How To Master A Song In FL Studio. Mastering is the final step in music production. Its the process of improving the sound quality and perceived volume of your song if possible andor needed with the aid of such tools as an equalizer, compressor, limiter, stereo enhancer, etc. Its also preparing a song for the proper medium i. Tunes. After mastering, your song should be ready to go public. What Mastering Isnt. Keep in mind that mastering goes hand in hand with mixing. The truth is, if your song is not mixed properly, amateur level mastering isnt going to do you any favors in fact, itll probably make it worse. Mastering isnt a way to fix major mixing issues and also it isnt magic that will turn an unbalanced mix into a polished, commercial song. You need to achieve the commercialism as much as possible during the mixing stage. Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band Man' title='Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band Man' />So, before you consider experimenting with mastering, its essential to learn how to mix first. Your song needs to sound balanced and as good as possible before moving into to the mastering stage. So if all that sounds a little too familiar, I recommend checking out some of my guidelines for mixing electronic music. And even though Im do not consider myself to be a professional, they might help you. Do I need to Hire a Mastering EngineerBreaking the biggest stories in celebrity and entertainment news. Get exclusive access to the latest stories, photos, and video as only TMZ can. Get the latest international news and world events from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and more. See world news photos and videos at ABCNews. Mastering is the final step in music production. Its the process of improving the sound quality and perceived volume of your song if possible andor needed with. AOL Radio is powered by humans Great radio is all about unexpected connectionsthe kind that an algorithm cant predict. Pick any station in any of the 30 genres. Thurs, Nov 3, 2016. MICK RAPLHS. Following the Bad Company UK tour that wound up last Saturday at Londons 02 Arena the family and representatives of the bands. Noregistration upload of files up to 250MB. Not available in some countries. Create-A-Short-Fade-Out-At-The-End-Of-The-Song.jpg' alt='Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band' title='Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band' />A lot of producers and professionals say that mastering should be left to the professionals. They say that you shouldnt master your songs by yourself if you dont know what youre doing. I wouldnt disagree because mastering engineers have the skills, professional equipment, proper listening environment, and trained ears on top of years of experience. So they pretty much know what can be done or shouldnt be done to enhance the quality of your mix. But, were also living in the new age of modern music production where artists and producers are choosing to do a lot more on their own this includes the mastering phase. There are many reasons to want to take on the mastering yourself including but not limited to limited budget, referencing your tracks at a mastering level, making music for fun not profit and dont need to hire anyone, and the list goes on. Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band Cartoon' title='Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band Cartoon' />Whatever your reason, I think its good to learn the basics and get your head around what mastering can do for your tracks. My general rule of thumb is when Im producing a track for fun or experimentation, I handle the mastering duties. Once I feel like I have something ready for release, Ill bring a mastering engineer on board. Some of us just arent great at remembering faces, which can result in an awkward moment when we think were meeting someone for the first time and they say we. But let me also preface by saying that Im NOT a professional Im just a hobbyist so what Im writing here may NOT be the best practice. If you are serious about mastering your song, I STRONGLY advise you to contact a professional mastering engineer. And for some excellent advice on mastering, check out this article by Ian Shepherd or this guide on mastering beats from Modern Samples. So with that out of the way lets move on A Bit of Info on Mastering Tools. Fl Studio Producer Edition 11 0 0 Final The One Man Band VideoThe Wolf and the Dragon had its own problems to be sureone in particular made me want to actually scream in irritationthe main one of which was its. There is a broad range of VST plugins that can be used for mastering brick wall limiters, single band compressors, multi band compressors, equalizers, stereo enhancers, etc. And theres even a bunch of presets to get you started. I have to say though, that while presets can be a great starting point, there isnt an FX chain or preset thats going to work for every mix. There is no shortcut to mastering. Each mix is different, which is why the mastering tools need to be picked and tweaked according to each unique situation. Everything depends on the audio material you have and what you want to achieve with the mastering. Sometimes, you may only need to add a limiter to get the job done, whereas other times you may need 4 5 different plugins. The thing is, you just need to learn to use your ears and pick your tools based on that. So with that in mind, Im going to show the method and the tools that I used to master the song in this tutorial. The plugins and the settings were tweaked and tailored specifically to the example song so that this configuration wont work exactly for your mixes. The idea is to take the general knowledge that I am presenting and apply it to your mixes in a way thats unique to your sound or your particular project. Ive also included the FL Studio Mixer State file at the end of this tutorial for you to download into your sessions and experiment with if you choose to do that. But I should also emphasize that this is NOT a definitive guide to mastering as there is a lot more to the process than just throwing a bunch of plugins at your mix. Okay, lets begin Preparing The Song For Mastering And Getting Down To Business. There are actually two ways to master your songs in FL Studio or any DAW for that matter. You can master the song while youre mixing it oryou can export the song as a WAV file, create a new empty project, import it back to FL Studio, and then master it. I personally like to keep mixing and mastering as separate processes, so Im going to use method 2 for this tutorial. STEP 1 Export your mix to WAV. Before you export your mix to WAV aka do the mixdown, you need to make sure that it isnt clipping. One way to do that is to drop the master volume level to around 6. B or lower. This is to leave some headroom air between the highest peaks and the 0d. B level, thus avoiding the appearance of clipping read more about this in my mixing guidelines article. However, if youre exporting your WAV to 3. But even so, its still a good mixing practice to avoid clipping by using the level faders. However, if youre exporting your WAV to 3. But even so, its still a good mixing practice to avoid clipping by using the level faders. Adobe Photoshop Cs5 Free Textures here. Also, make sure you dont have any compressor or limiter on the master fader when you export the track. Use the highest possible quality for rendering. Here are the settings Im usually using STEP 2 Create a new empty FL Studio project, and open your exported mix in Edison. Cut the unnecessary silence at the end or beginning of the song if any. Check the pic below STEP 3 Create a very short fade out at the end of the song if needed. This is to avoid the song being abruptly cut. In some cases, there might be a tail of reverb or delay still playing after the actual song has ended. Check below IDE NOTE The following step you should take with caution STEP 4 Peak normalize the WAV file. Peak normalizing increases the amplitude of the waveform so that the loudest peak is at its maximum possible level near 0d. B. This increases the track volume without clipping. Other producers say that you should NOT normalize your WAV at this point. However, Ive been doing it regardless. I like the signal to be hot before feeding it to plugins that affect the dynamics of the audio. I may be doing it wrong, but so far I havent had any issues with this step. But then again, what do I know Im just a hobbyist. So be cautious After normalization, save the changes to a WAV file. STEP 5 Create another empty FL Studio project and import the WAV to a Playlist. STEP 6 Load the mastering plugins. Remember, even though Im showcasing a mastering plugin chain, the set of plugins you pick really depends on your mix and what kind of treatment you think it needs. The following plugin chain may very well not suit for your needs you could do just as fine only with an EQ and limiter. So here goes Open the Mixer and add these plugins in a following order to the Master mixer tracks FX slots Fruity Parametric EQ 2 for cutting unwanted frequencies.