Help!!! FL Studios Mixing and Mastering

[kyrobeatz]

i know stuff in terms of basic mixing but idk i feel like there is another level to get that clean, crisp sound that a lot producers have. I know about cutting the low end out but how do i know exactly WHAT/WHEN to low end. I mean yeah i cut the low end on drums and 808s sometimes but what about instruments and sounds? I know what freq sound muddy but what i need to know is when do i need to use Parametric eq exactly? Do you have it for EVERY sound in the mixer? No, right? also what exactly should i pan? As for mastering, I use Ozone 7 and my question is, when do you know when you're done mastering because a lot of the time i listen to my beat in my studio monitors, apple iphones, and beats (they each have a different eq and the purpose of mastering, imo, is to have a sound that could sound good on any speaker/headphone) and I find certain sounds to be higher, lower or not even evident in different headphones. It;s really stressing bc i want to have high quality in my sounds and i mean yeah engineers can do it professionally but is there a way that i can have maybe a step below professional quality that i can do myself?? Thank you here's one of my beats

 

[Milo Burke]

I hate to answer without an answer, but everything you're referring to comes from learned intuition and experience. You can't take a shortcut.


EQ is easy to learn, yet takes years to master. Same with compression. There's no formula for these things, since every sound is different.

The best way to jump-start your mix skills is to watch [good] tutorials, use ear training software (like the free "How to Listen" by Harman), make a crap ton of mixes yourself, and compare them to popular releases. Take notes on why your mixes sound different and see what you can do to close the gap.



And mastering, more than anything, is not a formula to be applied. One small part of a mastering engineer's job is to make the track louder. But the main point is to have someone more experienced than you listen to your track on a better (and different!) system than you have.

He'll control the EQ: maybe one mix is 1.5 dB too hot at 100 Hz and 1 dB too quiet at 6 kHz. He'll fix it, but of course not every mix has those exact problems. Which problems a mix has usually depends on the flawed preferences of the mix engineer and the deficiencies of the mixing engineer's monitors.

And he'll control the dynamics: micro-dynamics to make sure there's enough punch and slam within each measure, and macro-dynamics to make sure the song appropriately swells in the chorus to sweep the listener off his/her feet. Without quiet, there can be no loud.


Mastering yourself, with your biases and the same monitors with the same flaws you mixed on, really isn't ideal. But if there is no budget for mastering, read up on how to do it from a master prone to blogging, like Ian Shepherd. And compare it against many popular tracks, taking notes of the differences and fixing them. And listen on many, many test systems: a car, desktop speakers, laptop speakers, earbuds, big headphones, high-end speakers, basic bookshelf speakers, etc. (The more years you've done this, and the more accurate your monitors, the fewer checks you need to do.)

 

[Milo Burke]

Just yesterday, I read a blog post from Ian Shepherd tearing into some other site that had a mastering tutorial that was way off.

Here are a few of Ian's nuggets from memory:
- Don't compress with too short an attack time, makes it sound like mud. He doesn't go shorter than 20ms attack speed in the mix.
- Don't have one compressor working too hard. A little compression on the track, a little on the bus, and a little on the master before a little limiting just sounds more lifelike.
- Don't compress with too steep a ratio: he likes 1:1.5 - 1:4.
- Multi-band compression is good for mastering, but don't have different ratios for different bands. And slow attack is good, maybe 70 ms.
- Add a limiter after the multi-band compressor, but don't hit the limiter very hard. Anything more than 2-3dB of peak limiting starts to sound pretty bad.
- The output of your limiter should peak at -1 dBFS. Mp3 converters actually turn up the volume slightly, and you definitely don't want an mp3 to clip.


Because he's a wizard, he can get tracks a little louder than many using these techniques and without degrading too much of the sound. But it's better for you and me to sound a little quieter and a little better. Particularly with YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify algorithmically adjusting the volume of each track for consistency. Oh, and the same services don't want peaks over -1 dBFS anyways. So you're not losing anything there.