its own empty mixer track (set TRACK in its channel settings), and turn off that track’s send to the Master. You never hear the copy. It only drives the sidechain.

Set up the sidechain

Route all your instruments into one mixer track, except the drums. Max names his SIDECHAIN. Select the copy’s mixer track, right-click the small arrow at the bottom of the SIDECHAIN track, and choose Sidechain to this track.

On the SIDECHAIN track, add Fruity Limiter and click COMP (1). Right-click SIDECHAIN (2) and pick the copy’s mixer track. Then lower THRES (3) and raise RATIO (4) until the instruments dip by about 2 dB whenever the vocal plays. Max finds 2 dB is plenty.

Now the vocal takes the instrumental down a little every time it comes in, the same way it ducks its own reverb, and that leaves room for the voice in the whole mix. The drums aren’t on that track, so they don’t move at all.

Common vocal mixing mistakes in FL Studio

• Putting reverb straight on the vocal. Max calls it the worst thing you can do, because it blurs every word.
• Skipping the volume step. Uneven input means your compressor and de-esser work hard on some lines and barely touch others.
• De-essing too hard. The vocal loses its brightness.
• A de-esser threshold that catches normal words. It should only grab the harsh S sounds.
• Judging the vocal only in solo. A de-esser that sounds heavy on its own can be just right with the beat playing, so make the final calls with the whole mix on.
• Leaving the vocal and the beat apart. The 2 dB sidechain from step 9 is what makes them sound like one song.

Save your chain so you only build it once

Once the chain sounds right, save it. Select the vocal’s mixer track and press Ctrl+Shift+S to save the mixer track state, and next time you can load the whole chain onto a new vocal in seconds. Treat it as a starting point, not a final answer, because every voice and every mic is different.

If you want the bigger picture, like recording, layering and mixing vocals in any program, read our guide on how to mix vocals.

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