How To Make Glitch Sounds Using FL Studio’s Edison

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In this tutorial I will show you an idea/method how you can make your own glitch sounds in FL Studio using Edison.

Here’s an audio example:

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(Tutorial for the beat I used in this audio example will follow soon)

Ok. Let’s get on to making those glitch sounds.

First, open the Mixer and drop two instances of Edison’s into any empty mixer track. First Edison will be used for producing the glitch sounds and the second will be used for recording them to audio.

Open the Browser and drop ANY sample material to the first instance of Edison (I’m using free single hit drum samples taken from Loopmasters “Ableton AS 100” -pack. Download link to the free pack is at the bottom of this article).

Now, in the second instance of Edison, enable the recording by clicking on the Record button and make sure the ‘On Input’ is enabled (should be enabled by default).

In the first instance of Edison, make a short selection somewhere in the sample, hit the ‘Loop’ button and start changing the length of the selection at live by holding your left mouse button and ‘scratching’ from left to right. Everything will be recorded to audio (Also: watch your ears, things may get pretty loud). After you’re satisfied with the end results, hit the stop button on both Edisons.

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Now, in the second instance of Edison, place the playback position marker after the recorded audio (double click to place it) and in the first instance of Edison, make another selection on some other place in the sample and record again. Also, try out different samples for more variation.

Moreover, try adding effects to the fx chain (after first instance of Edison) for even more complex sounds – Love Philter for example. Check what the preset ‘LP into HP with panning’ does.

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Now, there’s various ways to use the recorded material. For example, you can manually select bits and pieces, then drag & drop them to Step Sequencer (use the drag tool in Edison to drag & drop the selections to Step Sequencer).

And start making a sequence:

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Another method is to dump the whole recording to Slicex and let it slice it automatically.

First, clean up the recording a bit by deleting all the silence parts and similar sounding/looking parts to keep the audio as varied as possible. Doing this prevents silence parts (and unnecessary repetition of similar sounds) ending up into Slicex slices.

Dumping audio material from Edison to Slicex is easy: first (in the Edison), select all. Next, open the Slicex and use the drag tool to drop it to Slicex. Slicex will automatically slice it for you and you can proceed to Piano Roll and create your sequence (In the Slicex, switch off the ‘Auto-dump’ if you don’t want Slicex to dump the slices to Piano Roll automatically).

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Also, if you want to tune your glitch sequence to a certain key, you can record it to audio using Edison’s loop recording mode and use Newtone to pitch shift it. To do this, proceed as follows: First, assign the Slicex to a free Mixer track (assuming you are using Slicex of course). In the Mixer – While the Slicex Mixer track is selected – press SHIFT+E. This loads Edison in the first empty FX slot ready to record with ‘Slave playback to host’ and Record ‘On play’ enabled. Press play from the FL’s main Transport panel and Edison will start recording the glitch sequence material into audio loop(s).

The audio material between the ‘Song jump’ markers is the loop.

At this point, you might want to disable the ‘Slave playback to host’ mode in Edison. Otherwise, Edison will play the recorded audio material alongside with the stuff you have in your Playlist everytime you play back your project.

Now, open the Newtone (Newtone is a pitch-correction and time manipulation editor. It’s actually an ‘effect’ so you need to drop it to an effect slot to open it) and drag and drop the loop into it from Edison (in the Edison, select a section between ‘Song jump’ markers – TIP: use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to select a different takes. Each left/Right-click will jump to the next/previous section and drag the selection to Newtone).

Drag the blocks/samples/notes (or whatever they are) to the key(s) you want their pitch to be in (and to quickly fine tune the pitch, right-click the notes and they will snap to the nearest semitone).

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Lastly, use the ‘Send to playlist’ button to dump the sequence to Playlist (as a audio).

That’s about it. Use different samples for more interesting glitches – try vocals for example.

And have fun!

Watch the video version of this tutorial below and download the free sample pack.

Download Set Of Free Drum Samples From the Loopmasters Ableton AS100 Pack

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