A Trained Set of Professional Ears – Having a second set of trained ears to form an opinion on your track is important, if you have the money! They may adjust the song’s EQ balance as an artistic choice, and should have a properly treated room for accurate monitoring.Embedding ISRC Codes – ISRC codes allow your tracks to receive proper compensation of revenue/royalties! It’s a unique number assigned to an individual song – each song gets its own ISRC code!.You don’t want one song super bright, and one song super dull. EQ Balance – Similar to consistent volume, you want to have a decent balance in EQ from one song to the next.You want to make sure the listener does not have to adjust their volume knob from one song to the next.
Volume Consistency from Track to Track – This is more in regards to a full album/beat tape.(Can have a big impact on emotion of an album!) Intro / Outro Times – Adjusting the fade in and fade out of the song, as well as time spacing from one song to the next.Lets list some other aspects of mastering, that I know of: So loudness is by no means your only goal of mastering. There is a thing called the loudness wars, which is slowly ending as new standards and measurements are being brought in. Mastering is when you take your final mix, with the allowed for headroom, and bringing up the volume to a commercial loudness.ĭon’t get me wrong – there are many other aspects to mastering which we will cover shortly. I’ve had a mastering engineer suggest to me no louder than -3dB, but I’ve read online some mastering engineers ask for -6dB! Headroom is making sure your loudest peak in your song is no louder than a certain volume. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a few quick changes to help emphasis certain elements of a song.Īll these instruments, which are on their own mixer inserts, actually get summed into one mixer insert!Īs a mixer, you want to leave what they call headroom, as this allows a mastering engineer to do his job and not handcuff their choices. Your choices can alter how a song sounded originally very much! You would route all of these sounds to their own mixer insert and apply volume changes, eq adjustments, or compress a sound for consistency or creativity. Let’s say you have 5 instruments, some drums and claps, and some hi-hats. Mixing is when you take all the individual sounds and try to balance them in volume and EQ. I recommend saving your original beat so you can retry again! Difference Between Mixing and Mastering in Audio Production It’s really easy to go over board when you start mixing your beats. However, I do suggest you do some tweaks to your track to add clarity to your mix! Your digital signals are already high quality – maybe volumes just need to be adjusted? If you had a poor recording, you will need to do more extreme processing with EQ and other mixing tools to achieve a high quality result. These all impact the end result of that recording! What if there was background noise such as a computer fan, or the vocalist was too far away from the microphone? Recorded audio all depends on the actual recording. We may still EQ and compress our digital signals, but simply to make space in the mix, or for creative choices.īut comparing digital to recorded audio now: Sounds that come from VSTs and awesome sound kits. Recorded audio and digital audio are two different topics!ĭigital audio is super clean sounding by itself. What’s the Point of Mixing Beats in FL Studio? Advanced techniques (sends, distortion, and automation.).Popular mixing tools for high quality mixes (stock plugins vs.parallel mixing and techniques + plugin position matters! Fundamentals – EQ, Compression and Volume.What to aim for when mixing (metering, gain staging, headroom, and end result.).The difference between mixing and mastering your song.Why do we even mix beats in the first place.I hope this FL Studio mixing guide solidifies some topics in you! (As well as prevents you from buying unnecessary products). I will also cover the basics of mastering with you, but quickly discussing the difference between mastering and mixing. The next step is to learn mixing in FL Studio. When first starting with music production, your first step is learning how to make beats. In this post, we are going to learn how to mix beats in FL Studio.