Submixes in FL Studio 10

What is a submix and why would you use it?

A submix is a collection of signal flows bundled together in a way that they can be edited all at once. There are several reasons for doing this in an FL Studio environment.

In FL any newly added instrument is routed into the master channel by default. This is usually not a good idea because you'll want to add some sort of effect on an instrument signal, this could be reverbs and delay plugins or simply an EQ, or maybe you'll just want to adjust the volume of many signals together. Most of the time you'll have a lot of instruments in your list in a production. It usually doesn't make sense to route each instrument to an individual insert in the mixer just to apply the same effects multiple times.

An example of this would be percussion instrument. If you're working on an electro house track, you're likely to have a lot of percussion samples. You can bundle these together into one submix to apply an equalizer to all of them together.

Creating a submix in FL Studio

Doing this in FL Studio is very simple.

Notice the green light to the right of the sample. Left click and drag to highlight more of the green lights in a row. You can click twice on any green light to switch the selection between one or all of the instruments. To turn off the light on specific instruments, you can right click it.

These green lights represent which instruments you have selected. Now go to the mixer and select an empty insert. Right click it and choose "link selected channels > to this track" or hit CTRL + L on your keyboard. This will route all of your instruments to your insert, creating a neat submix.

You can always add instruments to your insert by selecting them and adding them like explained. The weird thing in FL Studio is that you can't remove specific instruments from an insert in the mixer itself. However, you can simply route them to another insert if you had to remove them from your submix, then reset that insert to get everything back to default, or you can go to the channel settings of the instrument and turn off its FX number so it says "--".

You can also send multiple inserts onto another insert to create yet another layer of submixes.

When you right click an insert, you can see an option that allows you to "create submix to". If you highlight this, you'll be able to send the insert onto any other insert. If you click this, what FL will do is stop sending to the master, and instead send the signal to the insert of your choice. You can also do all of this manually by clicking the little greyed out arrows over empty inserts to turn on and off audio signal flow.

You can now arm disk recording on your final submix or route it to the master.