How To Add Reverb In FL Studio: A Detailed Tutorial

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Greetings mate and Welcome aboard!

Stuart Charles here, HomeStudioBasics.com helping YOU make sound decisions, so…

Adding reverb to your audio in FL Studio can enhance the spatial characteristics and depth of your sound, giving it a more immersive and professional quality.

Reverb is an essential tool for creating a sense of space, whether you’re working on music production, sound design, or audio mixing.

• Related: What Is Reverb In Audio? A Quick Guide

In this guide, we’ll explore how to incorporate reverb effects into your FL Studio projects, allowing you to achieve the desired ambiance and atmosphere for your audio recordings or compositions.

So let’s dive in!

Step 1

Open an FL Studio Project and head to the mixer by pressing F9.

Here I chose the sample itself (Insert 5) to apply the Reverb.

On the right, you’ll see your inserts.

Mash the drop-down menu, look for Fruity Reeverb 2, and select it.

Note: As you can see, I’ve already applied it but the process is the same.

It should open, but if it doesn’t, click it.

Now we’ll have a look at our options starting with Dry, ER (Early Reflections), and Wet over on the right-hand side.

Turn the dry all the way up and the wet all the way down to hear the unprocessed signal.

Now turn the wet all the way up and the dry down to hear just the reverb.

The ER sets the relative level of the first reverberation, but we’ll look at that in a bit.

As far as dry and wet, ideally, you’ll want to play around with these to find a nice happy medium. Use your ears and determine what sounds best to you.

Now head to the left and notice the L. CUT and H. CUT dials.

Before getting started, turn up the wet all the way and the dry down just to make it easier to decipher what’s going on.

With low cut, you’re removing the low frequencies from the reverb, and high cut removes high frequencies. Fairly straightforward.

Now play with the dials and observe the effects.

Let’s move on to the next set of dials.

Pre-Delay

This essentially determines how much of a gap there is between the dry signal and hearing the reverb.

This helps in placing it in a room/space, in addition to toggling the size of the room which is the next knob down.

Play around with this and notice how if you turn it all the way down, it sounds as if it’s in a tiny space, and if you turn it all the way up, it feels like it’s in a very large hall.

Diffusion Pattern

This is essentially how separated the reverberations will be.

So if it’s turned all the way down, it helps separate out all the reflections, and if it’s turned up, it kind of cobbles them together.

Decay Time

The Bass, Crossover, and Damping knobs aren’t super important for now, but the decay time is.

The decay time is the amount of time it takes for the reverb to decay down to -60dB.

Play around with the knob and notice, with it nearly all the way turned up, how long it takes for the reverb to cease.

In most cases, you’re not going to want it up too high because the reverb essentially overlaps itself and can sound pretty wonky – especially if you’re beat/song is fairly fast. 

For slower beats, you can get away with turning it up a bit more, but just experiment to see what works best for your particular composition.

High Damping

Directly below the decay knob is high damping, which presents a similar effect to H.CUT, but it deals with slightly different frequencies and algorithms.

Open the H.CUT all the way up to hear what high damping does.

Now play with the High Damping knob.

Notice the differences. Turned all the way down it feels significantly dampened, while turning it up results in a more open, airy presence.

Play with both the H.CUT and High Damping to get the perfect happy medium.

Crossover

This determines what frequencies are affected by the bass dial, and the bass dial changes the decay time of the bass frequencies.

The bass dial also changes how lively a room sounds.

Play with the knob and notice how boxy/dead it sounds turned all the way down (Fast decay time), and how open and spacious it is turned up.

Stereo Separation

This only affects the reverb signal and not the dry signal.

Likewise, the low and high cuts don’t actually affect the dry signal going through.

The stereo separation may be useful for separating 2 similar reverbs.

Mid/Side

This button determines whether the mid information or side information will be processed by the reverb.

It’s important to note that if you choose “side”, your song should have stereo information – otherwise, nothing will happen.

With a mono signal, you would choose mid.

How To Automate Reverb

When you simply add a Reverb instance inside the mixer on an Insert, as we did, it applies it to the instrument, sample, kick, etc. for the entire duration of the composition.

If you want to automate a portion of the song, you can!

Simply head back to the mixer, right-click the fader next to Fruity Reeverb 2 > Create Automation Clip.

It will now appear in your playlist as well as the automation folder inside your channel rack.

You can even automate any parameter inside the Reeverb interface as well.

As I was messing around with one of the beats I’m working on, I noticed it sounded kind of cool if I turned just the dry level fader all the way down and then had it gradually come back up.

So I decided to automate it and it sounds super dope (to my ears anyway) 😛

Here’s a clip of what it looks like after you’ve automated it.

Now I’ll show you what I did.

Right-click the Dry Fader > Create Automation Clip.

Once you see the automation clip in your Playlist window, double-click the colored portion of it for an expanded view.

We want this effect to be rather short, but still with enough gradual incline to make it sound interesting.

Remember: You can do this for the reverb as a whole by using the knob in your mixer (pictured earlier), or you can automate any parameter inside the Reeverb window itself.

First things first, hit that zoom icon to completely zoom out so we can see what we’re working with.

That line is way too long, so we’ll hit Shift + left-click on the rightmost point and bring it to around 4. Notice how it’s on 38.

Now hit the zoom icon again to zoom in.

Much more manageable. Things can get rather confusing in a hurry when you’re making points, so I like to do this first before anything else.

Now right-click to create a point behind the open circle. This will essentially be where our dry automation is.

Control + Click the left-most point all the way down. Holding control makes it so the point can only move vertically up and down.

Now Control + Click the second point all the way down. It’s white in the image above. When you click and are ready to drag, it will turn green. 

From here you can just play around with it.

Shift-click the green point (bottom) and move it horizontally. This is basically the amount of time the Dry Fader stays on zero before coming up.

You can also Shift + Click the top right point in or out – essentially decreasing or increasing the time it takes for the dry fader to return to normal.

You can also Control + Click the top right point up or down.

Lastly, you can adjust the middle point.

Simply left-click it and drag it up or down, or you can Control + Left-click up or down for a more fluid curve/movement.

Cleanup

Close out of the expanded view and have a look at the automation clip.

Notice the excess? We’ll want to go back in and clean that up.

Double-click the colored area again to re-enter the expanded view.

We basically want to ensure that the final point is on a number.

However, if you like the sound as it is, you don’t have to do this. I simply do it because I’m OCD. xD

So I’ll put mine to 4 and then re-adjust as I see fit.

Close the expanded view and notice the excess piece is gone.

Have fun experimenting and use your ears to determine what sounds best for your composition.

Closing Thoughts

Well, that’s about it for today my friend! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial on How To Add Reverb In FL Studio and came away with some valuable insight.

Questions? Comments? Requests? Did I miss the mark on something? Please leave a comment below or contact me! I would be happy to help in any way…

What are your thoughts on Reverb as a creative tool? I would love to hear from you. Until next time…

All the best and God bless,

-Stu

[Xtr@Ba$eHitZ]

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