in this tutorial you'll learn everything you need to know about the citrus synthesizer in fl studio you'll learn how to control the plugin how to generate and shape different sounds and i'll also show you how to add unison and reverb and other effects to make your sounds really professional wide and lush this is one of the most powerful synths in fl studio and i hope that after this short tutorial it'll be one of your favorites and you'll be able to generate pretty much any sound you can imagine in these tutorials i like to get sound generated as soon as possible but i do have to very quickly go over the plugins interface and feel free to follow along with me in this video or not uh you'll learn from it either way for now what i want us to do is just go to the presets at the top here left click and select default i'll very quickly go over the various different parts of this synth and then we can just dive into generating sound right away so initially you have a main panel which is accessed up here which has a lot of general settings for the synth then you have six operators labeled one through six view these as oscillators in a regular synth this is what generates the sound of the synthesizer then we have three filters to help shape the sort of frequency content of those sounds and finally we have an effects section which has like a chorus reverbs delays that sort of stuff at the right hand side we have a rather intimidating looking matrix but i assure you it's really not that complicated and by the end of this you'll feel really comfortable using it at the bottom we have a keyboard which you can turn off and on using this button up at the top here finally we have a graph or curve editor down here which we'll go into in more detail to start off with i just want to go to op1 which is operator 1 and if i play a key on the keyboard [Laughter] we have a standard sine wave so to change this wave we can use this slider to go from sine to triangle saw or square wave we can also select them just here and we can also select a combination between those waves so this is where the sound is generated and all of these other controls here which you can read what they are at the top left corner of fl studio they just shape the wave in various other ways which can subtly or dramatically change the the wave shape and sound and the last two controls you need here are d-click which simply d-clicks the sound and pluck pluck dramatically changes the sound so if you're after that sort of plucked sound that's the one to click moving to the right we can control the volume output of this oscillator and you'll notice that we're only using one operator or oscillator right now but if i select the other ones you'll notice that their volume is also set to full but we can't hear them and this is all down to this matrix so this is the first explanation of the matrix you'll notice that this matrix is split into rows and columns so we have one through six so a row and a column for each of the sound generators then we have three filters the effects and the output and all we need to know right now is that if you want to hear sound from one of the operators you have to go to its row so in this case one and then we go to the output and we make sure that it's turned up [Music] if i turn this down we don't hear anything if i turn it back on itself we hear the exact same thing with a polarity flip you'll also notice that if i click on any of these rows or columns it takes me to the corresponding operator so if i want to hear operator two and one together i go to operator two i'm just going to pick a different wave shape make sure that the volume is turned up a bit and then i go to row two all the way across to the output and i just turn it up a bit now we're hearing a combination of operator one and two but i'll just turn that off to make it simple so to carry on with this tutorial we're just using this one operator you'll notice back in op1 we have various options for pan volume pitch phase etc so if we want to change the volume of this sound over time we can go to volume envelope and this is our adsr envelope so we can control whether we want the sound to rise up slowly whether we want it to pluck etc however you'll see there is a curve here but the sound doesn't follow it when i press the key it's just loud right away [Music] so what we have to do is enable the envelope so volume envelope turn it on there if i now select and drag a point so i'm giving a nice long attack time you'll hear that the sound takes longer to rise up to that point so you can click and drag any of these points and make this curve look and sound the way you want it to and you can also control them down here with these dials [Music] it's also important to note these little nodes and if you left click and drag them you can change the tension of the curves although controlling volume with an envelope is probably the most common way you don't have to use an envelope to control it you can use an lfo you can use different keys on the keyboard and i'll demonstrate this with the panning so instead of controlling the panning with an envelope i'm going to go over to the lfo turn it on and you'll hear that the panning goes left to right following this envelope [Music] so you can control your panning volume pitch phase using these various different modifiers at the bottom but now let's go on to something a lot more fun which is the unison because right now we just have one voice which is a little bit boring if i go to this main tab jump straight over to the unison over here and up the order to whatever you like you can have up to nine voices let's try seven so that sounds a lot nicer and all of these other sliders here simply control that type of unison so the unison can be mono or wide you can detune it less or more so it gives you sort of subtle control there something to note is that this drop down button here lets you change the distribution to be original uniform blurred just like you might have noticed in other synthesizers like serum and now that we've started adding more voices it's important to talk about the quality settings sometimes using citrus the sound you hear is not the sound you get after exporting so to make sure that what you hear before and after is the same just make sure that these settings are exactly the same eight times over sampling is great if you want to do more over sampling you might find yourself getting a different sound or higher precision but it's gonna really tax your computer so only do extra over sampling if your computer can cope with it and you really think you can hear the difference even if these were set to just times too oversampling you'd still be able to get extremely high quality sounds out of it these other boxes are not really essential for the time being so i'm just going to go back to operator 1 and what i'd like to do is start filtering and adding effects because i want to you know keep moving forward and changing the sound that we've got see what we can do with it so if i go across to filter one now i could use filter two or three but they're all the same when i select filter one it lights up in the matrix and what i'm gonna do is use this filter to filter away some of the high end so if i put up an eq on the screen this is the sort of filter we're doing there's some slightly unfamiliar controls here but there's some more familiar ones here like cut off and resonance so if i adjust the cutoff and resonance that's right you hear absolutely nothing which is sort of confusing and the reason for this is because the filter isn't set up on the output of the synth the filter is just sitting there and we need to tell citrus to send operator 1 to the filter and then send the filter out to do this i need to go to column one where you can see the operator one then i need to go down to the filter one and turn it up and this sends signal from operator one to the filter now i need to go to the row of the filter and go across and turn its output all the way up but in this configuration operator 1 is also being sent out and to the filter so if i want all of operator 1 to go through the filter i also need to turn operator 1's output down here now all of the sound from operator 1 is going to the filter and then out of the synth which is why we can now hear the cutoff so i know that if you've never used a matrix before that was probably quite confusing
the best way to learn it is to rewind the video a little bit and follow along those steps with me with citrus open but i hope it's starting to make a little bit of sense so some of these controls you're familiar with cut off in resonance but this bit's a little bit confusing this is where you choose your type of filter you can choose low pass high pass all these other filters here i've heard these referred to as quality one times two times three times this isn't the case these are the steepness of the slope so times one i think is a 12 db per octave times two is 24 db times three is 36 db so the slope just gets steeper and steeper so right now if i just choose one and adjust the cutoff right now this filter is static so it's not reacting to the sound it's simply filtering away just like an eq and then being left alone however i want this filter to adapt to the synth and to what i'm playing so to do this i'm going to turn the envelope all the way up and then instead of selecting the volume i'm going to choose cut off and i'm going to control the cut off with an envelope so if i turn on the envelope here if i adjust my envelope to look like this you'll hear that the cutoff opens up and then closes down again giving me a sort of slight plucked effect and if i pull this in more that's going to be more dramatic you could imagine how to start shaping sounds like this however citrus gives you a lot of control you don't have to control the cutoff with an envelope at all you can go to an lfo or one of my favorite is key mapping if i press different keys and you look in this graph down here [Music] you'll see that there's a different white line representing each key so if i drag this graph up this means that on these keys this filter cutoff will be at its maximum value [Music] and if i drag this bit down up here the higher keys will now be filtered a lot more the cutoff will be lower now depending on which key you play you're going to get either a higher cut off or a lower one so as we go up the keyboard you get less and less high end which can be a really nice subtle way to control the sort of harshness or sharpness of uh especially like brass synth patches just if you roll off a little bit of high end as you get into the higher keys it can sound a lot more pleasant i'm just going to right click and delete those points and just set this one back up and i'm going to set up an envelope on this cutoff so this is the sound i've decided to go for sort of a little bit brassy a little bit wobby and alongside the filter there's also a wave shaper here which allows you to mix in an amount of distortion but this one's quite self-explanatory you're either adding distortion or you're not and now we're going to go to the effects section so over here we have a chorus a reverb and also an effects send so these are quite self-explanatory i suppose if you want an effect you just go reverb here turn it on or you go delay and turn it on however if i press play you're not hearing any of that effect because again we have to go to the matrix so i'm using operator 1 and i want to send that to the effects chain so i go to the row of operator 1 and i go over to the effects and i turn its output up into the effects now if i go back to the effects here [Music] so you're hearing all of that lush reverb and delay the delays are quite simple you have three stacks delays you just turn them on and all of these just affect your feedback and whatnot if i go to the reverb you can turn that on here and to get great quick reverb sounds i would go to this drop down menu here select reverb and then just pick one of these presets from fruity reverb too you know you might want the drum room the venue let's take a listen just gives you a quick different flavor of reverb and again you've got all the typical reverb controls you would expect just experiment with them they all sound a bit different the chorus is set up in much the same way but to turn it on you just have to turn the order up here [Music] which just like the unison tool it adds a lot more depth and a lot more width to the sound which i mean chorus is very very very classic in the synthesizer world to add a dash of chorus onto something the next i control here is the send and what this lets you do if i pull up the mixer you can see and hear the sound from citrus coming out on effect slot 2. if i increase this number to 1 it will send a duplicate of the signal to the next available mixer track on the right if i go say 2 it will be 2 to the right this doesn't send an affected version of the signal out to another track as some people believe all this does is duplicates the sound so that you can add your own processing and effects onto it in parallel so you might want to send it away you know add a load of distortion or add your own delays or reverbs and then blend it back in on your mixer and that's just a really nice neat way to do it without having to actually do any side chaining yourself on the mixer there's just two more things to talk about with the effects and one is that you can adjust the panning and volume of these effects just like you can any of the other operators or filters so you could set up a volume envelope so that your reverb swells you know you can add extra pre-delay to it or cuts away so you can change the sort of volume shape of these effects that you're adding and the final thing to mention about the effects is that if you weren't using this filter but you were just outputting operator one to the output you can use these two here to sort of blend between the amount of effects and the amount of sort of dry signal you're sending out i'm going back to this main tab to quickly explain these five boxes here so here you have a global volume for the synth global pitch for the synth and also whether the synth responds to the lfos you've set up or not so you can quickly turn off all your lfos here this here lets you subtly adjust all of the adsr curves you've set up so if you had one for operator one and two and they were both enabled you can adjust them here to give overall the synth slightly more attack less attack etc the same goes for any envelopes you've set up on the filter modulation x y we're not going to look at it's more of a live performance thing you can set up various parameters to be linked to these and affect them in real time but it's not something we need to do right now and this eq is a neat little feature it lets you affect the output of the synth or the effects or both however i like to just load a powerful eq after my synthesizer and really tweak it to perfection at this point we've covered generating sounds shaping them filtering adding effects and generally trying to feel a bit more comfortable in the matrix but there are two more topics for further study if you want to really master citrus and these are fm and rm frequency modulation and ring modulation so far in this matrix you've noticed that i've just selected a filter an output or an effect but i haven't yet adjusted any of these in the middle with fm selected here adjusting one of these dials in the middle allows you to modify one of your operators based on the signal from another operator which sounds really confusing but it's best if you just hear it i will use operator 2 which i will set up as a square wave to modify operator 1. fm is often characterized by a metallic sound it has this sort of metallic shimmer added to it but the important thing with this matrix is that if you want one of your operators to affect another one you have to read off the top and say okay operator i want operator three to modify operator two up at the top here then i want operator two to modify operator one and that's how you sort of read off of this one here you could say i want operator three to modify one and two to modify one which is a bit different from saying i want three to modify two then two to modify one and it's all just about reading off the column and row i know this gets a little bit confusing but it's important to just slow it down try it out for yourself and most importantly just test things out and listen to them and if they sound good they are good the final point about fm is that you can set up an operator to modify itself so if i want one to modify one let's take a listen [Music] going down to the bottom with rm ring modulation works on the same principle you get one to affect another again with different varying results if you want to know more i would recommend studying fm and rm in detail i mean there's hours worth to teach there but as usual with these things i think the best way to learn is to to dive in just jump in head first and experiment with sounds because at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how you generate a sound it just matters whether you think it sounds good and sort of fit for the purpose you want or not so i know that that was quite a lot to cover in this video but i hope it sort of went at a good pace for you and you learn how to you know generate sound shape them and really just sort of create any sound you want using citrus it's gonna take you getting a little bit hands-on with it but when you when you learn how to use this synth it really is a very very rewarding tool to have in your toolkit so thank you very much for watching i hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you in next week's video bye for now you
