How to declick samples in FL Studio

Hey y’all, today I’ll show you how to declick samples in FL Studio using Slicex, which I think it’s the best sampling tool for FL Studio. Well, here we go.

What’s that sample declicking?

What's a sample click? (Click here)

That’s a sample clicking viewed from Adobe Audition

First, for any possible noob out there, what’s that sample clicking? Well, sample clicking is that usual and annoy sound that sounds like a short “click / peak” or something electric. You can listen to it while you cut your samples. As you must know a waveform / sound / song isn’t plane, I mean it sounds good as long as you don’t trim it and here we will learn to declick samples, or in other words we will learn to remove those “clicks” or “peaks”. You can take a look to the example below straight from Adobe Audition.

But how do I declick samples?

Before declick your samples first you need to make sure that they’re sampled in the right way. I mean sampling is an art, specially if you’re aiming to the nineties mood and sound in the music that you’re going to create. There are several ways to do that but today we will learn to declick samples in FL Studio using Slicex. I’m sure that you could do it with Adobe Audition, Ableton Live or any other great DAW, but the DAW I use is FL Studio and this is the way I do it.

If you’re creating your music in FL Studio but first you create and trim your samples in Adobe Audition or any other DAW better switch to this method to declick samples because it will save your time, and we all know that time is gold.

Avoid that kind of sampling using Slicex (Click here)

Avoid that kind of sampling

First make sure you’ve Slicex opened and everything’s sampled properly and as you want it to sound. I mean FL Studio’s Slicex offers several ways to trim and cut your samples BUT maybe they all are not suitable for what you’re looking for to create.

I strongly recommend you to avoid that Slicex ‘auto-slicing’ or ‘grid-slicing’ tool because this usually doesn’t recognize properly where the sound you’re looking for to trim starts or ends. You can see an example of what I’m talking about in the images below.

Click here to see how you should use Slicex in FL Studio

If everything sounds enough good and you’ve managed to trim your sample here and there to get your ‘markers’ sounding in the great way then we should move to the final and easier step of our sample declick walkthrough. First you will need to click on the Slicex’s ‘wrench’ icon. There you will see a lot of modules and options, like Envelope, Amp, Waveform, Time, Channels, Synthesis, Scripting, Noise gating, Spectral, Regions and so many others.

I don’t care my samples sounds enough good for me

Click here to see how to easily declick your samples using FL Studio Slicex

Slicex Regions to declick your samples

We will focus inside the ‘Regions’ option, which contains several options like ‘Dump to piano roll’, ‘Normalize all regions’, ‘Declick in all regions’, ‘Declick out all regions’, ‘Perfect all regions’ and ‘Tune loop’. At this point of the tutorial you will guess what ‘Declick in all regions‘ and ‘Declick out all regions‘ will do, but we will go a little further. If you’re not used to use Slicex (it’s a shame) it just split the samples into different markers that can be launched as different sounds straight from the piano roll or directly from any other MIDI based device.

The ‘Declick in all regions’ tool inside the ‘Regions’ option will remove any click or peak that will sound at the beginning of ANY Slicex marker, and the ‘Declick out all regions’ will remove any click or peak that will sound at the END of any Slicex marker. That’s all! I think it’s pretty easy and it will save you several headaches in the mixdown and final master step of your music! I’ve attached an image at the right to show you exactly where you have to click to declick samples!