Professional quality mastering, available 24/7, zero turnaround time, and delivery in minutes. LANDR saves you an average of $150/song compared to traditional mastering. The goal of mastering is matching a song's sonic character to that of other songs on the same album, optimizing loudness, and adding the last 5% of sonic adjustment (bass, treble, clarity, wideness). Mastering is quicker than mixing and makes less of a difference on the overall sound of your song, but is nonetheless important as a finishing touch.

• How To Mix And Master A Song On Fl Studio 10

What db level do I master at?Hello. I love Music Creator 5, and I am ready to master my songs for iTunes.I am mixing using the 24 bit option, but I am exporting and dithering to 16 bit WAV.I am trying to mix and master at the same time before exporting.

I figure if I can fix something in the mix it is better than trying to after exporting. I recorded every track below 0 db, and I have mixed to where the peak of the master level is almost 6 db. The reason I did this is because I am familiar with the loudness war, and I compared my mixes to popular songs to get an idea of where they peak. The new Bob Ludwig remastered Rush Moving Pictures cd peaks just around 5 db.My question is: is this a good way to do it yourself?

Mixing at a 0db peak seems weak sounding.Any advice? If you really mean 6 dB, it's tooooo high and clipping. Yes.very true. I was thinking the same thing.that you really meant -6 db which is a good level to aim for.I really don't pay much attention to the actual average numbers. I simply aim to keep everything 'out of the red' in the console view. From the tracks, to the busses, to the master buss. This is a method that seems to work well for me.I use Ozone as a mastering tool.

I use some preset's that are tweeked by me to 'pump it up' in the master buss.It is totally possible to master a track with the plugs included in MC5. Although, there are some really nice 3rd party plugs on the market like Ozone that just seem to make the job so much easier.I prefer to call it 'sweetening' as opposed to mastering since (IIRC) mastering refers to making all the tracks on an LP or CD pretty much the same in volume and other characteristics. But, yeah, we all call it mastering although we know it's technically, really not.After mixing to set the levels correctly.(no red line violations) and applying O4 to the master buss, I export the file and open it in my wave editor where I can see the wave form to see how compressed or not, that it is at this point. I will often use the normalize function in the editor to raise the level to 0db at the highest peak, with everything else being under that.proportionally. Hopefully, if I have done my job correctly in the mixing stage, there will only be a handful of 0db peaks in the whole song.

If I find it's running at 0db throughout, I must decide if I wish to leave it there or go back and turn my compressors down and make the adjustments to give it breathing room.In this photo, there are a number of 0db hits in the center, everything else is below 0db This song has been normalized at this point. Notice how it 'touches' 0db in only a few places, mostly in the middle 'louder' section of this song.In this one, I have the compressor up. Notice the dynamics are reduced but the entire level is under 0db. I don't believe I had applied the normalize to it yet at this point. Normalize it normally the last thing I do.In this last pic, the compressor is wide open, bringing it all to the peak. This is how many modern songs look, but it is not how I aim to mix. I did this just to illustrate what it looks like when it's overly compressed.

This screenshot was actually BEFORE I used the normalize function which took it border to border.and yeah, it was really loud.You should aim for the top pic as representative of your mixes, that will of course depend on the genre. Rock will sound really good if it resembles the middle picture.My wave editor is WavePad. My DAW is MC4. I really like using George Yohng's version of the W1 limiter; I use it for any kind of mastering/heavy compression I need to do.

You can accomplish it through the plug ins Cakewalk gives you, but I've really gotten hooked on this plugin. I actually also use it in track on a lot of metal vocals and drums for aggressive compression.And I'd like to reiterate what someone said about it depending on the kind of music you're mastering.

How To Mix And Master A Song On Fl Studio 10

Things like Jazz and Classical need more 'breathing', whereas extreme metal (death, black, grind) often needs to be compressed all to hell to really get the right effect. In my experience, rap vocals are also the same.I prefer to get my overall mixes pretty hot, but obviously never clipping. That way, mastering EQ and limiting is as it should be.very, very subtle.Also, I would like to point out that in my experience, if you need to have something in mp3/wma/any compressed format, DO NOT export directly to that format. Export from your editor/daw as the original wave file, then use a file conversion program to make copies in whatever other format you need.

The quality will be better that way; you won't have any problems with gain, clipping, distortion, etc. And NEVER delete your original Wave file, haha.

I made all of the above mistakes on a demo of mine a couple years ago.now all I have left of those songs are mp3 files that are slightly clipped in parts and annoying as hell. Good thing they were just demos, and were extreme metal. 'sometimes you realize that you need to go back to square one'It took me all too long to figure that one out, haha. People all too often get in the habit of overprocessing things, and when they mess up, they process the stuff even more to try to correct it and it sounds even worse. And then you're stuck with it if you haven't kept copies of the original.I really wish I had figured out that concept a long, long time ago.much earlier than I did.Anyway, back on topic.I'd like to point out that mastering and levels depend on a lot of variables.what kind of equipment/plugins you use, what tweaks you do to the equipment (knowing how to use it), how it sounds on various mediums, etc., in addition to how loud it is. Mastering is a completely different art form; it is supposed to be an extremely subtle use of compression and EQ, assuming the mixing engineer has done his job correctly. There is a long standing concept we were taught in school that as a mastering engineer, most of the time, if you have to make an adjustment in compression or EQ of more than 3dB, then a) you are overdoing it, or b) you're getting stuck having to compensate for incompetence on the part of the mixing engineer.Anyway, I want to reemphasize that a lot of it is not necessarily how loud it is, but how it sounds.

I just recorded a simple little piano/strings demo, and did three different 'masters' to demonstrate my point. All of these, to the average ear and on a couple of different consumer mediums, are about the same amplitude, but they sound completely different, and not all good:This is a lightly limited mix. It sounds good; has some headroom and dynamics (which is good for that kind of music).but it is ever so slightly quieter than the other two:This is a more moderately limited version, which is perfect.it's a little bit louder and still sounds pretty good. Has a little less dynamic to it though, but this version sounds the best:This is a heavily (and carelessly) limited version. Its slightly louder still but any halfway trained ear can definitely hear the compression in it. This is what most commercial songs look like waveform-wise, but the engineers who master this stuff have much more expensive equipment, far better listening environments, and spend hours upon hours making very subtle adjustments to make sure that you can't hear the compression/limiting here.

Your home recorded stuff should never look like this unless you have a ton of experience and some very good equipment, otherwise I guarantee it's going to sound crappy to anybody other than the average, stupid music hound:And just for reference (and giggles), this is the waveform of Trapt's 'Who's Going Home With You Tonight', from 2008's 'Only Through The Pain'. The dude that do this stuff know what they're doing.and get paid big bucks to play with rather fancy equipment all day long:So yea, there's my two cents.Oh, by the way guys, in reference to the whole clipping at 0dB thing, not necessarily. 0dB is the absolute clip point for digital audio, but not for analog. You can push levels on tape to 6 dB, and there are a few studios around that still strictly record to tape. However, (to the OP), since you're recording digital, yea, you don't want to go over 0dB unless you want some nasty distortion.when you do that, you cut the peaks and valleys of the waveform off (clipping) and unintentionally create what are called sawtooth waveforms.