How To Master Your Music in FL Studio 20 (Stock Plugins)

hello and welcome back to another video in this video I'm gonna be showing you how to master your music inside FL Studio this is going to be very similar to my last mastering tutorial which I posted a few weeks ago but many people were asking how to do the same techniques only using FL Studio stock plugins so again I've simplified it into five really simple and easy-to-follow steps and it uses only FL Studio stock plugins and two free and legal plugins that you can download so these plugins are a frequency analyzer and a loudness meter and you can download those I've left links at the top of the description so go ahead and download those and then let's get right into this tutorial I also want to say as we start that this is a tutorial for beginners people who are looking to start mastering or are a little bit confused and just want a little bit of clarity on the topic this is not meant to show how professional mastering is done and I by no means mean any disrespect to professional mastering engineers who are incredibly talented and skilled at mastering and there is so much more to mastering than just these five steps but these five steps should get you going in the right direction so let's just start by explaining what's in this session and then I'll go over the five steps briefly and then I'll go into them in a lot more detail so at the top here we have the mix that I'm going to be mastering today I'm going to be using it's our song called right here below it I have a reference track which is another mix that I'm going to use to sort of judge to see whether I'm in the right sort of tonal balance or sort of overall EQ you could say and then below it are some files that I'm going to show later to do with a loudness but don't worry about those for now so to briefly go over the five steps the first one is making sure that you have an aim what are you trying to get out of mastering usually in mastering what we're trying to do is check the track to make sure that there's nothing wrong with it and then we're trying to make sure that it's ready for release so that it will sound good on many systems large speakers headphones in a car and then also making sure that it's loud enough so that it's not too loud or too quiet to be posted online so once we have an aim the second step is sort of a final check and this is going to be how to identify problems with the mix the third step is looking at the tonal balance so does the mix need any EQ does it need boosts or cuts anywhere the fourth step is going to be limiting the track so that it's loud enough and how do we know how it is loud enough we're going to find out with that loudness meter and then the fifth step is trying any sweetening so any extra techniques such as stereo widening to see if you can give anything extra to the mix and really sort of add that extra one or two percent to make it really Sparkle so if we go back to step one which was having an aim my aim for this session is to make sure that this track is loud enough for online streaming it's going to be posted on Spotify and YouTube and I want to make sure that nothing gets past me if there's any clicks or pops or resonances in the track I want to pick up on those now and I also want to make sure that it sounds good if someone's listening on their phone or if someone's listening on great big speakers or sort of smaller speakers like this I want to make sure that this is sounding good on all devices this is also the right time to get yourself into the right mindset for doing mastering because mastering is not just something you do by the numbers it's a creative process it's a very musical process and this is a time to get inspired and motivated and enjoy the process and try to relax into it as well so that's step one the next step is our final check so the first thing we're going to do with this is add fades at the start and the end of the track so very simply I'm just going to go onto my master channel here I'm going to automate the master fader and I've added in an automation clip to control this fader here and what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy the value at 0 DB and then I'm gonna paste it in at the start and I'm gonna paste it in near the end then I'm gonna zoom in on the track and I'm going to fade it up where I'd like the track to begin so maybe I want the track to begin just here and I'm going to gently fade up into the track and again paste that value so that it definitely gets to zero dB I'm going to take a listen to it that sounds okay to me and then I'm also just going to do exactly the same thing at the end I'm going to listen to the tail decaying and I'm gonna pick the point where I want to start fading it [Music] nice so now that the track has those fades there's not going to be a pop or a click at the star and when someone presses play on the song there's not going to be a sort of a random jump in volume or anything like that the next part of this final check is to listen to the song so when I do this I like to just close my eyes and listen from start to finish usually a couple of times so I'll listen you know what add a decent volume in the room with the speakers and then I'll put headphones on and listen again and what I am listening for as closely as possible is any clicks any pops maybe in the vocal I've cut a breath in half and it sort of jumps up all of a sudden I want to make sure that that kind of stuff is nowhere near this mix if that's happening I need to go back to the mix and sort it out in the session and then I need to react sport it and pull it into this mastering session again the reason I'm mastering in a new session is because it just saves the CPU and the RAM on the computer is so much easier to just pull in your final exported file and master in a new project but anyway in this final check I'm just listening to the whole track basically you have to press play at the start maybe close your eyes or keep them open do what you want just listen to it and you're not allowed to change anything throughout the whole song you're not allowed to turn it up you're not allowed to turn it down you have to be happy with how it sounds from start to finish and and know that mastering is not going to save any big big problems with the mix if you find that in the chorus the vocals are too quiet and you want to turn the song up then you have to go back to the mix and maybe address that by turning the vocals up or turning the instrumental down or something like that so that it sounds good from start to finish sometimes a good way to address problems is to use an EQ so in this case on the master the first insert is fruity parametric eq2 and you get this by clicking here going to replace and then you can find fruity parametric eq2 sometimes it's useful to just boost the frequency a little bit make it a little bit narrow and sort of just sweep across from side to side as sometimes something will poke out at you it might help you identify a click or a pop or a resonance in this track the guitar had a little bit of resonance in it and I figure that out by sort of boosting and then around 300 or so the guitar really liked out of me and then I knew that I had to go back to the mix and sort of duck down that frequency a little bit so those two steps are sort of the more boring stuff but now we're actually going to start getting into the the audio and really working on it now so the third step is the tonal balance or like the distribution and energies of the frequencies and the mix so we're going to take a listen to the song and I'm also going to compare it to another mastered song so in this case it's one of my other songs I'm using one of my own songs because I don't wanna get a copyright strike and listening to see whether it sounds similar to something I've done in the past that I liked so I'm gonna turn off the mastering processing so that it's not going through any vsts I've pulled in this mastered track but I've also lowered the volume down here so that it's at a similar volume to the other track so that I can pair them equally so let's take a listen to the loudest part of the track [Music] and what I can hear right away is that I thought this mix sounded okay but when I compare it to this mix this mix at the bottom actually has a lot less bass is what I'm hearing in this room at least but I already know that this mix down here was already quite bassy it sort of like a sort of future house almost track it's got a heavy kick it's got a heavy bass line but this track at the top still had too much bass so what I could do now is either go back to the mix and maybe lower the bass drum or lower the sub but if I don't want to go back to the mix this is where we take our EQ and we do sort of broad strokes so we're looking to gently reduce the bass now you can do this by either taking like a peaking filter like this and dipping it down slightly or you can just take like a whole shelf and just take it down ever so slightly in mastering when you're beginning I think it's best to not be poking loads of holes in a mix like this and trying to do dramatic and drastic stuff because often when you do stuff like that you just start making mistakes as a beginner what we're doing is we're just going for the overall picture if you start making like really really particular cuts and boosts like this you're probably just hearing resonances because of your room and like a lack of acoustic treatment and also just the way your speaker's sound and you're probably not actually hearing problems in the mix so all I'm doing is I'm just comparing it to something that I know I liked when it was mastered and I'm seeing if I can just reduce the bass just a little bit that's the first thing I'm gonna do so let's take a listen and see if we can get this in the right ballpark [Music] so that was a minus 2.5 DB cut on everything from 120 Hertz down it's not incredibly gentle but it's also not a very big cut if I just increased this so you can really see what's going on it's not like I've done this so I'm just looking at subtle moves with mastering especially with the e cues like this we don't want to be making huge sweeps and cuts it usually doesn't sound very good so let's compare the two tracks now so it's a little bit better it's a little bit more controlled in the low-end the next thing I'm going to do is take another token and I'm going to change its type to a high-pass filter and then I'm gonna change the order to steep for just gonna scroll down in the middle and what I'm gonna do is just cut everything out from below about 25 Hertz or so it's good to do this because there's nothing important down there it's not gonna be played back on any system or any headphones or whatever your musics going to be played if there's anything rumbling in the low end that you can't hear on your speakers it's better to just get rid of it it gives you more Headroom later also going to look at the high end to see if I can open up the mix at all so let's compare the high end now we're listening to like the hi-hat the reverbs and whatnots [Music] [Applause] [Music] the hi-hats just sound a little bit more exciting in the master track underneath so again I'm just gonna take a high band and I'm just gonna boost it very subtly up here [Music] and it's just kind of added a little bit more excitement a little bit more brightness to the mix it just feels slightly more open but again it's nothing dramatic one of the free tools that I mentioned earlier is this span plugin this can help you see differences in the tonal balance of tracks if you're having trouble sort of hearing them or maybe your speakers are not so good so what I did is I just put it on to a high resolution mode and then on the settings I changed the average time up to about something close to 2000 and the block size is really big and then the smoothing is on half an octave and then what happens when you play it is it gives you a curve which sort of represents the distribution of frequencies in your song so let's play it [Music] and to compare it to the track underneath [Music] and you can just see that the base was just peeking up a little bit so it probably is a good thing that we've added that EQ in there if I now look at the graph with these low frequencies highlighted we can see the rumbling stuff that's just left behind all of this stuff down here is the stuff that we're trying to get rid of with this low-cut here I should have explained that the reason we're trying to adjust the tonal balance is because we want it to sound good on lots and lots of devices if you're tonal balance isn't very good maybe it's too bassy or it's not enough base it might sound really good in your room like on my speakers here the song might sound good but if the song has energy imbalances in some frequency ranges it means that when you listen to it on a different system like headphones those frequencies are all gonna be stressed in a different way and it might not sound good and this often happens with beginners where I mean happened to me all the time I was mixing with these rockets and the music would sound good in my room which was just a bedroom at the time if I played it anywhere else if I played it in the car I listened in headphones it sounded nothing like it did in my bedroom whereas if I'd addressed the tonal balance properly it might actually have sounded a little bit worse in my bedroom but it may have ended up sounded sounding better on headphones and on other speaker systems because we're really trying to make it sound good absolutely everywhere and you have to remember that a lot of people will be listening to your music on a laptop for the first time or on earbuds and that first impression is really important and if you do have too much low-end it does sound good on big speakers but often on a laptop speaker it just sort of blows it out and it sort of prevents you getting a good loudness so let's take a look at the next step now that we've addressed the tonal balance and this is step four and it's to do with limiting your track to get it to be at the right loudness so there's a tool that's going to help us with this it's the second free plugin I mentioned that's called the Yulin loudness meter and this is an L ufs loudness meter now you may have heard of peak loudness rms loudness L UF s is loudness units relative to full scale basically it's the loudness measurement that iTunes Spotify Apple music YouTube all of the places online where your music will be streamed it's the loudness unit that they are looking at to try and determine whether they're gonna turn your track down or leave it where it is in the past with the loudness war people would slam their tracks ridiculously loud because if it was louder it's usually perceived as sounding better but nowadays because the loudness is sort of equalized it means that if you push your track really really loud it's just gonna be taken down and that louder track when taken down in volume will usually sound worse than a track that was submitted that was more quiet so we're gonna be using this to judge our loudness so we're not we're not really using our ears to judge loudness or how loud it sounds in our room and I'll show you a few things you want to be looking for on this and then the actual plug-in we're going to use to get the loudness is Maximus you missed in other tutorials on Maximus that are going to go into all the different bands and do all sorts of crazy compression and limiting but I'm gonna try and keep this plug-in very very simple if I can now the first thing we want to do is just expand it so we can see what's going on and you want to make sure you're on the master band here I've quickly reset this plug-in back to standard and all I want you to focus on right now is just this bit here this is determining where and how limiting is going to happen so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to drag this point here I'm gonna take it down to minus 1.5 DB and I'm gonna do the same with this point but I'm gonna make sure that it stays on this 45 degree line what this means is that as we push volume into this when it hits minus 1.5 DB it's going to be chopped off so that if possible no sound will be louder than minus 1.5 dB now what we're going to look at just gonna close this down a little bit what we're gonna look at is the pre gain and I'm gonna just push the gain in to this until we've got some gentle limiting happening and you'll see limiting because you'll see some peak reduction on this over here and I'm gonna look at the Yulin loudness meter now the online streaming sites are looking for an integrated loudness of around minus 14 L u FS but that is across either the whole song or a part of your song so the loudest part of our song is allowed to be louder than -14 l u FS but we don't want it to be too much louder so let's take a listen to this and tweak some dials you want to make sure that you set the loudness at the loudest part of your song which is what I'm doing here [Music] [Music] I'm also just adjusting the attack down because I want to make sure that it clamps onto those Peaks absolutely immediately so what I can see is that the short-term loudness was at about minus twelve and if I played it across a longer section of my song in my average out to minus fourteen but that's something that you're just gonna have to check on your song at any time you can just press this X button to sort of reset this loudness meter it's good to sort of take awhile to learn how this works and get comfortable with it but it's not too complicated once you get used to it now often at this point people get a bit scared of what's going on inside Maximus because there's a lot of dials as a beginner I didn't understand what half of this men really for now just try to focus on the the pregame pushing into this don't adjust the post-game because that's just gonna push it higher than minus 1.5 we need it to be a minus 1.5 DB so that the online stores have Headroom to do their conversions if you push it louder than that your track will just end up with problems it will have distortions or it will have sort of strange artifacts occurring in the high end usually is what I hear and what we're trying to do here is raise the loudness of this track without really altering it in any way if possible I still want it to sound very punchy I want it to sound just as wide and just as dynamic if possible and you will lose some of that by limiting just naturally but we're trying to get it to stay as close to the mix as possible now what I've got down here which I was talking about earlier are three versions of the track so I have one version that's been mastered in green and this has some medium amount of limiting so it's about the track was about minus 14 L u FS overall the one in the middle that's loud was quite a bit further I pushed it by another 3 or 4 DB and the one that's very loud i squashed an awful lot with mastering to the point where it was you know I like minus 5 or minus 6 L u FS short term and what happens is if I play the mix then the medium then loud then super loud they sort of keep sounding better and better because they get louder and louder and louder each time so I'm gonna be just give you a warning this might get pretty loud [Music] there and for a beginner if you listen to the mix and then you listen to one of the loud versions you usually just assume that it's better because it gets so much louder that you're sort of fooled into believing it sounds better [Music] and this is something that I see a lot of people getting confused by I got confused by it at the start as well because when you hear things that are louder you're just always fooled into believing they sound better they sound bass here they sound fuller and more punchy usually but if I take the volume of these loud ones down so that they roughly match the mix again you'll hear that they actually sound a lot worse than the mix they lose a lot of punch and they lose a lot of their definition really so let's take a listen [Music] it's worth it and when I was comparing those these ones that were really loud actually ended up sounding really bad because they were just like being squashed and you could hear their compression and the limiting just sucking up and down it really didn't sound good at all so I'm gonna try and avoid too that kind of thing now what I'm gonna do is the one that had sort of the medium limiting on it I'm just gonna compare the two and see whether it still sounds good what I hear with the one on the bottom is that the bass is more controlled by that EQ and those changes and while it's definitely lost a little bit of its punch most of it's still there it still sounds wide still sounds clear you can still hear what's going on and nothing really sounds like it's sort of sucking up and down with the track like you can't really hear the limiting as being incredibly obvious on this track so once we get it to the point that we think it's loud enough for online streaming so I'm going to turn on all these effects so it's gone through the EQ it's gone through Maximus we've checked it on the loudest meter we've taken a look at spam to compare the tonal balance this the last and sort of final step step five is to try any sweetening so this is where if you've got your hands on any plugins that you like maybe you've downloaded that free stereo imager from ozone or you've got like a saturation plug-in or a mix buss compressor this is where you should just try those sorts of effects be very careful with these effects especially if you try stereo imaging we can do stereo imaging inside Maximus as well so I'll just show a little bit of that on the master I can image it I can make it wider here thinner here or I can go into each band high mid and low and try to image it from there I'll show you what this sort of sounds like [Music] and you might like the sound of that or you might want to go into just the high band and maybe you want to make the high band sound a little bit more wide [Music] and as you can see what I'm doing don't be afraid to you know when you first take it down you know push it to the extremes try and really listen to what it's doing and then be a bit more subtle with it the real take-home message for beginners here is try out these things don't be afraid to try them if you've got your hands on some new plugins whether they're from FL Studio or otherwise experiment with mix buss compression experiment with saturation with stereo imaging and see whether it enhances your mix and try to be really honest with yourself if you think it enhances your mix you can go with it but if you're if you've put it on and you just really want it to work but it doesn't really sound better don't be afraid of just turning it off again it's not wasted time you've spent time learning how to use the plug-in and the last thing to do with the sweetening is make sure that you check on the master put your mix back into mono especially if you tried stereo widening take a listen to it in mono and then turn those effects on and off if you turn the stereo imaging on but then you listen to it in mono and it sounds really bad then you probably want to take the stereo imaging off or at least sort of rain back on it a little bit your song will sound a bit degraded in mono but it should still sound good enough in mono a lot of times your music will be played back in mono unfortunately some people will listen to it on their phone or on their laptop ideally everybody would listen to music on headphones or speakers but that's not always what happens after you've tried any sweetening ideas it's time to export the song so what we're going to do is we're going to select at the top here by right-clicking and driving when we go from the start of our fade all the way to the end of the other fade and we're just gonna make sure that everything else is muted we're going to make sure that all of our mastering effects are turned on and then I'm going to go to file we're going to go to export and we're going to select WAV file save it somewhere and then what we're going to do is we're going to select 24-bit WAV depth high quality enable insert effects enable master effects and cut remainder at the top we want to make sure that it cuts it exactly where we want it to and doesn't sort of keep trailing off to forever so then we're just going to click start and it will export our song so those are my five steps for getting started with mastering but like I said earlier don't be afraid to dive into all the other aspects of it and find out more about mix buss compression more about sweetening I talked about that a little bit more in my other video on mastering which I'll link just here but thank you very much for watching and I do hope this has sent you in the right direction bye for now [Music] [Music]

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 632,590

Rating: 4.9495077 out of 5

Keywords: how to master, how to master a song, fl studio, stock plugins, how to master a song with stock plugins, mastering tutorial, fl studio mastering, limiting, maximus tutorial, how to master your song in FL Studio 20, mastering in fl, loudness, loudness wars, mixing, audio engineering, music production, in the mix, mastering tutorial fl studio, youlean loudness meter, fruity eq 2, master eq, master limiting, sweetening

Id: uQ57_VLPDAA

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

stock fl gang

[u/nomic_london]

Like everybody else he talks about how mixing is more crucial than mastering to start off with. Personally I was getting a bit tired of that sentence. Everybody keeps saying it. And I'm like yeah, I got it, done that,lets leant how to master. But after that sentence most tutorials didn't have a great deal of good advice. I've posted a different video before. But going back to songs I mastered that was I realised the compression I put of was too much and the song sounded shit.

Here is the result of my mastering attempt.

https://youtu.be/VewDwZkPaKc

I'm quite happy with it. But the most important is that I feel like I know what I am doing now and what I am aiming for.

[u/Nuaua]

The "TT Dynamic Range Meter" plugin for measuring your dynamic range is still the best free one I know about. 14db+ is considered high-quality. While heavy music can go lower (8-10) going bellow really start to sound like shit.

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/tt-dynamic-range-meter-by-pleasurize-music-foundation

[u/0xet]

Thank u my brother I learned something 🙏🏻❤️

[u/[deleted]]

would save this post. Thanks for your sharing

[u/krik777]

pffft. i just put a maximus master preset on master and im done