In this tutorial I will show you how to make a squeaky, whiny, a bit of 303’ish sound using 3xOsc and slide-notes. This is a sound that should fit in to all kinds of dance music.

Here’s an audio example:

Ok. Source of this sound is 3xOsc so go ahead and load it and select saw wave for each three oscillators and tune them down to -24 semitones.

Assign the 3xOsc to a free mixer track and load Fruity Flanger to the 3xOsc effect slot. (Flanger is going to be used for adding a little swirling movement and a kind of ‘spatial depth’ to the sound.) Set the Fruity Flanger like shown in the pic below (refer to the FL Studio manual for in-depth explanation what each parameter does. TIP: press F1 when FL is open):

Done. As you can hear there’s now that slow, swirly movement in it and it also sounds like it’s coming from a ‘can’ or something. (That’s what I meant about the ‘spatial depth’.) Usually, ‘canny’ sound is not so pretty, but in this example sound, it seems to be suitable (IMO).

Next, a bit of a distortion with Fruity Fast Dist (at this point you may also want to drop the volume level a little), so drop it next to the 3xOsc effect slot and choose B as the distortion type and turn the Pre amp to two o’clock:

Next, load Fruity Parametric EQ 2 (PEQ2 is used here for boosting the upper mid range – for the bite). Boost the 2.8khz range by 10+dB with a bandwidth of 64%.

Ok. The sound is ready. Next step is to head to the Piano Roll and make it whine with the help of slide-notes so go ahead and open the Piano Roll view of the 3xOsc

You can see the slide-note selection button below the toolbar:

When you select a slide-note, the notes you add to the Piano roll becomes ‘slide-notes’. This makes the normal notes, above or below the slide-note, to slide to the pitch of the slide-note. The slide-time equals the duration of the slide-note.

Here’s the sequence I used in the example (you can also download the sequence as a score file at the end of this tutorial):

Now, if you want, you can enable the filter envelope in the 3xOsc for some filter action.

Use the AMT -knob to open/close the filter.

That’s pretty much it. Try tweaking the Fruity Flanger parameters to add a different kind of flavor to the sound.

The end.

Watch the video version below:

Download Squeaky Whiny FL Studio Project File (.flp) (Requires FL Studio 10.0.9 or later to open properly)

Download Squeaky Whiny Score (.fsc)