How and when to effectively use Channel Groups in FL Studio 9

Hi there! in this course of tutorials we have already learned the basics of FL Studio in our step secuencer, main meters, and keyboard shortcuts tutorials, it's now the time to learn techniques on how to organize ourselves better in the environment of FL Studio, more precisely in the channel window via channel groups.

Channel Groups

Channel groups is one of the most underrated and underestimated features in this DAW (digital audio workstation), mainly because the majority of the people are too messy with their projects and/or their projects never reach the complexity level needed to use this feature.
Even after looking at the demo projects that come with the DAW, people just don't use it. And I'll tell you a good reason why that is: you might be happily using the numbers on top of your qwerty keyboard to turn on and off(1 through 0) the channels in order to make some "live mixing" or just to quickly see how new combinations of channels sounded like, and then you start to group the channels and try to do the same within the groups and guess what, you can't do that. This happens because the order of the channels is the one in the "All" group, and it overrides any other order in the groups that you make. Pretty annoying isn't it? well, in this sense yes, and when you begin using channel grouping you should stop using that technique at all, because if you don't it will be very confusing and annoying.
Then, why should you learn to use channel groups? The reason is very simple: because it is the only way of working with larger projects (20/30 channels and above, or anything more than you can naturally, easily, and visibly handle).

How to use it

First of all, there's three categories of groups:
"All" group: it shows all the channels of the project, whether or not they are in a group. Useful to keep track of the whole project.

"Unsorted" group: it shows only the channels that are not in a group. Useful when locating group-less channels.

Your own groups: these are the groups that you make on your own criteria, i.e. "leads" "strings" "drums".

Now that you know the available groups, in order to make one of your own you must right click on the "channel display filter control"->"add filter group",

set the name of the new group and press enter,

this will create an empty group in wich you'll be able to add all the channels you want, and the way to do that is this: after the creation of the new group the other groups seem to be gone, but you can see the group that you want by clicking the "channel display filter control" and selecting it.

Once in the "All" group, select the channels to add (by left clicking the green light to the right of every channel, right clicking deselects the selected channel, aka "turns off the green light", but also selects individual channels, aka "the ones with the green light turned off"),

  then go to "channel" on top of the main menu and then click "group selected" (alt+g).

This will bring a text box where you must write the exact name of the group where you want to add the selected channels.

The finished and newly created channel group called "drums"

  A very simple procedure that will save you lots time in managing those huge projects full of channels everywhere.
There's another procedure to add channels to already created groups: simply select the group on the "channel display filter control" and add a channel as you would normally do. The new channel will belong to that specific group.
How do you move a channel from group to group? just select the desired channel and go to "channel" on top of the main menu and then click "group selected" (alt+g) and write the name of the desired group, this can be the "All" group or even the "Unsorted" group.

Conclusion

Even when you don't actively use groups, you are actually using them, because the "All" default group is a group after all. So, denying an important feature like this one will only be to confuse the hell out of you when you reach a decent complexity in your projects.
This feature is a must in later advanced projects, without it, effectively editing and managing of your channels will be compromised.


See you next time, live musically.

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