Never, EVER just layer things for the sake of layering them. As said before, it'll make the sound muddier, but it'll also drastically reduce the amount of headroom you have to work with, meaning your sound ultimately won't be as loud as it could be, as well as giving you more unnecessary variables to worry about.

Keep it simple.

With the right synth, one layer of saws + noise should be all you need. If you must, I could see 2-3 layers in different bands, with different unison settings (getting noisier as they get higher), but Harmor can map unison width to frequency anyway (since it uses additive synthesis). Other than that, see the other posts here.

Anything Rob Swire was involved with. Knife Party has some REALLY clean mixes.

please provide a tldr

i've always only applied it to dj'ing

That's pretty much the same idea! If you change keys when DJing, that gives you a leg up.

FL has a very detailed manual too, and sometimes it goes beyond how the software works and into how to use it. Like their mastering suite has a quick primer on the Loudness War.

I'll say that picking a DAW is like picking a starter Pokemon. Not always an easy choice, but it's the rest of your team- and you- that determines how you do against the Elite Four.
(Laziness, inertia, despair, and unwillingness to innovate. Or something.)

Whatever DAW you use, my advice is to LEARN TO USE THE STOCK PLUGINS. Too many people watch a tutorial that uses Sylenth or Massive and immediately assume they need it to sound good. Especially Sylenth. FL's stock plugins can do just about anything Sylenth can, but it forces you to mess around with them and (god forbid) learn what the controls do.

Consider your effects chain and what you're actually trying to achieve.

i'll explain this with distortion and reverb.

The differences between a distorted reverb and a distortion that's being reverb hold different properties and are much different.


If you want to get reverb that has the characteristics of some kind of distortion, lets say tape. Then you'd apply a reverb unit then the tape distortion in order to get a reverb that has been recorded on to tape or is being distorted by tape.

The other way around, a distortion unit that has reverb being applied to it, is slightly different. In this case, it's as if you're taking a distorted signal and adding reverb to it.



Back to the topic.

It depends on what you want to do with your signal and how you want it to effect the processing, as i've stated before. So do you want to have a pre-eq effect, where as your EQ would shape the frequency content that the side chain is being effected? or do you want to process the signal after the channel is side chained?

in this case, you must look to your side chain channel and ask yourself if you want to effect that particular signal in a PRE or POST effect fashion.

the PRE and POST settings are also useful for sends/return, auxiliary, and buss effects (just to throw out as many names for them as possible).


Go do some research on PRE and POST signal processing and apply it to your question that you have. when you apply and experiment, you will have a better understanding.

While this is all very good advice, and definitely worth considering, the order of EQ and sidechain specifically (as long as it's just ducking via sidechain) doesn't really make a difference.

Guitar Rig is an effect, you need an actual guitar to use it.

I record my own guitars, but as far as I can tell, the gold standard for sampled guitars is Shreddage by Impact Soundworks.