>>1516
Lets see here... First of all. it seems like ONE thing you don't understand is geting more than the maximum number of effects. these pictures are about that. it's just about feeding one mixer channel into the next.
Another thing you may want to look at is Patcher. that's what the last screencap should be of. in it I have made my own custom band-split distortion and effects chain, which does all manner of crazy. but its pretty straight-forward how it works. the yellow lines are audio, the green/teal lines are control/modulation inputs. If it's not clear, this splits the sound into different frequency ranges for different effects chains, and then mixes them back together.
As for the last thing. it seems you want to have multiple sounds with multiple parallel effects chains then go through the same bus, and then split again. This cannot in and of itself be done. If you set it up to do that through either patcher, or channel routing, you would have to use something like Edison to RECORD EACH SOUND SEPARATELY and then play the recordings on a separate channel, and clear those mixer channels later.
Otherwise, it's impossible.
Lets say your lead has a band pass, a distortion, a reverb, and a compressor,
and your bass has a lowpass, a distortion, and another lowpass
Then your drums just have an EQ and reverb.
Then you want to send those together through an EQ and a compressor.
Then afterwords you want to give the lead more distortion or something, but not the rest.
so what you would do is this.
make the individual FX chains up to the point they WOULD merge. DON'T MERGE THEM.
Add an EQ to all of your mixer chains. yes, this means you will be running 3 instead of one. If you want the EQ's to be identical, you can do that 2 ways
1- Make the EQ the way you want it, then copy the settings to the other EQs. you can save it as presets, or you can do rightclick copy/paste value.
2- place all 3, and then link the parameters to a controller (dashboard, it's included with FL) and adjust them simultaneously with that
Next, compression. what you're looking for here, is what's called Sidechain Compression.
I should have a screencap here of fruity limiter using sidechain compression.
What you do is you tell it what channel (that has been routed to it) that you want to use to trigger the compression.
you do this by routing a mixer channel into another, but then setting the mixer's receive volume to zero. This means that things like Fruity limiter can see the other channel, but that channel's audio doesn't play through on this one so you don't double-up on audio.
Side chain compression uses that channel to effect this one.
For more advanced sidechain compression you could create dedicated mix for compression on a channel that doesn't go to the output, that is used to control sidechaining,
--OR--
you could use fruity peak controller and fruity formula controller to add values together that way, and hack together your compression manually.
If you want to do a shared effect other than compression/distortion you have to put duplicates of the effect on each effect chain. This is the only way.
In the case of distortion rather than compression, yes, if you put each sound through duplicate distortions, vs putting them all in one distortion, it WILL sound different, but you won't be able to separate them back out. The closest thing you could do is attempt to use lots of very aggressive filtering and phase cancellation of the dry audio to filter out SOME of it, but there will always be added harmonics or saturation, in addition to causing your sound to clip more often.
in that case only, it's an impossible request.
TL:DR You literally just have to duplicate your effects instead of mixing them into one channel, they can't be split after they're mixed, except for frequency-band splitting, which is not what you want.