Transcripts
1. INTRODUCTION: Hey, what's have already gratuitous here and welcome to my fo studio intermediate course. So this course is geared towards those of you who are really wanting to take your music to that next level. In a sense of getting your music ready for commercial release is OK if you already understand how to make beats. But, you know, you're struggling with the mixing, the mastering the arrangement and all those different aspects of getting your music ready. A professional level. This is what we cover in this course. Okay, so again, this is like an intermediate efficacy. Of course, this is like the curriculum. This is not how we start. Okay? We actually start with just to be just like a little dupe is a finished be in a sense of we have record. We have her leads, pad, base, kick, drum and stuff like that. And then we got into actually, just first of all, analyzing it, starting with some gain staging. Okay, That's just when you kind of adjusting levels, we get into some kind of myths with gain staging, talk about e que when to use it. The dangers of Q at best practice of using e que again seems compression. Best practices, different uses of compression, setting up like sends and subgroups just for a more powerful mixing experience. If I enter here to close the playlist, as you can see, you know, here's like my sends. I also have a subgroup set up here and, as we perceive, actually get into building up the song explaining song structure. I also talked to you about a term that I coined over the year called Audio Painting. And what audio painting is is it's just communicating with your listener and always preparing them for what's next in your song. We also master the track. First of all, what is mastering? Where's mastering come from over the years I introduced you to like, you know what allowed us wars. Now there's a cloud this normalization with al you fs I explain like my actual mastering change my process and we actually master the track together. Okay, Um well, that you listen to this track at the end of this video I explained to you about, like, exporting your song properly and then finally, you know, staying organized. If you are going to start, you know, taking your music more seriously. In a sense of, you know, you're going to start releasing on Spotify and these different types of streaming platforms because, you know, right now, if you're making music, you know it's fun. But as soon as you start taking it more seriously, you have to make sure that you're organized. This course is geared towards the intermediate producer wanting to know step it up, ready to release the music at a professional level. Now I just want to talk about me for a second. You know, me being the teacher with his course and why you should trust me. It was my experience. Okay, so over my years I have searched released beat tapes. Okay, I have. Currently I have released eight beat tapes as well as like, a kind of greatest hits. I also created like a real physical coffee of a beat tape. It turned out really, really good, and it's really cool business card that I hand over two people. But over my years, I have learned a lot in these eight be tapes. Each beat tape has about 11 tracks. Okay, so it's like 88 tracks that I've released over the years. So I have. I experienced a lot of trial and air, a lot of mistakes, and I've come a very, very long way. And I prepare you for how to start releasing your music again At a commercial level. I'm gratuitous. Hope you guys enjoy the course. If you guys decide to enroll, all talk to you. Guys decide the course would cover a lot. That's gonna get you up and running and really understanding how to use FL studio on really understand music production at a professional level, okay?
2. 1-1 - Listen To What We Have: Okay, so let's first listen to what we have here. Okay? So what I do have is a have some instruments. Ah, bass sound, some chords, a lead, a pad sound, and then just a really simple drum loop. Just remove that. So I just had a little drum up here, okay? And then we have our instruments. Now, if you listen to them together, I'm gonna tell you what I hear and what needs to be fixed. Okay, So first of all, the instruments are way too loud in comparison to the drum loop. OK, So that kick drum is not cutting through. It's not hitting hard. And with a track like this, you know, you want that kick drum hitting you because it's really foundational to the rhythm of the song. OK, so that's the first problem is it's too loud. Next, there's kind of like some frequency kind of masking going on in a little bit in compared to some of the instruments. For example, this court sound and this leads sound. They're a little bit similar and frequencies. So when it comes time to mixing and stuff like that will address that a little bit. So what I'm gonna do isn't gonna highly all these. I'm going to come down here to the mixer. I'm gonna right click go channel roading and go wrote selected channels starting from this track. Because since I've highlighted them all, they're all gonna be added into their own individual mixer insert, which is awesome. Now, we could actually do our volume balancing. Um, Now, the next thing I want to do is I'm gonna break apart this pattern and make them into their own patterns. Okay, so all these instruments now, how I would approach that is so up here, you can see that the shortcut for that is shift control and see. OK, so I'm actually gonna hit that three or four times because we have four instruments here, so I think I'm gonna hit three times. Okay, so I'm going control shift in C and you're going to see appear so one, 23 So now we have four different versions off this. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is it will go to the 1st 1 I'm gonna f two and I always type in capitals Woodham labelling patterns and stuff in fl studio. So I'm gonna go base Before I did that, I should have pushed in the middle scroll wheel, Get the color. So now if enter now, what FL studio does is again if Hef to um Now you can see this is purple. OK, as you could see, if this is the same pattern bass and bass. So right now, if you click here, you can see the FL studio stored that same green from base at the top. There also a shortcut is because since I just hit enter with that green color you can f three and f o studio will pull in the same color that you just enter on previously. OK, so they have three done. Now I'm just gonna click and hold from cords here, Come here and gonna press control and X to cut those case that the base now I always use the number pad to go through my patterns. So I'm gonna click the plus. Now I can remove of the base, and I can also remove the these two. Okay, because this one's gonna be cords. Now, the first thing I want to do is pushing him my middle scroll wheel just to enter and that's just going to save the color for us. I can also copy this because since there are already label that chords so going to control sea to copy the text. Now, if I have to Now we're on the pattern. Okay. And again, how I'm getting f two is right here. Rename and color, such as the shortcut. OK, so right now I'm on the pattern. I have to I don't want instruments. Number two, right. I want to be chords. So I'm gonna press control and v to pay set in there that if f three that's the last pink color that I just saved again. You guys can also click the color here, and it's the 1st 1 It saves it right there. So I have three done. OK? And I'm gonna click that in There are Sorry. I have to be like the paintbrush or pencil. So now we have these two, okay? And if I hold down control and right click, it will now kind of make it all fit in the playlist. Okay, so now I'm gonna do is a little bit faster and not explain so much and you'll see like this is actually quite a fast process. It's just because I'm explaining it to you. It's a little bit slower. Okay, so I hit the plus. I'm going to control X control. X middle scroll wheel control. See the copy. Enter F two for the pattern. Paste it. F three done. Okay, Now we have lied and loaded up the last one saw. Just click from the lead up Control X middle scroll Wheel control. See Enter of two at three and Control and V to paste that. And I'll place it in there. Now again. And hold it on control and right clicking. Okay. And just quickly, I want to re color the drum loop just to get a different color from the base. Okay, so maybe we will give it this clap color. It's just to keep it simple. Okay, so at the moment, you know, I have it all in, like the kick clapping high hat, all what pattern? But really, if I was going to arrange this song, you know, whole composition, I would want to break apart the kick, the clap in the high hat, too. But just for simplicity of this course, I'm gonna keep in the same pattern later on. In this course, I am going to arrange the track with you a little bit, give you a little idea and how to approach that. Um, but it's really simple so far, so everything is color coded. Okay, we know where everything is. You can even come here to the base, right? Click and go separator. Now, it kind of just creates a little bit of division, because these are what you call sends. If you don't know about sends, I have a course called fl Studio Mixer workflow, Um and, you know, just a quick way to use effects. Okay, But now, as you can see, these are all my patterns. Like that mold, my actual individual instruments. These are my effects if I want to use them. Okay, so I've set myself up to make mixing really, really easy. In the next video, we're going to get into how to approach this mix to get your music ready for that commercial release. Okay?
3. 2-1 - Gain Staging Mix Master Procedure: Okay, So in these section of videos, I'm gonna be talking to you about gained staging and just kind of achieving an overall balance with your sound. What? To be careful of and stuff like that. Okay, so the first thing that you want to do to achieve a good mix this first of all, listen to what you have, OK? Don't dive into e que and compression and all this different stuff. The first thing is, you want to listen. Okay. So in the last video will be listened to this mix. I told you that the instruments were way too loud. Okay, so we will listen to a warmer time. But what I'm gonna do is, you know, the shortcut. NFL studios hold on control shift and left click. And I could highlight these, and I'm just gonna bring them down in volume. Okay, So first of all, let's just listen to this again. The instruments are too loud, and the kick drum is not hitting us in the chest. Very well, case. Let's turn them down a little bit. Can. So with FL studio, you guys have always look in the top left in the hint panel up here. This is an amazing, helpful little panel that I use all the time. You know, whether you're just in volume, panning on off anything in fo studio. So whenever you're seeing me adjust stuff, if you want to see, like, the percentage difference always look up there. So, for example, in this case, when I was dialing them down, you know, I brought it down about five decibels. Okay, so let's listen to this again Now that the volumes a little bit lower. Okay, so I'm gonna left click to single it out. And this movie down, More down. Okay, so for now, that's a decent little balance of what we've achieved. Now, as I'm listening, you know, there's things that we could now apply to add more clarity and stuff of in later videos I'm gonna talk to with the e que and compression. But before we get into that, I want to talk to you about So right now, depending on where you are in your production career, you may want to send stuff out for mastering or you may not. Okay, depending on you know how much money you have at the moment. How serious you want to take your production career. Those are all factors on if you're going, get your actual track mastered or if you're gonna try it yourself at the moment, let's talk about if you were going to send it out for mastering. Okay, so you're kind of new. You're wanting to achieve a commercial release, and you want the best result possible. Okay, so you want to mix each individual mixer insert and get the overall balance of your whole song. Now, you have to be careful when it comes to the Master Channel. Okay? This is where you can really screw up your track and all your hard work in your mix. Okay? Now, the goal behind your mix is to achieve. You want minus six decibels. Okay, So how audio works? Digital audio is zero is the absolute loudest. And as we go down, you don't minus six minus nine. So minus nine is quieter than minus six. You know, I'm sure you guys understand that stuff, but I'm just doing it for clarity. Okay? So when you send your music off to a mastering engineer, they'll ask for minus three to minus six. I would recommend minus six, because how it works is when you're actually mixing your music. It's really hard to achieve, like a minus six for, like your back speak over my experience of my years in my very first release What I actually released an album with vocals and I had about six tracks, and I decided for myself that I was going to get it professionally mastered for my first release and then for my second release. And then on I started mastering my own music. But what happened was I was mixing my music and I kind of got like that minus three. And then also I was really started looking at every single song, and I started noticing that, like, you know what? Certain areas of the song that it was going over minus three and there's just, you know, it's a little bit stressful. Okay, so if you achieve the minus six, it gives you that little head room, and the whole idea behind that is so that nothing's clipping. That's the reason why the mastering engineer is saying that you want the head room is so that your track is not clipping, and what clipping is is when you're audio goes over zero because in digital audio you can not have audio that goes over zero. If it does, it starts to distort. Okay, So if you have, like a you know, a sign way, for example and as soon as that sine wave would go over zero, it starts turning into like a square wave. Okay? And that's where you get audible distortion. Sometimes that could be a good thing, which I'll explain later. Okay, because distortion isn't always bad. Sometimes if you're intentionally adding distortion, it can actually benefit your music by adding frequencies at a warmth and making a fuller sound. Okay, but you do not want unintentional distortion, for example, in like the mastering stage. If you're boosting up your volumes and it's going over zero and you're getting distortion Ah, in a bad way, that's what you don't want. So if you're sending your music off to a mastering engineer, typically what they'll say is you want no effects on your master track. Okay, so it would be turned this off. Turn off Chertoff. Okay. And then what you want to do is you just want to look for the level to be at minus six and then from there, if you want to export your actual track now, you know, you just go file, export you a wave, and we're to save it to ah mo se. But here for now, so again, it all depends on your mastering engineer. Some people are really anal with this stuff, but at the end of the day, your music gets bounced down to 16. Bit 44.1 That's been CD quality for many, many years is extremely high quality. But then you have some people in the industry was like, Oh, I want 24 bit 48 k OK, And if you don't know that kind of stuff right now, you guys could just kind of look it up and read into it a little bit. But at the end of the day, I would recommend 16 bit 44.1 Sounds very, very high quality. Okay. But again, depending on what the mastering engineers asking from you, you might have to selected to the 24 bit and stuff like that. Okay, um, so I will be covering exporting later in this in this course I just wanted to talk about that just for clarity at the moment. So again, minus six would be your Max Peak, and then you would export it at 16 bit 44.1, or depending on what their specifications are. And again, they do not want anything on the master track. Now let's talk about if you are going to be mastering your own music, okay, so there's actually two approaches that you could cake when you're mastering your own music . So the 1st 1 which I personally leaned more favorite towards, is actually mixing and mastering in your own project now. But this is the kind of a harder approach, but in my opinion is also a bit easier in terms of workflow. Now the first thing which might be a hindrance to you is if your computer isn't powerful enough to handle the mixing and mastering. Because as your track starts to grow, like right now, I only have four instruments and you know three individual one shot sounds, the kick, clap the high hat. But if we're working with a huge composition like we're talking about 20 instruments, tons of different kick drums, you know we're layering collapse there's lots of stuff going on. Would you actually compose the beat? Okay, that's just one stage. Now you're starting to add all these ah fi ST's effects accused compressors, reverb all this different stuff. Okay, so now it starts to grow and then now assumes you go into the mastering stage again. Now, your computer may not be able to handle it, but that's probably like the only hindrance that I could see that happening for you And computers are becoming a lot more powerful nowadays to now. How I approach it is I mix each of the individual tracks, okay. And typically, I will kind of go for, like that, minus six. Um, you know, Max Peak to OK. And then what I do is on the master track. I will actually open up like a gain plug in and buy gain. I mean, any plug in that is transparent when you boost the volume. So, for example, that could even just be like opening up just ah an e que you guys can use even like the fruity parametric eq you to. That comes with FL Studio and I would boost this up in volume. Intelligent like the desired Al you fs, which will cover later. Okay? And then what happens is if my actual audio is hitting my limiter too loud to achieve my desired value. Fs That's where I'm gonna have to be applying a little bit more aggressive compression or more aggressive Q and stuff like that. Okay, so that's just kind of little general overview of how I would approach mixing and mastering a track inside of the same project. Now, the next way, how you could be doing it. Now, let's say that your mixes done okay, you got, like that minus six. You know, Max Peak on your master track. You know, you don't you don't really have much going on. You know, you don't want a limiter and stuff like that. So now you export it, and I don't want to contradict myself. Okay, But how you would do this and how I would probably do this is I would export it to 24 bit wave. Okay, 24 bit, 4 to 4.1. I would consider good enough. Um and then you also want to dither it when you're exporting it. Because how it works is whenever you change bit, debt, bit depth. You want to dither? Okay, so dither is It's a very it's kind of confusing, and it doesn't really have that much importance, but so you hear me? OK, so did There is at the very vory quietest parts of your audio. Okay. And you'll never really hear the effects and tell your actual music goes to a quiet part and the music, you know, he actually turned up quite a bit, and it's to do with something called Quanta Ization air. And when you are dealing with, like, let's say, 24 bits to 16 bits now you're reducing the bits. And when it comes to the actual points that have to be placed, um, that's where these points could be. Kind of placed a little bit weird because of quantum ization air. Like it's like it's to do with rounding at the end of the day. Audio is always to do with math. Okay, so I'm gonna keep this simple. Okay, so your track is done, you've mixed it in this project. Now you're gonna export it 24 bit and you're gonna dither it. Okay. And now what you're gonna do is, Let's say you're gonna release, like, let's say a beat tape or something. So you have six tracks. You can export them all that minus six. Now, what you would do is you bring all those tracks into one project and you can master them as a whole. And then when you export there, then you can export it to 16 bit 44.1. And again, you'll want to dither Because because you're changing bit depth again. Okay, so you're changing from 24 bit to 16 bit. OK, so I'm going to explain that one more time. Okay, So my personal preference is to actually master mix and master in the same project. Okay, that way don't have to worry about this 24 bit and, uh, also having extra files. And, you know, when I work in one project, I don't have the expert once, and that's it. I'm done. That's the reason why I like it on. And then when it comes to testing, which is, you know, I'm making sure that the volumes are all similar from one track to the next. Again, we're dealing with, like the mastering stage here. If you're working the beat tape. You want to make sure all like the volumes are really similar. OK? And I do that in the testing stage. You know, after all my tracks are exported, I'm listening to him on headphones. Whatever. I will make notes on a piece of paper, and it's OK. I want to boost that one up, Maybe half a decibel. I wanna maybe turned that one down, decibel, that kind of thing. Okay, when I mix and master in one project, I don't have to worry about this 24 bit. All that kind of stuff is just one export. You're good to go again. Now, the second approach is to actually export from this project. It's only mixed. And then you're gonna bring all the files from let's say you're working on an album or a beat tape. You bring them into one project and you can master them within that project. Okay? And the benefit of doing it that way is that you can easily compare in between each other to hear the loudness and stuff like that. But the downfall of that is that if you know something to do with the mix like Let's take the guitar is too loud or something like that. You can achieve fixing stuff within the master sometimes. But sometimes it's best just to bring it back to the mix. And now, if you hear something in your mix now, you have to come back to this project that you're looking at right here, right? Then you have to export it in that 24 bit again, you're together. Then you're gonna bring it back into the master project. Okay, Then you have to export again. So, like I'm saying so if you bring it all into one project, you know, let's say you had six songs and you know, it's really nice because you can compare in between them right then and there. You don't have to do this headphone testing. Well, you should probably still do the headphone testing. Still, you know, just to hear from one track to the next when it comes to your fade ins. So your intro and your fade out your outro from one song to the next. Right? But in my opinion, just in my experience over the years, I've just like to mix and master in one project, its way simpler, and that's just bid my approach again. All listen on headphones and I'll I'll make notes. It's like a this this song has to be a little bit louder. And then it's just a matter of opening up this project, exporting it to a 16 bit, 4 to 4.1 wave again. You dither and you're good to go. Okay, so where we at right now in this video? Okay, so first of all, before we get into the mixing in the mastering and again, I talked to you about that just so that it can is gonna make it easier to understand going into this course. Okay, so the first thing you want to do is just gain stage, you know, do your basic volume balancing, and then you want to listen again. You want to listen for our frequencies? Kind of clashing, like the kind of fighting for the same space. Are certain notes not standing out, um, and stuff like that. Okay, so in the next video, Omar, talk to you about gain staging and some common myths that you'll hear within the audio industry and just get you up and running with best practices when it comes to, you know, starting up with your mix. Okay?
4. 2-2 - Gain Staging Myths: Okay, So in this video, I'm gonna talk to you about some common myths with gain staging and stuff like that. Okay, so with digital audio, this is what you call a 32 bit floating point program. Okay? And so at the end of the day, you do not want your master to go over zero, but on your actual individual inserts, like for example, let's say we take this kick drum. Okay? I'm just gonna wrote it to, let's say, 14 just for the time being. And if we actually boost up this volume and it goes over zero, that's not a problem with a digital audio workstation with this 32 bit floating point. OK, now where you're going to run into problems is if v ST's are emulation of analog plug ins or, you know, old analog gear. So, for example, no, there's a lot of the STS, for example, compressor emulation of like old vintage compressors. Okay, when you're dealing with these types of ves teas and stuff like that, you do have to be careful about going over zero, okay? Because you are going to introduce unwanted distortion. Okay, again, there is distortion that you do want. And that's by using distortion, plug ins and driving the signal toe add warmth, clarity as well as, like, punch and stuff like that. But then there's unwanted distortion, which is when you don't want the distortion. And again, if you're working with, like, these analog kind of plug ins, you know, emulation. This is where you gonna run into distortion that you don't want as well as if your actual track goes over zero on the master. And once they got talk about right now is all in your actual master track, you put a limiter and you want to have minus one so you don't even want your audio to go to zero. Anyways, you always wanted to be a little bit below zero, which will cover more in the mastering section. OK, so for example, if we have a kick drum here actually put onto 15 and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually remove it from the master. So if I just play the kick drum, so this is copy this code a new pattern, and we're gonna play just the kick drum here, okay? So if I play it, we're not gonna hear it? Because what's happening is 15 is not going to the master. So hit play. We're not gonna hear it. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to wrote 15 to 14 Okay? So just follow me here. So 15 is going to 14. And 14 is going to the master. So that means that we will actually be able to hear our audio. So if I click it, Okay, Such a kick drum. Okay, so now let's say we come to 15 here and again, let's just open up like a gain plug in. So I know it's an e que, but I'm using it as a game plug in for transparent gain. So let's just crank this up, okay? Let's put up like this now, not to hurt your ears and not to blow up your speakers on 14. I'm gonna turn it down, okay? And what this is going to show you is that it doesn't matter on these individual inserts if your audio goes over zero. Okay. So, again, if you watch 15 so on 15 I have this week you which of using as a game plug in and boosting up 20 decibels of volume of gain. Okay, so that's for sure going to go over zero, but because on 14 I've turned it down. Well, now it still sounds fine in the mix. Okay, so you could be doing stuff like this like, it doesn't matter so much when you're actually missing mixing your track. You know, if your volumes are all over the place, your whole goal is balance. And then under actual master like, for example, even if your volume was way over zero, you could even open up in in this case again, I'm using a e que as a game plug in. Um, you can actually come here and you can actually even turn it down. Okay? So again, if you're volumes are way too loud and stuff like that, you can you Like I said, you could turn it down, But again, you know, you want to be working with best practices. But I'm just trying to tell you, like the theory that you could just you could go as aggressive as you want with this kind of stuff. And it's not gonna be a problem. The problem that you're going to run into is again with, like, analog emulation plug ins where if it does go over zero, you're going to get that distortion. So when you hear the word gain, staging your whole goal is to achieve a balanced mix. And you first want to start with your volume. Okay, before you get into EQ, you compression and those types of effects to really help mold and shape the mix that you want. You first want to start with volume. Okay, so let me just repeat what I've done. So on 15 I have an eq you and using as it gain plugging with 20 decibels of of boost. Okay, when a hit play, you're going to see that the audio is gonna go way into the red. But then what I've done is I've routed it to 14 because I've removed it from the master. Okay. And then on 14 it's going to the master. So we are going to hear the kick drum because it's going into 14 and then fourteen's going to the master. So I've boosted it up in 15 on 14 have turned it down just to protect your ears. Um, and it's gonna sound fine. Okay, so here we go, we'll turn down a little bit more because I haven't heard yet. Okay, so you can hear it's clean, right? There's no distortion going on. But as you can see, like I'm way into the red. Okay, so that's just really important for you guys to understand when it comes to these digital audio workstations is you can drive the signal really, really hard into one of these inserts because it's the 32 bit floating point program. And at the end of the day, when you exported into a 16 bit file. Okay, so since this is 32 bit floating point, you know, if we're dealing with, like, 24 bit or 16 bit, that is where now, on the actual master, where really, really matters that you are below that zero and again with the limiter here at minus one. So I just wanted to talk to you about you know, this gain staging and the common myths that are out there when you are dealing with analog simulations. Yes. Be careful. Do not drive it, you know, into infinity. But in this case is you could see I drove it super hard. I just turned it down on this insert. And, you know, um, you heard the result is still clean. It just matters on the actual master. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to disable it from 14. I'm gonna put it back to the master and were to turn this off and then on the actual sir, we're gonna bring back up 14 and then the kick drum. I will bring this back to, um 11. Sorry, I was I right. Clicked it. Okay, so now we're good to go. We're ready to mix. Your whole goal is to first start with your volumes. Then we're going to get into EQ. You and compression, which will be in our upcoming videos.
5. 2-3 - Best Practices With Eq: Okay, So in this video, I'm gonna be talking to you about e que, Like when to use e que, uh, dangers of using e que and best practices with e que Okay, so we're not actually going to be mixing the track in this video? I'm going to actually mix the track with e que and compression in a later video one to understand the benefits and harms of both. Okay, so it is really, really powerful. Okay, you can really sculpt a sound to exactly how you want. And typically when you use e que you're using it for ah reason. Okay. So either your warning to sound to stand out or that sound it could be clogging up the actual song. So you might want to be removing some frequencies. And that's pretty much where you want to be using EQ. You either to help the sound stand out or kind of dial it back a little bit to allow other sounds to be front and center. One other way, you could be using e que is maybe for more sound design purposes. And that would be being more aggressive with CQ now EQ. You can actually be very, very, very dangerous to your music. Okay, so you have to be very, very careful when we're in the mastering stage and I'll actually open up and e que here. We'll just use this when I was using as a game. So one year in the mastering stage, so and e que like this is really nice because you just have different, um, you know, scales that you can really see what you're doing. You know, for example, if we're all like the 30 scale and watch this if I cut like this, it's like, Oh, that's not too big of a cut, right? Like that doesn't look huge. But really, that's six decibels. And as soon as we go to, like a more zoomed in this scale, you can see that we can't even see on the screen. So, for example, even if we open up the fruity Parametric EQ, you too. Okay, just to give you a reference and this is nice now you can actually expand it, make it bigger. Okay, So when you're dealing with mastering with e que you want to be typically subtle, OK, so as you can see, you know, looking like the top left here. So right now I've brought it down, like, you know, 1.5 DB kind of thing. And in mastering this is quite aggressive. Okay, in mastering you want to be subtle. So, like it might be like, let's say, you know, half a DB and you would open up the cue to kind of do stuff like that. Now I'm gonna go back to pro Que and I just like these types of plug ins because they're very, very visual, You know, I can hover over this. It tells me right away what it is that I look, I don't have to look in like the top left. Okay? So again, with mastering like you not want to do big cuts and you're not doing, like, narrow cues and stuff like that, this is gonna making music sound very, very weird. Okay, but in the mixing stage, on the individual instrument, like you can get away with this type of stuff and it will still sound quite natural in your in your music. So let me tell you some best practices with music production and Mexico. Okay? The first thing is, you want to avoid mixing and solo. So, for example, like I was saying So you know, we were listening to our whole song, and then we want to solo it out. Okay, so it's playing now. We're gonna come here, and you're like, OK, I don't like this here, and I don't like this. And, um, you know, the problem of this is that you're not listening to your actual instrument in context of your mix. Okay, so you can mix in solo, but you wanna quickly do things in solo and then go back to the actual track. Okay, so right now it's soloed right now routes into the whole track. Okay, so mixing in solo is extremely dangerous. Um, if you don't believe me, what's gonna happen to you is you're gonna solo a sound. You're going to try and eke you tweak it and get it sounding exactly how you like and after 10 15 maybe 20 minutes. Maybe even mawr. Trust me. In my beginning years, this is what I've done to what happens is you know, you spend all this time on it, he queuing it, compressing it, getting exactly how you like. Then you add it back into the mix. And you're like, Wow, that doesn't even suit the song anymore. Okay, so you have to make sure that if you are gonna solo off the sound that you make your adjustment really quick and you keep referencing it back. So, for example, if I was working with the CQ, you know, let's say coming here, but kick gonna make tighter now gonna go back. And then And then what you want to do is you want to make sure there's a fair volume comparison. This is extremely important, even when we get into the compression stage. OK, so I'm going to Seoul it out and we'll listen to this with the plug on, and then this is off. Okay, When it's red, it's off. When it's not red, it's on. Okay, so we're gonna listen again. You turned down a little bit. Okay, so this is a little bit louder with it, um, when it's on. So I put it to a boat, maybe, let's say three decibels Now, One thing to keep in mind is just because I have made an eight or almost a nine decibel cut here, it doesn't mean that I have to, you know, boosted by eight decibels or nine decibels or whatever. Okay, because you know, the whole sound has frequencies. We're just cutting on the certain frequencies. The ones that in this case, let's say we didn't like them. And I'm just making this operator. You know, as I was talking to you, I just click and drag random stuff. I didn't really listen to what needs to be done. You know, this sounded pretty good. Uh, the adjustment I made there. So again, when I turn this playing often on, that's very, very important. Okay, so so far, we've talked about soloing. You want to be very, very careful when you're solo mixing you want to send to the whole song, And then if that one sound is a problem, you can simply just sold out. You know, make your quick adjustments, but then keep bringing it back to the mix. The next important one is to make sure that it's a fair volume comparison. Don't spend tons of time on this. Just make it just relatively close. And then when you are actually into the whole mix now, Okay, I'm gonna turn the plug and often on and see if we can hear a difference. So I want you to listen to one thing here. And one thing that I was hearing is that with this with the e que settings, is it allowed for a lot cleaner mix? Okay, this lead wasn't fighting with the cords. Okay, So if you listen to the courts and this is the lead by itself, case like I'm saying, those were, you know, in the high frequencies, it kind of has a little sizzle kind of sound. Okay, again, listen to the high frequencies in between them listen to, like, that kind of sizzle. Okay, so we listen to them again now much cleaner. And when starting up, it's typically best practice and even not just starting up, like, just in general. Typically, uh, it's been told to You want to cut more than boosts, but at the same time, I still do aggressive boosts and stuff like that. But the reason why cutting when you're starting up is better than boosting is because you're thinking more in terms of how can I make the other instruments stand out? Okay, so in this case, with this lead, you know by us dialing back around, you know, 2.5 K here. It allowed the other instruments to stand out. It allowed the mix to sound a lot clearer. And this is actually just kind of by accident. Okay, I just kind of dragged it down, But typically, I probably would have maybe even done something like this. Anyways, whether it was with the cords of the lead, I probably would have done something to help them stand out. Okay. So, again, cutting more than boosting is really, really important. And then you just want to make sure you're doing a fair volume comparison. Because that way, when you turn the plug in often on, you'll know And as you start to progress in your mix. So, for example, let's say on the lead, let's say we had e que let's say we had compression. Let's say we had some other effects, too again you want to try to achieve Ah, a nice even sound. So when you turn the plug ins often on, you always want a fair volume comparison because it will let you know what you're doing, you know is actually benefiting your mix or harming it. And then in FL studio. Would you turn often on the actual plug ins? Because this is the kind of like master, in a sense of it's just gonna turn off all the plug ins again. If you look in the top, left their calling it enable effects slot. Okay, so this disables all the effects or enables them. So let's say you had five effects on here and you disabled them. Now let's say the volume difference was way different. The thing is, with music is when we hear something that's louder. Typically, we think it sounds better, and this is especially important when it comes to the mastering stage, because mastering yes, mastering is about making music loud. There's also other things involved with mastering again. When you're dealing with multiple tracks, you're concerned with the fade in, fade out times and yes, you know the loudness and stuff, but especially in the mastering stage, right? If if if if an actual track is louder to pull, you think it's better. So it's really important to have a fair volume comparison so that you can actually hear the difference between the loudness at a fair volume comparison because if the track is louder , typically what happens is the dynamics dynamics is like the loud parts of the quieter parts . So, for example, if a kick drum is always gonna be hitting you in the chest a kick drum, unlike stairs stuff those are typically like the loudest parts of ah, beat right, your kick drum and snare. So if you're boosting up, the volume is really, really loud. You have to squash thumb with compression and limiting and stuff like that. And now, if you've a fair volume comparison to, like the before and after, you'll notice that the before has a lot more punch the kick drums actually hitting you, the snares, more hitting you. And then, if you listen to, you know the same volume comparison, but now it's squashed. You hear that? You're not really getting with that punch, but at the same time the benefits of maybe it being squashes. It might have a little bit more off a balanced sound. So that's where you kind of got to get, like, the best of both worlds of Yes, you want some compression? Yes. You want some limiting going on to get that balance but you don't want to remove that punch . Okay, so it's all about balance in these types of situations. OK? So again, you know, dealing with, you know, like you. So you want to be careful in solo? Yes, you can do it. You just gonna be careful how you do it? Um, fair volume comparison. And this is with anything to do with music production. From what I found over the years, when you turn that effect often on this is with equal compression, especially you want to hear the benefits or harm that is doing to your music. And then when it comes to your actual EQ, you cutting is more beneficial than boosting. And again, the reason why I think that is this, like your mindset. Okay, you're more thinking in terms of how can I make the other instruments stand out? But again, that's not to say I don't boost. Um, but when you're starting up, that is a great approach to, you know, mixing your music. Okay, so those are some general things with e que. To get you up and running again in later video, we will actually mix this track. You know, there's not tons going on with the track. You know, we only have, like, four instruments and stuff like that, but I think it will still, you know, by the understanding this knowledge first going into those videos, it's really gonna help you, okay?
6. 2-4 - Best Practices With Compression: Okay, So in this video, we're gonna be talking about when to use compression, the different uses of compression that's really, really powerful. There's two main uses of compression which he may not be aware of. The harms of compression and best practices with compression. Okay, so pretty much the best practices is to do the A and B comparison. Making sure that you know what you're doing is actually benefiting your music. Okay, so first of all, I'm going to explain to you the different uses of compression. If you guys want more information on compression, I actually have a course is called. Why do we Producers use compression. Okay. And I break down all these different details about compression. More detail in specific videos. This is just gonna be a little overview to get you up and running. Okay, so the different uses a compression is First of all, there's level balancing her, like, you know. So, for example, from speaking into the microphone and I say some loud words and some quiet words, compression will reduce like the loud words and with makeup gain, it's gonna bring up the volume of the quieter words so that as you listen on headphones or speakers that the vocal in this case would be consistent. Okay, that Let's say you're mixing a track and you know certain words are getting lost in the mix . You can simply use compression to help all these words stand out. Now, one thing to mention here, too, is that you guys could also be using volume automation to achieve a very, very similar results of compression. Okay, compression is just like an automatic, you know, Volume knob. Ah, but it does bring harm to your audio if you don't use it in the right way or if used aggressive compression. Okay, you can really bring up like the sound of the room into the audio signal, which you may not want and stuff like that. Okay. So again, you might want to be using both volume automation and compression hand in hand if you're dealing with a vocal in like, a verse or something. And there's just certain words that aren't standing. Okay, So volume balancing is one way to use a compressor. Or in the case of the FL studio, we right click go to the piano roll. You know, you can adjust individual notes as well. That's really, really powerful. Okay, now, the next way to use compression, which you may not be aware of is you can actually shape and mold a sound. Ah, with the attack and release dubs. Now, this is where compression gets really, really fun because you can actually mould a sound to be way different from what it waas and typically, you know. So how it works is you can really be affecting the transient, which is like the beginning of the sound, or you could be affecting the tail of the sound. So, for example, if we're dealing with in a kick drum, so on a kick drum must look, let's actually look at a picture here. So right here. This is like the transient, the very, very beginning. This is what can hits you in the chest. The tail is like the, you know, the rumble. Now, if you have a long attack, what's gonna happen? Is the compressors actually gonna clamp down a boat here? Okay, so in other words, it's leaving the transient, and it's gonna clamp down here, so this is gonna be lower in volume. This is now much louder thin like the tail, because again, like I'm saying, uh, if you have a longer attack, the compressors not clamping down on the transient, which is hitting you in the chest, Um, and it's actually now lowering the volume of this. But if you had a fast attack, what's happening is is actually clamping down here. Okay, so it would be reducing the actual transient. So there's kind of, like pros and cons to this, but it's also to do a sound design and your compressor. Okay, so, again, the transient is just like the actual initial hip. So for this example, I'm actually gonna go in the courts here. We're gonna open up a compressor, and I have quite a few compressors. Many of them are free, like densities free, I think Rough Rider. That's the one I'm gonna be using. In this example. It's free as well. This is a really, really aggressive compressor. And the reason why I selected this one is toe emphasize the attack and release dollars with you. Okay. So again, I'm not gonna walk through intense detail. You know how compressor works. But you know, in short, how compressor works is you have your threshold. Okay, As soon as the audio goes over the threshold, instantly the compressor engages. Even if you have, you know, a slower attack. The compressors still kicks in, but you're attacking. Released knobs determine how long it takes to get to that maximum threshold. That's a myth that you will see out there in the audio industry will say, Oh, if you have your threshold, your audio goes over. You know your compressor won't start working and tell, you know, the attack time has passed by, but that's not true. A compressor will instantly work, but the attack just determines how long it takes to get to that desired result. Okay, okay. So again, give your threshold. Audio goes over. Depending on your ratio settings, that's gonna be how aggressive your compression is. And then with your attack and release, this is where you could be creative dealing with, like that transient. You can either open up the transient to allow to cut through mawr and squash like the body , or you can clamp down on the transient and make the body have a longer sustained tail. And every compressor kind of has sometimes like different knobs and stuff like that. But in general, that's how it works. Okay, so let's be really, really aggressive with this just to emphasize what we're gonna do with these courts. Okay? So I'm just gonna sold them out here, and this is what it sounds like. Okay, so with it off. But listen to the very, very beginning. Casey, listen to the very, very beginning. The transient. It's kind of more plucky. Er Okay, so listen to the pluckiness in the very, very beginning. Okay? Now with it off. Okay. So, again, this is really, really aggressive, But I'm just doing that to show you how it works. Now, let's squash the transient. Let's make the attack fast and again. You want a fair volume comparisons If I turn off and on, You know, if it's louder or quieter, it's not gonna flow. Very good. So I'm gonna hear a fair volume comparison, and then we will turn off and on to here. You know how it sounds. Okay, let's dial back the ratio a bit. Actually, let's be more aggressive on the ratio and the sensitivity we will die was back. This must be kind of like the threshold on this compressor being okay, So sorry. Okay, so, see, we're not being aggressive enough because we're really dying, dialing in a little bit. So let's be a little bit more aggressive here, kid. Dial it back a little bit. Kick off, Came or aggressive and Dalit back of business. Dial it back A little more, Kate. One time. Okay. So, again, the main thing I want you guys to focus on is just how we could make this the on these cords more plucky, er, by opening up the attack a bit, being more aggressive in order settings and turning it off and on with a fair volume comparison, and we're getting more of the actual pluck through. Okay. And then again, if you squash it, you know, let's say a little bit of a longer release, uh, trying often on. Okay. So you could see, you know, we are compressing super hard, so I'm gonna dial back the sensitivity of it. Okay, So if we listen from here, listen to the tail now, Okay, So the tale is gonna be sustained, which means it's gonna be longer, you know? So when we turn often on, so when it's off You know, it's a little bit of a quicker play, but with it on, you'll hear that the tail is more drawn out. So here we go. Is on. So when the time with it off. Okay, so we will listen to that again. Okay. So again, Now you have to be careful because we're compressing in solo. I have no idea how this is gonna sound in context of the actual track. So just for example, let's just listen to what we've done here. Um, you know, whether I keep this or not, I just want to show you with a compressor again. You can use it for volume balancing as well as molding and shaping. Those are two different uses of a compressor. Okay, so here we go. We're gonna add all the insurance back in, and we're gonna hear how this how the courts sound with this compressive, careless dalati talk up. So, in this case, you know, I think I liked it a little bit more when the attack was faster. Without back to release a little bit again, turning off and on to make sure it's a fair volume comparison. Onda, we will listen and The biggest thing I can't stress to you is it's all about just listening to it over and over and over again. I don't want to waste your time by constantly do you doing stuff like that. But really, when I'm sitting here mixing my music, that is what I do. OK, so as you can see, I kept kind of going back tweaking these knobs to kind of get it toe where I think it sounds natural for the song making sure that's a fair volume comparison. And then at the end of the day, is it actually benefiting the, you know, the actual whole track again, If I had multiple effects on here, e que compression stuff, I come here and I would turn off and on through here and again making sure it's kind of affair. Volume comparison, typically with your attack like you never wanna have it like the fastest in just totally squash. You do want to open it up just a little bit. That is gonna make your actual audio still sound natural, But just be a little more controlled. Typically with a kick drum and stuff like that, you could open up the transient. So, for example, let's just drag this onto the kick drum, just for example. Ah, and we will solo out the kick and I'll show you, You know, we can really change the tone of the kick in the actual transient or if the with night the body. So cases over out the attack must be really, really, really, really aggressive. Yes, you can hear, like we're hearing the click, but again turn off and on like we're not hearing like the tail. So we are hearing the actual, you know, transient hits you in the chest, but we're not hearing like the body, Which is that the feel of the song? Now, if we were to clamp down on the attack Okay, a little bit too aggressive. Okay. So often on. Okay, so right now you know, we are hearing the actual transit hit you in the chest a little bit. It's a little bit rounded feeling, okay, but with it on. So I was really rounded, but we're hearing more like that tail. Okay, so we open up the attack. Okay? Now you correct the click. Okay? So obviously, now what's happening is since we're allowing too much attack through the makeup gain is too loud. So is that is why it's kind of distorting. So Okay, so with it. Oh, no. Okay, so that kick drums tighter sounding the transience, hitting you more in the chest. Now, again, this isn't to say that this is benefiting the kick drum in context of the mix. Okay? Because this is dangerous. I'm doing it solo. I just want to kind of show you. You know how you can use the compressor. Okay, you have to train your ear toe How compression sounds. You know, a trained ear like you really hear when depression is too aggressive. It really sounds like it's just being pushed super hard, but is being pulled back at the same time. It's kind of like this pump. He kind of sound. Okay, you be careful of that. And again, that's just because you were just being too aggressive. So it's just a matter of, you know, maybe dialing back the ratio a bit. If this is like the threshold on this compressor, you dial back the threshold, and then you also have to compensate for the makeup gain. Some return often on you hear like a fair comparison. Um, and pretty much the best practices with compression is just often on often on, you know, a fair volume comparison. Keep listening is what you're doing benefiting your overall track and a cool way to learn compression. Is this to be aggressive with it? You know, just like I just showed you here. I took a kick drum. We played around with this compressor again. Rough Rider is a bit more oven aggressive compressor, in my opinion from, you know, other compressors that have. So, um, typically in all honesty, when I use compression, I mainly disuse the fab filter Pro C. The reason why I like it is it's just really visual. And it has everything I need. They also has, like, a soft knee and a hard knee is just just this just determines when compression happens. So, for example, if I goto hard me, um, as soon as the audio goes over 18 it's gonna start compressing. But if I have a soft me, you could see that compression actually starts happening around 24 even though on that minus 18 threshold. Okay, so again, it might be a little bit confusing to you if you're just starting up. But again, just check out the course. Ah, why do we producers use compression and a break all this stuff down for you. Okay, so that's pretty much compression. You can use it for level balancing. You can use it to shape a mold of sound. You have to be careful to the harm it could be bringing to your music to. And at the end of the day, you just wanted to a fair volume comparison, and it's gonna help you out tremendously. And like I said, compression is actually a lot of fun when you are starting to work with the attack and release knobs, okay?
7. 2-5 - Sends Layering Creative: Okay, So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through how to set up sends as well as kind of subgroups. Now, I'm gonna cover really, really quickly because I've already covered this in my fl studio Beginner's course. This is now, like, the intermediate course, Like I'm just going to kind of gloss over it quickly. Um, and why I'm going to do that is because what I have done here is I've added in some claps. Okay, so I'm gonna highlight these. I'm going to go up here to the arrow. I'm going to go color selected ingredient, and we're gonna have a different color than what we have. That's a yellow OK, So yellow, Just like the same kind of yellow. Um, and now these are our clap layers. Okay, so I'm also going to have to, and I'm going to say in capitals, So clap layer. I might be using this in, like, the course or something. Um, and as you can see, what I've done is I've panned one of the collapse of the far right and one of the collapse of the far left. And then I also have two other collapse just for a bigger, fuller sound. Now the benefit of panning one far right and far left is it creates a really nice wide stereo sound if you guys don't know how to program really powerful drug loops and stuff I've also created a course is called safe spots. Safe spots is a term that I have coined over the years, and it teaches you where you can place your sounds within your drum loops for them to sound good no matter what. Okay, it's a really, really cool course on how to build effective drum loops. Okay, again, it's called safe spots, and I teach you about you. Don't panning one right and left, and it just creates a nice wide sound, because when you're dealing with, let's say Syria wide nous plug ins, you have to be careful of face cancellation. And whenever you are using, um, you know, a wide this plug in like this, you always want to be making sure that you're testing your mixed in mono. Okay, so here's the master. Ah, and if you look at the top left here, you can see that serious separation. So if we go toe left now, it's removing the mono content. And if we go, uh, we're not like that. It's purple. You could see that it's merged. Okay, again in the top, left in the hint panel. That's always gonna help you in fl Studio. So in the merged, if we go all over 100% now, our tracks and mono So whatever you're using a wide nous plug in, you always want to test your mix and mono. And in pretty much in general, he always wanted tester mixed in mono just to hear how it's gonna sound. Um, and what mano is is just like a single Ah, speaker. Okay, stereos. When you have two speakers and what cereal is is, it's just the difference between the left and right channels. So right now I'm talking to you to the microphone is just one microphone. So it's only recording one signal. That means it's gonna be a mono signal if I had to. Microphones, You know, let's say ones right here, as you can see, but I also have won. That state's over here. Now, the distance in between those So this microphone that's further away is gonna pick up my voice later, okay? and that's going to create that stereo. Ah, widen this kind of sound. Okay, so with the collapse, I've just made some layers a pad, one far right for left for whiteness. And we will add these in. OK, And now what I'm gonna do is with these highlighted. And I'm just looking to push right click on there, too. You can select in de select. Ah, in between. And stuff like that is just handy. Um, I'm gonna come here going to right click, Gonna go China Roading and then wrote Selected Channel started from this track. The shortcut is shift control and Ella's Well, okay, So now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, uh, on 18 here. I'm gonna help us f two. And I'm gonna say Clap layer sub. Okay. And again, I can press f three and it's gonna be that same yellow kind of color or again, it's gonna be your very, very first color, because I just saved it. So I enter. Hold on, Ault on the left arrow key brings it over. Andi, I'm just going to, uh, left. Click this one first. Now I'm gonna hold down control and shift and then left. Click and hold. Now I'm selecting multiple I can, right click here. Go wrote to this track on Lee because I don't want these individual sounds going anywhere else. I want them to go through the subgroup and then into the master and other cool thing you could do on a subgroup. Two. Oh, pushing my middle scroll bill. You can also give it just a little bit of a lighter or darker color. In this case, let's give it. Maybe it's a little bit darker, one just a little bit, okay? And you're going to see it just it will just differentiate in between. You can go a little bit more aggressive. I'm not going to spend too much time on that. But, um, that's just kind of a cool trick to let you know like that's your actual subgroup on benefit of it is now I can control this, you know, one subgroup for all these sounds, if I apply e que compression or and stuff like that and in addition, if I use it ascend and Ascend, would any of these inserts would be ascend? So let's just click on one. Let's just say It was like reverb. Okay, give it color. And you just open up. Um, Mr School reverb go river to now you. The biggest thing with the send is you want the dry to be zero and the wet to be 100%. Because the send is your effect. OK? And now, in this case with the clap sub, I could just simply wrote it to here. And I can dial in the amount effect I want. Now, One thing to keep in mind is when we send her audio through the mixed knob, this determines how much of the effect we want. Okay? And then this is actually what determines how loud who want that effect. So if we dial this back to Bo here, whatever, we're actually not getting much reverb. But in this case of its full, you actually get a lot of reverb. But now you get to control how loud you want that reverb. So there is a difference. Okay, so just gonna right click file and we go default. Okay. And there you go, Ok, and I'm going to remove it from there. Okay. So what I have right now is I have my clap players in there. I've added them all to, um, one subgroup and I just turned it down in volume. Um, again, once we actually start building out this arrangement. So if I have, like this and hold on control B, as in Bob a couple times, um, you know, I might add this clap layer only in, like, the course or something. And, you know, right now I don't have tons of instruments, so I don't have tons of flexibility on to build up the song like it in the sense of, ah, different verse one from a different verse two or anything like that. But these kind of techniques such as like a clap player. You know, that can really add that more emotion and stuff into the track. Okay, so let's just leave this and I'm going to delete this, and we will bring this back over so licious Listen to it, okay? And then I'm going to ah, mute it and then added back in, just hear how it sounds. And then we can always a justice later with e que and compression and stuff as we are actually mixing the track. So here it is with the clap player. Sorry, I'm in that pattern mode. So here's some mood. It was noted. Okay, so I like it just as this. A little bit of extra wide nous, a little bit more fullness. So this is just kind of a quick video showing you, you know how to set up a subgroup. What sends are and, you know, a cool trick with, like, layering to be a little more creative in your arrangement, okay?
8. 2-6 - Sidechain Compression Power: Okay, so this is the final video. Before we actually get into mixing this track, I just want to introduce you to side chain compression. I'm sure you know about it, but I just want to show you how to apply into your track, you know, as a creative purpose. Citing compression is an amazing tool. It's not just used for dance music. It's also used for many other purposes. For example, if you want the music to turn out in volume like a when a voice comes in or something like that, if you're doing video editing, that's kind of a cool trick for citing compression. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to be using the kick drum to reduce the volume off the pad as well as the high hat. Okay, that white give us a little bit more balance into this track again. I don't know if I'm going to keep that. I just want to show you how to do it in case you want to, because it is a very, very powerful tool to use in music production. Okay, so how you approach it is so first of all, you select the kick and now you decide. Well, what sounds do you want to effect? Okay, so from the kick, I'm going to say, Well, I want it to reduce the volume of the pad. So go side, change this track. Now when in this menu, how it works is like if you go side change this track wrote to this track, it's pretty much the same thing. And by that I mean this is like, you know, by selecting these two different options at the end of the day, this knob stoke It's created now, as soon as you apply a little bit of audio. Now it's wrote to this track. So now you can actually hear the audio of the kick drum when it's at zero, which is what side chain to this track is, you know. So now what's happening is the pad is able to see the kick drum signal, but we can't hear the signal, which is what we want for side chain compression, because we wanted whenever the kick drum plays who wanted to reduce the volume of the pad OK in the same way. Like for example, I could just left click here, and I could just turn down the volume now. OK, so it's the same thing as right clicking, going up to this track or side change this track. Okay. And then if you go up to the track on Lee or side change this track, only it actually removes all the routing of where it's going. And it will wrote it only to that track. So we're on the kick drum. I have. I wrote it to the pad and the high hat, and we will solo out the path. We will also Ah, bring in the kick in the clap. And now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open up the free limiter. I do typically like, uh, the proceed by fat filter. I will open that up, but I'm gonna mute it for now. I'll show you how to do it both ways. In case you have 1/3 party plugging as well. Um, and we're gonna go dynamics. We're going to see the fruity limiter. Okay, so now the biggest thing here is because on the kick drum, I have wrote it. Okay, so if we go to the compressors compressors section, you're gonna see side chain. If you right. Click it now. The kick is there. Okay, if I were to remove this, Okay, you could see it removed it. Because now there's nothing to, uh, act as that side chain. Okay, so one cool thing about a compressor, which I'll tell you which I do cover in that compression course. The why do we produces these compression is that all compressors actually have a side chain . It's just not all compressors allow for an external input for that side chain. Okay, because how compression works is like so your audio comes in and it actually monitors against itself. So depending on, like, the threshold and the ratio and stuff like that, So it actually monitors against itself. So as soon as I you know, the audio signals over that threshold, it will actually compress against itself if we're using. Ah, you know, without an external, you know, input. But not all compressors allow for an external input. And that's where you know you won't be able to decide chain compression. But as soon as you have an external input, like in this case, the fruity limiter. So now we can actually use an external audio source such as the kick drum, which is what we've allowed here. You now, I could have added in the kick. And now whenever the kick drum plays, we can reduce the volume of the pad. OK, so let's just listen to the pad, okay? Just like what it sounds like. I'm gonna be aggressive on the ratio, and one assumes that bring down this threshold quite heavily. You're gonna hear pump. Okay. Yes, I might be a bit aggressive again. You can always dial with the ratio back, Kay listen to and concepts of the whole beat, okay? Might not flow. So it's more aggressive. Bring back up. It's me, you piece. We're down. Turn the volume just a little bit. Okay. So without the such in compression, Okay, so it sounds cool in context of the actual whole song. The patterns getting a little bit lost. But, you know, that's where maybe you could automate this. Maybe you can automate it to turn off and on only in the course or cyclonic in the verses. Like when it's slower. And then in the chorus time, when it's all busy, Maybe you want that pad to sound a little bit folder and remove. Ah, the pumping. Okay, so now Ah, cool thing you can do to keep consistency is you can actually just ah, click. Here you go say preset, and you could just drop it onto the high hat. Okay, so now the same thing. I already have the kick drum routed to there. And now this is on the high hat one. We will close the pad, and I'm just going to play just the drum that just for the time being Okay, so this is what it sounds like. Okay, so this might not be the best example of and the reason for that is because this high eyes playing a little bit slower, um, where it's really, really powerful, is I'm just going to clone this for a second, OK? And if we make the high hat faster, for example, and this is sometimes a powerful technique, So, for example, we could have ah, this one be like, uh, you know, of course. You know, And then again, I couldn't come here, and I can adjust it to be, like a darker color or something. And now this, let's say, is like the chorus one. Okay, so if we look at that, So the nice thing about it is like, now, you know, this is the course, and this is like the verse. Ah, this one is like a slower high hat. This one has a faster high hat. And then, you know, because again, when a high hats faster, it creates more energy, and it might make the course more full. And the reason why I'm doing this is just so I could show you the sights in compression with, uh, the limiter. Or I guess the compressor is both a limiter and a compressor on. And now we could hear like that pump a little bit more. So let's listen to it. Just the drum loops. So click this and we'll play just the pattern. Okay, so here we go. Bring back up. Can't be more aggressive. Cancel trip turned off. You're gonna hear it just so constant that there's no groove right now. This is, um, groove. Can you turn off your constant get? Okay. Here is the balance right now in context of the mix. I don't know how this is gonna sound, and this is what I was telling you before It's really dangerous mixing in solo because in context of the mix, I have absolutely no idea how this is gonna translate. And when you're mixing a track, you want to hear that groove because things could get lost in a mix. Right now, it's like we're only hearing a couple of those hi hats. You know, pretty much when the when the kick stops playing, you know, depending on the release. So how it works is you know, as soon as, uh as soon as the kick drum goes over that threshold, it's going to reduce the hi hats volume, and then the release is how long it takes to get back to normal volume. So if I go like to a faster release, it's gonna pull back faster. Um, but again, in contact with the mix, I have no idea how it's gonna sound. So let's just try it out, actually. So just for the time being, let's remove these. Bring these over, and I'm gonna hold on shift and click, and it could duplicate a pattern, and I put it back in here. So all right, click again. And now we're gonna listen to, uh, the pump sorry. Going somewhere came with you. Live it loud. Okay, so this is actually what I'm gonna do? I am going to bring these down one. Okay, Got a quick here. I'm gonna press the minus of my number patches. That's gonna bring me up a pattern, because I I know when I duplicated this, I have this pattern and I'm gonna put this one here. Okay? So why I'm gonna do this is because I'll be able to hear the fast hat compared to the kind of slower hat. Um, And then I'll turn often on ah, citing compression, and we're going to hear that. You know what? What kind of sounds better? Okay, so let's just listen to our original iwas, But turn off the effect so he really okay, Turn off at the site in compression, in kids to see it might be a bit aggressive. It's a little bit more aggressive. So before course time without side chain compression. So it is constant. A little bit of bounce lower on the threshold can dial back the ratio. And I'm also gonna open up the attack a little bit. That's going to make it so that the transient of the high hat might cut through a little bit more then the kick jumble clamps. Let's try it one more time with the attack opening up a bit kiss. So without citing compression, it doesn't sound bad. It's just just constant. Like there's no group with the bounce. Trump the volume a little bit. Okay. Without it. Okay, so I think that's really cool. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold on. Control left, click and hold. Highlight this press control and be I'm going to remove the course one here and then remove the verse one here, Um, and that way later on, when we build our arrangement a little bit now we have a verse, and then we have, like, a course. Okay, that's just gonna add a little bit of flavor. Um, now, really, what I could do is I could just create, like, two different patterns, um, are sort like two different mixer inserts and that I could even just, like, right click and like, duplicate this. That way, I don't have to worry about automating, um, that high hat chorus time, which is maybe what I'll do right now. Okay. So I'm just gonna right click and do this. I'm gonna push in my middle scroll. Bill, come to the end. Ah, understood. Of course. Okay. And again, you know, if it wanted to change that color, I can. But this is fine. Okay, so now I'm gonna hit the plus in my mind number pad. It's gonna bring me down to the course drum loop, Okay. And again, you guys can also just click here, and we'll do that too. But again, like I just know with my flow, how I used FL studio, I use the number pad a lot. I use the minus in the plus to move through patterns. You guys can also go from 1 to 9, and you can go through all your patterns to let the cool thing. Okay, so I'm just on the drum loop for the verse drum loop. I'm gonna press the plus in my number path, and we're gonna do is I'm gonna, uh, click here, press control of X, then control and V to paste it. Okay. You know, cutting is a very really powerful thing in the step sequencer. And then what I'm gonna do down here and it's gonna right. Click go file goes safe. Mixer, stay. Ask dropping into 19. Hold on. Ault left Arrow key and is gonna put it right here. F two and I'm gonna go. Course. Okay. And I'm going to put this 1 to 14. Now, what I have to do is on the kick drum, because see, right now it's ready to the verse high hat. I don't want that. I want to be on the course, and I could turn this down. I'm gonna come back to the verse one now and just to keep it simple for you guys, all also write verse. Okay, so now we know the different team verse. Of course. On and then on here. We do not need the the limiter like the compressor for that side chain compression. Okay, so that's just kind of site in compression is how to be creative with it. I showed you guys how to set up like a pad as well as like your high hats. Those are really, ah common techniques. When you get into really heavy the e t. M and dance music like, I think they pretty much side changes like everything but for myself. I typically m selective when I do such in compression. It's an extremely powerful technique again, it's not just for dance music people even uses like in hip hop, especially in that kind of boom BAP and stuff like that. It really add some extra kind of groove into your music. So let's action compression really, really advanced trick really helps you get your music. Does that little extra touch?
9. 2-7 - Actually Mixing The Track: Okay, so in this video, we're actually gonna mix this track. Okay? Now, this is gonna be a little bit longer video. And in addition, I'm also gonna maybe sometimes go a little bit faster and maybe not explain everything because, you know, in order to explain everything and really get to the point, it's gonna take a long time, especially as a mixing and explaining. Okay. So as I'm mixing, I'll try my best to explain what I'm doing. Why I'm doing it. How I am approaching it. I'm so now you understandable e que compression when to use it, you know, creative uses and all that kind of stuff. Now we're actually going to apply it, especially when it comes to like this A sends and adding effects and those types of techniques. Okay, One thing I want to do is remove the clap player from the verse two. Okay, because we have our verse, and then we have our course K. So typically, what I do is many times I will just highlight an area, And to do that, I hold on patrol and then hold on left, click. And you could do that. Yeah. So now I have this area, and as I hit play it's gonna loop over and over and over, and I typically will mix like the full chorus. That way I know all the instruments are gonna blend. And then once I transition out and took a verse, then maybe I make, you know, make some more adjustments. And really, at the end of the day, when side mix kind like the course and happy with it, what I will do is, you know, I will remove the loop. I will start from the beginning. I will hit play, and many times I'll walk around if I have, like things to do Rick around like the homeward ever all just hit play and I'll just let it go And many times I'll just listen for key areas where it's like, Oh, you know, maybe I need a transition there. Oh, maybe that pianos too loud or these are the things I listened for. But what I do is I get a rough mix on the chorus where I'm happy, and then again, I'll get up, walk around and then come back, and I just find two and all these little adjustments until I know. I'm happy with what I have. Okay, so I'm gonna hold on. Control left, Click The highlight. This. Okay, so here we go. Way. Okay. So I'm gonna turn on all the instruments of it just to make a little bit easier to mix your nose high. Had a bit. Okay. So when it comes to mixing many times, I will also use, like, thes sends and stuff distortions really powerful to help things you know will be more consistent in the mix. This pad doesn't have tons of high frequencies, and it's getting a little bit lost in the mix. Like, right now, it's more of a quieter section of the song, so it sounds good, but watch as soon as we add in the cords and leave. I can't really hear that had, however, if we remove it, still notice its gone right? But when it skin, it's a little bit hard to hear. So what I can do is maybe I can add some distortion in there. Okay, lets, um So right now I'm gonna push him in the middle scroll wheel, and I'm going to say site our side chain compression. Okay, press F two just even a little bit of a color. Also, I didn't show you how to set up Sidekick Impression with, like, 1/3 party Anyway, so in proceed anyways, here it is, you click expert. OK, you click external and then up Here you go. Here you go processing and in stereo side chain. That's where you can select the kick drum and then you can now use this compressor the same way How it shows you with the free delivery of it. You have a cure threshold ratio and your attack and release to kind of find tune that pump . Okay, so I'm just gonna remove this for the time being, and we'll bring it up here and I'm just gonna open up in e que in here. And maybe we can adjust some eq you on this pad just to get it to, you know, maybe stand out a little bit more. So when we play this pad, one thing you'll notice is that there's lots of low end going on, and we already have a kick drum and some base, so we may not want that pad to kind of conflict with that low end. So we might be using, like, a low cut. And, you know, we couldn't even issues like a gentle slope just to kind of help filter that out. But again, So hit play. We're going to see the frequency spectrum of this pad and you'll see what I'm talking about . There's lots of low end. Okay, so this is kind of cut. Some of the how many will go like a 12 db slope can. So it's just not as aggressive. Six might be too gentle, and then these are just really, really aggressive. So I'm gonna be gentle. Cut some. So it's boosting highs. Maybe with it off. Cut some more of the mids moments, Soledad for second, only the kick drum in. Okay, so maybe I will add some compression before the sides in compression, and that might make it a little bit more consistent. And I'm just going to use the fat filter. Proceed here. Okay. So I'm going to turn on the threshold, bring it up, and this just kind of see how it sounds, So cancel a bit aggressive, dial back the ratio. Okay, so I'm gonna increase the scale so I can see more so As you can see, I'm compressing quite hard. I'll be more aggressive, though. Kiss overturned often on. So I also want a fearful in comparison. So I 2.5, maybe Casper Italy for Let's try the compression After the sighting, compression made some cool. You're bit more aggressive on the pump. He was the compression after the session. Compression. Can I sit? That might just make it a little more audible. Let's listen to it in context in the mix again. A little bit aggressive. Okay, Without my effects, it's just a little bit loud. Okay, um, I do feel that I've made the pad sound stand out a little bit more. Another cool thing that when you use these types of third party plug ins is like, you know, right now, if I feel I was a bit aggressive on my e que So I've highlighted them all right, and really get to just, like, kind of like, dial it back just like a little bit, you know, this for example. Okay, so that's what I have so far for the pad. Let's keep working. Um, I was pretty happy with the lead and the court. How I did this with the lead and got it kind of sounding, you know, with, like, that case. So I also have this Roughriders compressor, which I had on before when I was showing you a compressor in terms of, like, the transient getting more pluck and stuff. So let's just turn that off, okay? Lets maybe, ah, this Remove that. And that's maybe like the fruity limiter. Okay, I'll show you have to use this plug in is a stock plugging with several studios. So, um, I am on the compressor section and was gonna dial it down the threshold, apply some ratio, and we're just gonna kind of here what we have right now. So right now I'm totally squashing the sound we're gonna open up just to get a little more life into it. Help that transient state Turn up the volume. Kilis is sold out quickly. Can we turn on the voice? Begin more attack? Okay. Without it can we can still turn up the volume kiss. So without the compression on its sounding quite quick, but with the compression on, we are helping that tail be a little more audible. Okay? And this also has a little bit of base to that. We might want to be a little bit careful of when it comes to a kick in our base to get those standing out really nice without the compression. So again you can hear is kind of quick with it on its more sustained and Trachsel's Fuller . What, You're down a little bit. Okay, so now I'm gonna open up some me que. Now you'll hear people in the industry say, should you geeky before compression or after compression? In my opinion, it wholly depends on my process. Like if I listen to a sound and I think that it needs a meek you adjustment, I'll do e que first. And then I'll maybe compress after if I feel that it needs compression. Um, in this case, I compressed first, and I'm gonna take you next. Um, you know, So that's just my opinion. That's just how I do stuff. Um, you know, everyone approaches things differently, So here we go. So again, it this has some low end, which I might want to tame this a little bit. I do like how it sounds. It sounds nice and full, so I want to be careful. I want to keep that. I just wanted to be control it a little bit, so let's just listen to it right now. We're on the cords, so I might boost a little bit in this kind of low mids that may just kind of help. Adds more to it, Um might introduce the muddiness, but it might again add some kind of warmth that I'm kind of after right now. Came without with a leak. You you turn down a little bit, so let's just solo again. Fair volume comparison. Let's just try the eq you before the compression cast. So this is listen to in context of the mix. So without the effects and then with the effects. Okay, so this work with this lead here. So right now, I feel that I could increase the volume of it. Because if this is the lead, when it comes chorus time, like maybe in the actual verse, we won't have the lead, you know, once we get to the arrangement, will figure that stuff out. But right now, in the chorus, just think you know the songs going to someone's going The chorus comes. You want to make sure that that lead hits you hard. It's catchy. It's friend center, Um, so let's just bring it up just a little bit louder than the courts at the moment, So was And then in this case, many times will do is I will Ah, maybe open up like a compressor on here. And I'll just do it just for creative purposes. Like maybe I can be, you know, a little bit more aggressive with this and play with the attack and release knobs. And maybe you get something cool, and if not, you know, right now, right now, it is sounding good. I like the way how it sounds. But many times all kind of play around with things just to see. Can I make it better? You know, I'm making it worse, and then if I'm making it worse than maybe just, you know, I'll get rid of it. But it's always fun to kind of play around and see what you could do, because again, now that you know with the compressor how you can use it for shaping and molding a sound with the attack and release knobs, you know you can create really cool sounds. So here we go. Um I don't know how it's gonna sound, but we're gonna play with it. I'm also with this compressor you get, you get different styles of compression. So let's try at the Classic and we'll go like a heartbeat. - It's just sold out often on que homer time, often on a little bit louder. Let's just call it 4.5, OK, so leave it about here. Let's just here before and after I will turn all the effects often on So again the thing that I'm hearing that I have improved upon Here's first of all the eq You, you know, like we heard before cutting the highs here just allowed for more clarity in the other instruments and the compression. What it did is to get added, sustained and length onto this lead sound making it sound fuller, More musical, in my opinion. Okay. So again, when I turn the compression often on and again, compression is you really have the train, your ears, and you really have to make sure like you're on some type of earphones or headphones something. You could hear this music nice and close. Okay, um, again, the lead. Just listen when I turn the compression often on listen for the lake the fullness of it. OK, when it When the compression is off, it sounds quicker. It sounds a little bit thinner. With the compression on again. It sums longer, more tail or sustained like a fuller sound. Okay, So again, often are kids are a little bit thin. He just sounds a little bit longer. Little solar and with all the effects off and then with it on Okay, maybe contribute down just a little bit just to kind of get just a nice balance in between the whole song. Okay? Okay. So, so far, we have done the pad, the lead and the cords as well. Okay, so, um, let's move into the kick drum now with the kick drum. A really cool trick to get it standing out is to apply distortion on the kick drum. Okay, Now you can apply it directly on, but there is something called Siri's and parallel processing. Parallel processing is when you're now working with sends and stuff like that. Okay, so right now, if I richer left, click on the distortion, what's gonna happen? Let's just listen to the drum loop here. Okay, without the distortion. Now again, the biggest thing here is you have to make sure that you are volume balancing. If you're not volume balancing again, your judgment is gonna be skewed. You're going to favor the louder one. Okay, but what distortion does is as frequencies to that kick drum. Okay? It also allows the kick drum to hit harder, and it really helps it cut through the mix. It's a really, really cool trick. So in addition to using e que and compression and stuff on the actual kick drum which, you know, you know, feel free to Ah, but many times by adding distortion in parallel onto that kick drum. And then you get into styling in, you know, like the amount of distortion you want. You hear this? It's amazing how powerful the kick drum kind of cuts through the mix k. So again, this is so let's just listen to the drum loop. Okay? Without it, Okay. Without it. So, as you can hear, it is a bit louder. I'm going to leave the distortion full, but it just turned on the volume of it. Okay. Without it. Okay, So let's just open up the distortion plug in here. And this plugging has actually just been recently updated. I think it was in ah, efforts to do 20.5, as you can see in the update right there, Um, they just improved the layout of it. So you know, you can adjust. You know how much distortion you want right here. And many times I will just compensate for the gain. So when we turn it often on, So right now, if you listen okay, so again, that just adds fullness to the overall song. So if we listen to the overall so okay without it. Okay, so let's remove these compressors on the kick drum, apply a little bit of e Q and a little bit of her own compression. And then again, this distortion send is gonna help amplify that. It's gonna make our kick drum hit nice and hard. Okay, so on the kick drum, let's just listen for what we like. What we don't like with that kid come can be kind of a little bit low lows on that. This boost some of the actual kick. Now, the nice thing about using 1/3 party. I e que like this is that, you know, you are able to kind of soul things out. So if we just sold about the kick drum and we listen to this, so I'll need to pad as well. So so you can kind of hear, like we don't what you like, what you don't like with a kick drum. So in here, you know, does sound a little bit weird. Smooth shirt. This? No. Maybe we'll try and cut that a little bit. But again, this is dangerous because we're not mixing context of the mix. But we are gonna keep referencing, okay? And then I am going to boost around here because this is what hits you in the chest. Okay, so with the kick drum, you have, like, your lows. You know, like your thump you have, like, your chest hit in here is kind of like can be, ah, kind of boxy sounding. But at the end of the day, um, each kick drums a little bit different, and you're gonna have to play with this for two. You know, suit your track. But many times people think that, you know, you have that kind of cut this stuff, but many times this can actually really benefit your kick drum and really help it sound folder within the mix. Okay, So again, we're gonna listen contacts with the mix. So without it, so does hit a little bit harder. But right now it's little bit cleaner sounding. So again I'm gonna boost it up by Lord Decibel, cause I've cut okay without it. Another thing with your kick drums to is most kick drums have some type of click or what you call it the beater sound. And that is near the high end of the kick drum. Okay. And if you boost like, obviously right now, I'm being dramatic. But if you were to boost the high end, you're gonna hear it. The click. And this is what really helps the kick drum stand out in a mixed too many times. The low end is there in your kick drum. But what's happening is the actual click. The beater sound is not being heard many times. You have to boost it up a little bit just to help it audible and will help it stand or in the mix. Okay, so right now, I'm being really aggressive, but we're gonna listen. Okay, so obviously it's too loud. Bring it down. Okay, Often on. So I think we've cleaned it up a little bit. So there. Turn it off. Now let's compress it. Oh, this issues like the fruity limiter and read Compress it, bring it down and again. Right now, I am squashing the attack. So I still want some of that transient to come through, turn up a little bit often on kids. So with effects and without. Okay, so I have cleaned it up. I made it sound a little bit cleaner. We are missing a little bit like the low end. Um, so maybe maybe we'll just leave it because again, we have our base line, which is which is a fundamental to our low end, so it might actually help us. So let's listen without it can turn on that kid from a little bit. With this week, you will boost this up this a little bit. Okay. On the actual distortion, let's be a little more aggressive with it. And que without effects. Okay, so now let's move on to the base. Okay? We're gonna get thes kick drum and the bass grooving a little bit. Now again, you got You can also be applied this side chain compression onto the base as well. Um, in this case, the base isn't playing all the time. Um, but if you are working with the track and your base in your kick drum are clashing because they are low end instruments. And at the end of the day, lo, uh, you know, low frequencies, Ossa late, Slower. Which means that you're gonna, you know, like if they are gonna clash, it's gonna be more audible. And with your track, you have to make sure that your low end is hitting hard. You want to make sure it's nice and clean and tight sounding, Uh, and if it's not, you know, your track is really gonna suffer. Okay, So with the baseline, uh, let's just turn up in volume of it, okay? We're gonna get some, so I might try and cut a little bit where the kick drum is playing. That's gonna allow the kick drum to cut through. It's also gonna make it maybe not clashed so much, and we're gonna hear them or audibly apart. So maybe around it here. What kind of? A little bit. So what about it? Okay, I think I like that. So again, if you listen in compared to the kick drum and the bass with this often on. So when it's on Because I've cut around here and I've allowed the kick drum to stand out more. It sounds a lot cleaner. And we could still hear the bass the okay. So again, with often on, just listen to the relationship between the base and the kick drum. Okay, with it on, it's a lot cleaner sounding. You could actually hear that Kick Drum is not fighting for space with it off. You know, it's kind of competing and really that I heard that the kick drum is kind of getting lost, so I'm going to stay with it. Offers okay with it on now, Really, What you could be doing is, you know, again, you give you kind of boosting up and here a little bit to really help that that you know what? Those mids to help a little more audible many times, if your base is getting lost in the mix, you can be boosting up like kind of like in the mids that, you know, mid highs. And it's really gonna help that baseline stand. Okay. And now another thing I'm hearing with this base is there certain notes which are a little bit plucky Earth than others. Okay, so if we actually listen to the basin solo Ah, you'll notice that some of the notes, you know, they really, really stand out with, like, their actual hit kiss. So what I'm gonna do, um, actually hearing, actually, hearing two things the first fall in the base. Um, it's sounding wide. So so one thing to compensate for that as I could just make the base totally model. Sounds like some kind of phase cancellation going on. Um, this assiduous serum there's something. Ah, you know, it could be like the river. Another thing that could be causing a problem is that if I had chorus on or something like that, something with white nous, but I think this might be OK. So now I'm gonna compress this quite hard. And the reason for that is I'm gonna I want my base consistent. I don't want to be super dynamic to be like some loud notes and quiet notes. I want to be very, very consistent to keep that gel to keep that groove going on in the track. I might have a little bit of attack just to kind of, you know, have a little bit of hit to you. But I don't want it to be out of control, OK? Caso obviously way too aggressive. But maybe we'll turn up just a little bit. So, like, the three and we will open a bramble threshold, and it might squash the attack and up on your threat on the threshold. Okay. With it often on. Oh, okay. So see, like that. Set that one. No, it's around here. This is the note right there. Okay, so I'm going to bring the compressor back. The school was maybe 6 to 1 castle, four decibels. Turn off it on. Can go five. OK, so let's listen to this. And contacts of the mix might be a bit loud. Now, the attack A little bit. Okay. Maybe a little bit lowering threshold and a little bit less on the ratio. OK, now, like I was saying, we could be using things like distortion as well as parallel compression. Now what parallel compression is is you just use any compressor and you compress it extremely hard on. And then what you do is you just suddenly bring it in to help for thickness and fullness. Okay? Because again, right now, what's happening with the base? What I'm hearing is still plucky. Even with my compression going on now, what I could be doing here is maybe I could be using to compressors so that you're not hearing, you know, one compressor so aggressively you could actually using it to compressors to again tame like that peak to keep it more consistent without it being so audible. Which maybe I will try here in a second because I'm struggling a little bit to get the space toe How I want. Okay, so let's bring up a little bit. Let's be a bit more aggressive again, you know? Ah, you know, I just did that, but I'm going to do the same thing on, so it's a preset, and we will try to compressors, Okay. And I'm gonna try it without mono. Okay, So maybe we will just dollar in this a little bit. Just a little bit creative that way, because I kind of actually like the whiteness sound of it. But maybe just a little bit too much and another thing to, um I'm gonna actually open up another e que. Because I kind of like how it sounds right now. I'm just hearing I want to tweak something, OK, which is many times what I do. Like when I'm mixing my track. So, for example, right now with the base, you know, I've adjusted my eq you, however, I want, you know, I'm happy with that. I have applied, you know, in this case, two compressors. And the reason for that was because I found that one compressor putting it really aggressive was to audible. So I kind of dial that back a little bit on the first compressor, open up another compressor, Uh, and I doubt the second compressor back just a little bit too. And it is giving it more transparent result. I've also applied distortion, which is like a parallel signal just to add more frequencies to help that base kind of stand out. I also ah, applied parallel compression. That's just it's similar to distortion, except it's just not as aggressive, but it's still adding thickness to that overall body because again, I found it was to plucky for a baseline on Ben. Now, what I'm hearing is I'm hearing there's almost maybe just a little bit too much low end. Okay, so I'm just gonna tame just the lows just a little bit, and I can tighten the Q a little bit, so it's just not, you know, So it's not hitting like up in the like the hundreds s I'm gonna bring it in just a little bit more. So right now, this maybe Let's just go like 25 okay? And I'm gonna tighten it just a little bit more. Okay? Again, I'm just hearing that now. Another really powerful thing with using a tool like this is you can actually e que than the mono versus the stereo signal. Ok? Ah, when it comes to FL Studio, um you know, I don't even think they have a tool like this right now, and it kind of sucks because, you know, I'm showing you something with FL Studio, where you like now you need 1/3 party plug in to do achieve something like this. But for example, I will show you because I'm sure there are free tools out there. You know, free accuse that you can get whatever to deduce technique. So right here, this channel mode. Okay, I'm gonna click it. I'm gonna go mid side. So mid is like your mono side is like your stereo, and what I'm gonna do is underscored, Teoh just double click to create a new band. I'm going to click here. I'm going to go low cut, Okay? And then what I'm gonna do is it's gonna click side for stereo, okay? Because you do not want base in your low end in your stereo content. And that's what I was hearing as I was listening to that back. Well, there's two things that I was hearing. First of all, I was hearing almost too much low end for these headphones anyways, and then on the stereo. I'm just going to cut this and again, You know, 24 slope 24 db Slope might be a little bit aggressive. 12 and it's just kind of dial it in a little bit. Let me just put this to, like, Leslie, 75. OK, so it's just solo it out and hear a base OK, Que? No, without it. Okay, so that might have tamed it. And really like here. You know, maybe we could Dalit more okay without it. And with all our fax. Oh, okay. So now it is more consistent. It's a little bit brighter that's gonna help it stand out more in the mix, especially when it comes to small speakers. Okays. And I'm talking like cellphone speakers and even, like earbuds, you know, not the ones that are designed for base. Like, you know that said, you know, the earbuds that come with, like, an iPhone or something. When your speakers air smaller, you know you won't be able to hear like those eight awaits and stuff like that. So what people do is they distort the baseline. Ah, you know, not to the point of like, it's bad distortion. You know what I'm doing here? This is like the good distortion, and in this case, I just used for the blood overdrive. But there's many distortion plug ins, for example, like a camel crusher was a really cool one. This is free. The company went out of business, but it's a really, really cool plug in. You get tons of different styles of compression. And then you can apply. You know, two different styles of distortion the tube or the mechanical. Yes, here, as I'm assuming is mechanical. Um, and then, you know you can You can compress it really hard. They also the fat mode to get the extreme compression. Um, Then again, if this is on the actual distortion, uh, send you could just dial in what you want with that baseline. So, for example, right now, I've replied some more distortion on this base. We listen to it, um, I might just turn it down, but okay. And the biggest thing is right now with distortion. When you're mixing in solo, you might think, Well, it's too much, too much distortion. But in context of the mix, it might be what you need. Okay. And that's why I keep repeating that it's dangerous mixing in solo. Um, but maybe this sounds good. And then with the kick drum, Okay. Obviously, I think this is a little bit too much aggressive, you know, a little bit too aggressive. Okay, so without camel crusher and then with it, Okay, let's listen to in contact with the Knicks, now I have applied to distortion plug ins on here. Now I'm not, You know, I don't know if I'm gonna keep it, but let's just listen. You know, I get I'm just kind of showing you things that you can dio again. I'm just coming out low, low and just to clean it up a bit for the time being to keep it simple, Let's remove camel crusher. And if you did want to apply to different distortions, I would probably recommend creating a different send, you know, bring it over. And you know, all you have to do is apply camel crusher and just be a matter of clicking, adding it in there and again this house And how much of you know what the effect you want This styles in the amount of the effect in the sense of how loud you wanted to be. OK, so I think so far we're doing not bad. We have We have makes her kick our bass chords leader pads. All the instruments are done. We don't kick drum. Now it's time to do our clap and, um then we also touch on the high hat a little bit and also the clap layers. So let's get onto our clap here. So I'm gonna hit play goes into the clap and, you know, at the same time, you know, many times on issues like thes sends and stuff. Now it's really important not to use these sends as like a crutch. And what that means is you don't want to rely on them to mix. You want to use them to enhance. And that's the difference. So that this clap like, if there's a problem, yes, I want you to go into the actual individual insert applies to me que which I will do right now. Um, I don't know how it's gonna sound, but typically, you know, a clap can always benefit from your own e que, uh, you know, if you want to add more brightness or Tecos, Um, muddiness money ness is more like in this area. Brightness would be anywhere kind of back here. It doesn't have to be a high shelf. You can make it like a bell. Um, you could even like Titan sometimes. Or, you know, like I'm saying on the individual sounds, you could be a lot more aggressive in your decisions on the mastering stage. Uh, that's where you you know, that you want to be very, very subtle in your moves. Again, I'm on a three db scale and again point to one like this is very very, you know, these are the types of moves that you'd be seeing in mastering. Okay, so here's the clap casts. Let's just cut some lows on that. Give us some body. Can't you guys a little bit And this is gruesome highs. I like that around there. So bring down a little bit. Que without it. Okay, so now again, the biggest thing you want to be careful of is right now we've We've boosted more than we've cut. Okay, so we have to turn down in volume now, so let's just say minus 1.5. Okay, the solo with Okay, so this is without with I said that's pretty similar. Okay, so let's listen to one more time can boost up a little bit. So why this 1.25? Okay, so, you know, as you are mixing, you are gonna have to kind of do that stuff back and forth. But I'm telling you, that's the difference. Is really gonna help you make more wise decisions in your music. You know, it might be boring to watch, but I'm telling you, it's gonna help you. Okay, So what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna play some distortion on there. Okay, kids, So without it, you're not as a little bit and volume. Now, one thing we can do with this clap again. Once you understand that a compressor can mold a sound. You know, it makes compression a lot of fun, and I always, typically at least try it. They typically try compression on the kick drum. Try compression on the clap, see if you know it. Dialing in these attack and released office if they do benefit the actual track. Okay, so it's at least worth trying. Seeing you know how it sounds. Doesn't mean you have to keep it, but it is worth your time to at least his try and see. Um, you know, you can come up with something cool. So this being really aggressive with this one and we will open up the attack a lot, okay, it up a bit often on. Okay. So for example, if we sold out, let's hear the before and after. Okay, so right now it's really, really quick sounding with it off case that was more tail going on. Okay, so let's open up the threshold. Bring up the threshold a bit, a little bit faster attack. And we're going to go a faster release. And another cool thing, which I haven't mentioned to you actually yet is using the A and B if you know if you're plugging, has it? So for example, I know the fruity Parametric eq u
10. 3-1 - Goal Of Arrangement: Okay, So in this video, we're gonna be talking about song structure, how to build your song out, how to arrange it and your mindset that you should have. Now, I just want to let you know that this is gonna be a quick overview of arrangement. I do have a specific course on this. It goes super in depth. The boat arrangement in terms of intro chorus, verse one verse, two bridge, all that kind of stuff. And I, you know, describe each section way more in detail. I just want you guys also know that over the years I have created this term called audio painting. Okay, I'm gonna be talking about it in this course to, But again, the course is called song structure and arrangement by me gratuitous. And it's a really in depth course. It helped a lot of people so far. Okay, So, first of all, I want to talk about what is the point of arrangement. And you know what? Your whole goal behind arranging a song. So obviously you know, you have to always be thinking Does your song flow? So when you hit play, you know, from the beginning of the song to like the middle of the song at the end of the song. Does it transition naturally? Okay, because you can have big, dynamic kind of changes that you know, that you've got a totally different direction in the song and like the middle. But you have to have the right types of transitions and kind of work your way into that different sound. Okay, so, um, when you go and to start adding in new instruments or adding in new sounds many times it can sound rushed So many times. What you have to do is you have to add some type of transition or some type of way to communicate with your listener. Okay, so the whole goal with what I call audio painting is it's all about communicating with your listener. And we do this through transitions and different types of effects to communicate with their listener. And the whole goal is preparing the listener beforehand. OK, so, for example, whenever you listen to your favorite tracks, you know, if you're listening to the verse and it's building up into the chorus, that producer, what they're doing is before it goes into the chorus, you know, a couple bars before they're actually adding in, like, snare roll drums. You know, like there is kind of like a rolling, rolling, rolling, and they're kind of pitched up, and they're kind of just building up into the chorus. You know, That's one example. Ah, white noise, you know, they could be using. That was like a filter to help build it up. They can also use that kick drums. So, like, for example, with our kick drum, we just go for and then I'm gonna go to the piano roll. Um, you know, like your kick drum. If I go control be now, um, now you can start making ankle faster, and then I'm just gonna copy this and pace it over, And then again, you could make it even go faster. So if you just listen to that quickly again, this is like a common technique that we hear in music all the time. Case was building, right? Okay. And then even like if you want to make it go faster, you cooperate the snap. You can ah go like 1/4 step. Whatever. Zoom in, get as intense as you'd like. Great. But again. So when a producer is applying these types of techniques to their music, their preparing their listener beforehand. OK? And they're building up that tension and that emotion, and it's all about communicating. So whenever you're adding instruments in, you always have to be thinking it's like Does this sound rushed? Is it kind of weird? Typically, you always want to use some type of transition, whether that be like a reverse symbol again. Snare rolls. Um, you know, is this stuff like that? How I pretty much think about music production is there's different stages. So you have, like, the beat making stage. That's where we actually made the beat. You have like the mixing stage where, you know, like I just did with you. We adjusted our volumes. We added e que compression You could do extends subgroups, all the different type of stuff. Ah, the next stage would be like arrangement, which is what this section with these section of videos are. And that's where your building up the song and then the next section is what I would call audio painting. And it's once the song is arranged. Now you have to listen in terms of the flow of the song. So when you're going for one section to the next, do you have these transitions thes buildups? And again, it's all about preparing that listener for that change. Okay, because a really good analogy is to kind of think of like like a roller coaster, right? So, you know, you get onto a roller coaster and you start building up. You know, it's a huge climax or building building and that you know that that drop is coming, you know, just like a course or something, right? But the whole thing is is that you were prepared beforehand, and that's the same thing with music you want. Always communicate with your listener. And that's what I call audio painting. Okay, And again, what I usually do is once my song is mixed. Once I build a little general layout, I'll hit, play a walk away and I'll listen. It's like Now do something sound too rushed. Do I need to add a transition in here? And, you know, typically, like I might even go like cook dinner or it might even ah, go. I don't just like my my dog, you know, I might go pet my dog or something like that. And also, I just listen, I get up, I come make a change, and then I'll go maybe go pet my dog again or something. And you know that process. This may be built like a 20 minute, 30 minute process where I just have the song on. Repeat, it goes over and over again. And I just have been a nice flow that I have found over the years. OK, so in the next video, we're gonna get into actually building out this track.
11. 3-2 - Actually Arranging The Song: Okay, So the whole goal with arrangement is there are no rules. And that's the cool thing with with the building out a song. OK, but the thing is, you do want a general idea of how arrangement works. Okay? But like I'm saying, there's no set in stone rules like you can start with a chorus. First, you can start with the reverse. First, you can start with Ah, in intro first. Right? So you don't have to always start with an intro that's slow and building. You can also start with a chorus that just starts right off the bat. And it's just nice and aggressive, and then you get rid into the song. So that's kind of cool, because it's always up in the air for what you would like to do in your tracks. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is this chorus. I am going to just kind of drag this out a little bit over here. And what a fever over here for now. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold on control and left, click and hold. Okay. And then this is the cool trick. You hold on control and be so 12345 And the reason why I do this is because it's a lot easier to remove sounds that it is toe add. Sounds back in NFL studio again. If I were gonna add sounds back in, I just use the number pad. So, for example, here's like my base here is my chords. Here are my you know, that like the lead and then the pad. Right? So that's just a nice workflow, too. But I find doing this. It's really easy just to remove sounds than it is. Just add them all back in. So let's just see where we're at in terms of like, should we start with a slow intro? Should we start with the chorus first? What should we do when we start our song here? So let's just hit playing. Let's just listen, Okay? This might be a little better. Maybe this try without the base. Let's just try with just the just the drum. Now, You know, if I was actually working with this myself, I might kind of spice out this drum loops. So right at this moment, um, what I can do is I can just right click on these patterns will make unique. And maybe we will add, like, a different kick in, like right here. So and then again, if I have to And just give it just a little bit of a different color that way, I just know. Make a brighter Okay, So listen to this. Maybe around here, allied something in so little time? No, just like this one. Okay, so this is actually, let's go with that. So again, what I'll do is I'll take out the kick drum, and I'll repeat that for every four bars. Okay, So how arrangement works is there's four beats in one bar in 44 time. Okay, so if we look at the lines so it's 1234 and then it goes back to two. So sorry that the Carol like the actual markers in the way. So getting 1234 Now we're on the second bar than 1234 Now, on third bar. Okay. And then, if you ever hear about in rap music where they say I'm gonna spit like 16 bars, that is just 16 of these. OK, so as you can see up here, at 16. So it would just be This is 16 bars right here. Okay, so remove that. And now what'll do isn't going to hit control and be and we'll do that. So now we have that one pattern that's just a little bit different. It's going to give our arrangement just a little bit more variety than just like that. 1234 Okay, maybe. Let's just add that pad back in, okay? I don't really like through this pattern, but okay. So as you can hear, when we're listening to this arrangement, it's it's kind of all over the place when those instruments came in. That's what I'm saying. Like it's so rushed. So we need some type of transition. We need some tape of build up. We need to get the groove going. And I haven't really found the combination yet. Eso let's be trying this. Okay, let's keep the pad in here. We could keep the basin. Okay, so this is a cool thing you could be doing is you could be using filters, So filters are an amazing way to add a motion into your music. So, um, you can be using, like, the fruity Parametric EQ E two. And ah, What you can do is you, like, select the different ones up here despite your like this, or you can right click and go type So high pass. And then if you hover over this, you can also make it a steeper Um, And then you can also just, um, your cue right here. Okay, So I think I want to do, um So I feel like there's two ways to call these filters. So, like there's a low cut and then also high pass. And then there's also a high cut and a low pass, their kind of confusing in the opposite, But they mean the same thing. So, for example, if you see right here, they have high pass. And what you're doing is you're allowing the highest to pass through while cutting the lows . I personally prefer to call a low cut because it's just easier. It's like you're cutting out the lows, right? But so what? I'll show you here is on the high end of the sound. We will put, um ah, low pass. Okay. Will be a bit more aggressive on her filter. And we'll bringing the queue up. Okay, so if we listen to this, they kill here. How we can add a different dynamic, more emotion to the music. Okay, so maybe we'll try the low cut or the high pass. Okay, So in order to do that, how I typically like to work with these filters, as I will highlight the area I'm working with and then on the actual band. So in this case, this is what moves the frequencies I'm going to, right click, create the automation clip, and then you can simply, you know, dial this down, and then you can adjust the tension. So right now you know we can't hear the effect. And what you can do is hold on control and right, click and hold, and you can zoom in in that area. Now you can work on it a little better, so I want to adjust it to the point where I can still hear the cords a bit. Okay. Now we will make the tension more tense. Oh, yes. Once it gets up to fully open. Okay. So for the time being, let's move this over and is over. And bring the automation clip over a swell. This just put it to I think this is it. It's usually like a low shelf that I'm just gonna leave it like that. And I was going to reset it because I'm gonna work with, uh, the, uh the high cut or the low pass. Okay, Silence is also really powerful transition to, as you can see right there. Okay, so at this moment, maybe let's do something with the kick drum here. Now, you can go and create a new pattern to create, like this build up, or you can get even, like, a different sound. Um, but sometimes what I find myself doing is I will just work with this pattern it here, and I'll just use that to do like, this buildup is a nice little quick and dirty way. A cool tip that I can pass on to you. Is that you? Could you click like the magnet up here? This determines how like your snap so determines how fine the actual grid is on the playlist. And if you are working with, like, let's say, 1/4 step like it is so fine and assuming you could see it gets really, really fine and this makes it really, really hard to arrange, because when you're so far back, it's really hard to know if something is on B or if it's not on beat, right? So at the moment, I will select a lower, You know, um or fine snap. And the reason for that is because I want to kind of play with the kick drum here. Um, so baby will describe this and revoke Trump, be control, be controlled, beat. We'll do two more times, and then here I'm going to make these ones faster. Okay, So I'm holding on controller and shift and left clicking, and I'm going to hold and make it smaller. And then I'm just going to hold on shift and then left. Click. Bring those over. Okay, so if we listen to this, Okay, so maybe what I'll do is we're going to remove this, okay? And we are gonna bring the chorus in. Okay, so this will be the fast high hat. Now again. See, since I'm so far out, it's hard to know where I am. So I'm gonna delete this. I'm going to go to a boat, a B or bar. This is usually what I like to work with. Let's say you dragged in like a clap. Okay? And now if you're wanting to try it to ah, let's they have, like, a reverse clap, right? And as you can see, like, right now, this isn't lined up on time because to be on time, it would have to be on the bar. So now, because I am on a beat or bar, if you left click and hold, you can see that you have to follow the snap. And that's a knowing right. So the quickest way to do it is to hold on, Ault. And you kind of break free from this step. So, for example, like if I wanted to put this clap right here, let's just go a little bit closer case if I want to put it right here. So I want I want to line up rate on, you know, the new bar. So there. Hold on, Ault. And as you can see, I could put it wherever I want. And again Ah, hold down control and right click and zoom into this area and then hold on ALTs and you can find tune it. That way. Another way you can do is just go to, like, none. Okay, but again, that that takes longer. So you have to come up here. You know, it's a couple clicks. Uh, holding out Ault and doing it is by far the fastest way. Um and we will just bring this over now, and this has put this year. Let's just hear how that sounds. So again, I'm gonna hold on Ault and bring it on grid, and we will bring our course over, okay? And I'm just holding on shift when I'm clicking when it's highlighted there. Okay, so let's listen. Okay, So let's maybe make a little bit of the build up here. Okay? So what you could be doing for your buildups is like reverse symbols are super super powerful case, so I don't really like it's a cool sound, but in terms of this reverse symbol, I wanted to be a more consistent sound. This kind of had some volumes swinging it. Okay, I don't like that. See, that's more consistent. Well, maybe go with that. So what I'll do is I'll bring this symbol in here. I'm gonna hold on shift and click. Now What I want to do is I want to make it unique case. So I wanna have actually have two unique sounds of that same sound. Sorry. I want to right click and go make unique. So this is what I wanted to make any God. Not this one case to make unique. Now what I'll do is here. You can click. You go reverse. Okay, now it's reversed. Now again, I'm going to hold on control. Right. Click. Zoom in here. Hold on, Ault. And how it can get rid of the snap and you could find Tune it. Now the biggest thing was symbols is they're extremely loud. They could hurt your ears as well as your listeners ears. So when you're mixing them in, I always dialing back quite a bit. And then I will find tune. Um, once I know once I listen. So Okay, so here this baby just make these kicks fast. Like this the whole way. Okay, so I'm gonna go here, here and here. And let's just listen to it. So for here, maybe a little more creative here, so maybe ah will take out, um, from right here and ah, you know, kind of make it a little bit more engaging. So go take these ones over. Now, if you want to find too in that symbol like if it was too long Sound that you want to be a little bit quicker. You can't come into your actual sound. You can put your trim up full. You can also go like you're out and you're in to be more creative. If you want to approach it like that, you can also just hold on Ault and click on the sound. And you can actually just cut it that way to maybe I'll try that. Okay, so we'll try this So again, like I'm saying so since I'm so far, it's hard to see to get it to find too. And that's why I hold on control and right click and do this. Uhm And another thing to like, if I was actually working by myself. So I like to have a full studio set up like this That way it's just really minimal. And then if I do want to work on it so that the playlist I can enter and it goes full screen and I can work you know, however you want to work. And when you're done with the playlist, you just hit Enter again and it puts it right back in its spot. Okay, so let's just turn up the volume a little bit on the symbols here. Just give it a little bit more impact. Okay? So, holding on, controlling us, right? Clicking, zooming everything in, go back just a little bit, Okay? And then we're gonna get to the verse. Maybe what? We will actually give some space. They're kind of cool, and you will put on the fourth. Okay, So as you can hear, when that lead came in, they decided, rushed. Like, we need to let the song play out. We need to let our listener enjoy what we have so far before we start adding in these instruments, it just sound a little bit quick. I did kind of hear that. Maybe I could add in like this right here. One thing you have to be careful of his high hats. Hi. Hats as so much emotion to your music. Especially when you add, like, fast high hats and okay. And the thing is, with high hats, it's really hard to remove high hats once you've added them in because they add so much emotion to your music. Okay, so in this case, you know this drum loop? We have slow high hats and we go to the chorus. We have the fast high hats, right? So if we were to take away the fast high hats and put in like, the so high hats, we need some type of transition or some type of you know what you think we need to do something you can't just switch. And if you listen, you'll notice It's just kind of like Like something No, it's it. The tension kind of. We lost attention. Okay, that's kind of what I'm trying to say. So it's just listen from here cases against here, You know, it added a little bit more emotion, But once we go from the chorus to the verse, maybe we can actually maybe the other remove the pad, or, like, the cores or something. Um, that way we are able to build up the song a little bit more. Okay, so at the moment, that sounds cool. We could maybe. Ah, So what I'll do is maybe, um, we will just put the course here and I'm gonna maybe apply this technique in verse two. Okay, so I'll bring this over to first to, let's say, and I am going to remove this. Bring back to just in a normal pattern and I'm going to remove the pad. OK, so this is Verse one and then many times, really powerful thing to have in your track. Two is like some type of pre chorus. So as you can hear you know, this this could be a type of pre course. And, you know, a pre course always comes before the chorus. You don't have to have it in every song, but if you do have a pre course in a song, you know it comes before the chorus. And again, what it's doing is it's preparing the listener. It's reminding them. Oh, yeah, the chorus is coming. Get ready. Okay, typically, you know, this could even be like a word if you're dealing with vocals. One other thing I want to talk about before forget about it is your chorus on how long your courses adds to the tension to So as you can see, you know, we have a little intro. Uh, this is kind of like building up into our course. I guess it could be kind of like a pre course or something like that. More effective, like the intro. But this right here, this is like our actual course K. I'll make the playlist big screen. So this is like, the actual course right now. Okay, Now, the thing is, I have kind of teased the listener, so we've kind of teased them with just a little bit of the chorus. And then once the song goes later on like, let's say we're a minute and 1/2 2 minutes into the actual song, then you can actually play this chorus twice. Okay, So instead of it being like this, you know, maybe it would be the chorus twice and you'll hear like, this is almost like what the whole song was building up to was like, maybe like that longer chorus. Now every song is different, but that is sometimes a really powerful technique that you can do Okay, So just teasing them with the chorus in at the beginning and then, you know, even here we could teach them to And then later on we can maybe even end with the chorus being long or something like that. Like I'm saying, there's no rules with arrangement, which makes it really awesome. Right? So right here, let's make a little bit of a transition. I'll go to my my sounds here. Okay, So I am going to hit, enter on this. We go to our patterns. So I'm just gonna go to, uh, the clap layer here. I'm gonna hit. Plus, in the number pad, I'm gonna have to transition. Okay. And what Drag that in trade that in bass Slap, uh, well, gets movies of different sounds. A little bit different. Kind of sounds. I was gonna cool. Um, again, I don't know what we're going to create, but we're gonna create something. Okay. So, again, these air kind of quick sounds I'm kind of more looking for Ah, you know, just kind of unique percussion elements that we can really work with. So it may be maybe a shaker or, like, try other. So again, kind of cool and ah, with these drums care. So, so far, we have these sounds. Okay, So at that end, put that on the two in the four allowed that on the four. Add that on. Ah, this is like the You know, Uh, so I again I was talking to you about safe spots. So how safe spots work is like, there's, like, the one there's like, the on B. This is like the off beat. And then these are what I call the in betweens, which is the A and the B. Okay, That's really, like the easiest way how I could describe it. So I'm gonna play on the be here, will play on, like, the be here in the middle of a and then we'll play on beat off beat and then off Beetle can again. You guys can check out the course is called safe spots creating amazing drum loops. That's the actual name of the course. Okay, um, so we're gonna play this right here, and we're gonna hear how it sounds when we have to add in some effects. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is we're going to actually add all these and I just held down shift and left, clicked and held, or you can right click and hold to. That's what you could do as well. I'm gonna add these all toe, one mixer insert. OK, so I'm going to hit control in l. That's the shortcut to add all sounds toe one mixer insert. I'm gonna f to just give it a color. Okay, Um, are actually sorry. We will give it this color this transition color. Okay, so I'm gonna come here since I just saved it f two f three. Because that's the last save color F three. Since I have these highlighted, I'm going to hit the arrow. Wouldn't go color selected. Radiant. And that color in the same color. Okay, so there we go. Now, on here. What I'm gonna do is this just gets, um e que, uh Let's get a compressor on here. The reason why I'm bringing the compressors. I just want to be super super consistent. Okay, that's what I'm concerned with right now, so I'm gonna squash it pretty hard again. I don't know how it's gonna sound, but this is gonna be a starting point, so I'll just play from here. Okay, so right now it's compressing really hard. Will bring up the volume. Okay, We will take us a little bit of like the low end and ah, maybe cut out some of the mids, bring up the highs a little bit, and we're going to apply some effects on those. So again, since they have the sense set up, we'll add some reverb, dial it back a little bit, and then some delay, maybe some wide nous. Okay, so right now, this is what it sounds like. And another thing you could do to is maybe we can fill throat some highs, so so kind of muffle it, but make it still sound cool. You could even boost up the cue that still add some more brightness into the sound, but it kind of filters it out a bit. Okay, so maybe we'll dial back of the delay a little bit. And then on the actual sounds itself, I am going to distort just a little bit. We can also do like the parallel distortion, too. But I just want to have the distortion on because what's happening is the distortion is going to be following into, like, that reverb and the delay. And it's just gonna keep the sound more consistent even in those effects as well. Okay, so it's just crank it up a bit here, and this is here. Go to dial it back a bit. Okay. I'm just gonna also add some parallel distortion on their T. Okay, So just just hear how it sounds like I don't know how it's gonna sound. Okay, So we could add something in here because, you know, it sounds like it's lacking a little bit in here with the transition. So we have Don't didn't. So it sounds like Don't did it. So we gotta add something in here, so maybe we'll just dis clicks of stuff. We will add this and then here, that makes some cool, okay. And trump the volume. Well, this is a former time. Okay, again, this is these are things that I do constantly over over just little tweaks all the time, you know? I know. Well, we only have a certain amount of time in this video, but I just you know, these are the things that I would actually Is this the sound this sounds. So I think I wanna remove it on one of those and the people add it is here, and with this delay, we will add. Actually, I might just add its own delay. So I'm just gonna have to and to say, Ah, transition delay. Okay. Can give it that same color. I'm gonna go DeLay. And what I want to do on it is that it's wanna have this a little bit of a longer feedback . Okay, so I want the feedback to carry on into, you know, the next part of this first a little bit because it's kind of stopping. Okay, you know, right here I can apply the feedback you no longer here. But the thing is, since this is like ascend, and I may want to use it for other sounds or something as we progress, you know, I'm gonna leave. This is kind of like a general safe area. And then if I want to be more aggressive, I would then add, you know, I'd create my own send, or I could even apply, like, the delay on to the actual, uh, insert here as well. I usually like to have a send. That way. I can blend in what I want, and I still have, like, the dry signal. Okay, So what I'll have to do here is just simply, just click it to wrote it. And then, um, the dry. I want that zero, because this is a send. I just want the wet the effect case. Let's listen. Okay. So obviously it's still going. Okay, So obviously, way too much, right? But we can maybe filtered out a little bit. And that's just kind of what I want. And we could even make this one be like, ah, different time. So it was 1/4. Just make it, like, 1/2. So Okay, the moment time turn down a little bit and one more time. What is that, like 1/4? Okay. Okay. So not to spend tons of time on that, But that's typically like what? I kind of do. Like, you know, you want some type of transition to kind of transition in between. This may not be the best example, but it will be enough to kind of get to understand and get you going. So, so far, we have our intro a little bit of ah chorus with little buildup. There were into reverse one. Uh, here, this right here, I'd consider, like, let's take a pre course. Okay. We're gonna go right into like the chorus we're here. We have our verse two. So had control and be, um so sorry. If you're actually highlighted and use control be it kind of goes weird. So as you can see that it's not even make proper Where should be so good? A highly fiscal control be, um And we would remove that. Or was Hold on shift and left. Click. Bring it over. So this just listen to what we have, okay? To see where we're at. So against silence again. You know, even this was a bit rushed sounding, but again, what we could be using is, like, you could reuse thes types of transitions. So, for example, I can bring this symbol right back over. And if you listen, you know? Sure. Just went down. It's a little bit, so you can see it's this one. Okay, this is kind of like that, you know? Is building up for the course caso right here. We could maybe do this. 123 So big. And here. So what I'll do is watch this, So I'm gonna hold on shift left, click. Bring this down. I'm gonna extend the pattern, and I'm actually going to play the original notes. That should be there, which is the clap. OK, let's make the course longer. It's just this. Just do it right here. You'll hear you just kind of allows the listener drops you enjoy your track a little more And one thing I will show you. So sometimes, you know, usually near the end of you know, your loop. If you add things in, it kind of brings back in the loop. Kind of keeps it fresh for your listeners. So, for example, right here I heard something you know, to myself, just me. Well, maybe I could do, like, a clap, like clap clap or something like that. Okay, Maybe that's actually a good clap. So I'm just going to go down to transition. So when we're now, we're on a new pattern. You guys can also be hitting like at four to create a new pattern as well, if you want to do it that way, I just I was using my number pad. So this cooperate here, I want to do this. So clap clap K and I want to put it right here. So that's what I want to do. So if you listen cast. So we want to be like this. Okay, so I'm going to bring it to its own pattern. I guess I could just come here in the school control L um, begin. Let's just Ah, in this case, I can just This is right click file and we're going to go save mixture. Stay as so. What I'm doing is I'm actually gonna copy this pattern into this pattern case and on these , like a duplicate pattern, I could just now tweak it more how I want. It's It's a nice little fast way, because now I have an eq. You open. You know, I don't have to keep it like this. I may adjust. I probably will adjust it, but I really have all my effects. Now. It's really easy just to kind of dialing back or change them rather than having to reopen them. So in this case, let's just give it a different color. It's just getting have to That's a good color. And then I'm gonna push him in my middle Stromile F f three, because that's the last one I used. And we're going to say, Ah, so I'm gonna click on the actual step sequence or have to again, This is the pattern. Okay, so I just called her the colored and labelled three things there. One was the actual insert. Um, and actually, the best way to do NFL studio is the first color here first, because, you know, if you're gonna go at it into the actual, uh, mixer, the color follows. Okay, so I'm just going to say, Ah, double club, okay? And I'm just gonna have to delete this because I want urban clap, because that's like the name of it. So controlling L Okay, so this is what it sounds like. And let's just add lots of everyone killer and turned up and turn off the Q shut off the compressor. Okay, so it's just a justice quickly. Okay, so it's just actual default and this Just make it break. Maybe you will do Zika Bill. I want more like the actual slap of this clap. And then here we would cut some of that, um, and then on the actual maybe the distortion. Yeah. So the distortions. What's kind of flattening off that sound? You hear that? So we'll listen. Let's bring this symbol over again. okay, again, We're going to transition from the chorus into the actual verse. We could even again have the symbol here. Now, again. You know, you don't want to overdo things because it can sound really monotonous. Really boring. Too repetitive. Ah, but again, this is just kind of the whole process that you want to do. Like many times, you can have many different transitions that you use in different areas or ah, for different buildups. Again, you can use like a synth, and you could have a note that rises up over time to kind of create, like, that riser up sound and stuff like that. Everybody get in for listen here. And this symbol might sound a little bit late, actually. So if I put it here, can a little better under the same thing here. Why this to that? Okay, so I kind of like that flow going. But again, let's just add the course kick and clapping here, and we're gonna remove the verse one, and this is just gonna really help add more rhythm and we're kind of building up, right? And then right there, we can maybe drop off to maybe add like the lead and maybe, like just the cords or something and remove everything else. We would bring the pad in and courts, maybe just add this kick back in control and be again. So this case, I'm just going to open up 1/3 party e que so pro que I really like these types of plug ins again. Just for workflow. Um, and we can just try this and then you can do that for, uh, two times. Okay, So for eight bars and then again, So if you listen, if you watch your mouse, I'm building it up. And then right here, maybe I can remove the clap and maybe like that and add like, the basin only for, like, around that those notes again. This is where I'm talking, like in the sense of just being creative with your music, right? Um, arrangement. There are no rules. So this is what I'm gonna do here. So, first of all, I'm going to put the filter all the way open. I'm gonna right click here. Now, if you are working with third party plug ins, the reason why I can right click is because amusing of E s t three version of this plug in . Okay. BST three allows more integration into fo studio. It's the It's like the way of the future. So old plug ins were like VSC too. Okay, so there's gonna create the automation clip. Uh, now, this is a cool trick that I do. So I'm gonna hit play. I'm gonna listen for how low should I set this filter to be? OK, so let's listen, kid. Now listen, if it's down here way, can't even hear it. So it's useless, right? I can kind of hear, hear. I think I'm gonna want it around here. Okay, So I'm just gonna right click, copy the value. And now that's gonna give me a starting point right here. So I'm gonna paste it in, because this is where I can still audibly hear it. But I still get, like, that effect of it being filtered out. And now it's just a matter of adjusting attention. You could even again it's gonna make it big screen. They're heading. Enter holding down, uh, control, right? Click and hold could resume to this area. So in this case now, you could do anything that you'd like. You know, like if you right click, there are different styles of points that you can do. So for example, if you like a double curve and if I be aggressive with it a Z could see you know the beginning. It's, you know, because this is so long, it's kinda hard to see, but watch if I go shorter. So, you know, a double curve allows you to do stuff like this again. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm just saying that the option is there, so I'm gonna leave it on like a single curve. And sometimes I do play with the different single curves. Ah, so watch this If I do like a single curve and I kind of bring it like this, So if you really look in this area like where the actual curve starts toe accelerate, I'm gonna right click and look and go like the single curve to Okay, so just allows you just to kind of just just get a little bit of a different angle. More aggression or more rush. So in this case is you can see, like that's right there. That's not what I want. Um, but you know. So if we listen to this, I'm gonna enter again. Now, if you watch the filter, you're going to see that it's gonna slowly build up. Okay? So as this filter goes, you're going to see that this ah high cut filter is moving forward and back. Case, that's automation. Super powerful stuff.
12. 3-3 - Does Your Song Flow: Okay, so this is the last video in our arrangement section, and I just want to kind of recap what we've covered and some things for you to take away with. Okay. So, again, the biggest thing to listen for is does your song flow If you were to hit play right now and listen to the beginning to the chorus, all that stuff like, you know how it transitions, does it flow? Do you need some type of transition, you know, to get your song flowing? Okay, So that's one thing I wanted to talk to you about was, you know, listen to your track over and over. Listen for areas that either sound rushed or don't flow naturally, okay? And then you want to fix these areas. Whether that is through transitions and stuff like that again, be careful with high hats is really easy toe. Add high hats in to create emotion. Intention. It's really hard to remove them because it it almost immediately removes that emotion. Intention. Okay. A big thing you want to listen for is your mix are certain instruments like, for example, as we're listening to our whole song here as it's flowing you know, when you go into the verse and then you come back into the chorus is one instrument too loud? Is it kind of sticking out in a way that, you know, it isn't flowing with your actual music? Because, really, at the end of the day, the whole goal of your song is to make it some balanced and just to make it sound natural, so that if your song is being played on the same playlist as your favorite songs from like well known producers, you shouldn't really be able to hear a difference in terms of, you know, the master. In terms of the sound quality, it should all be the same. The only difference is you know, their court progressions, how they have programmed their melodies and, like, you know, again how they do their audio painting when it comes to their transitions. And they're things like that. That's really like the difference between a professional to like an amateur producer. But in terms of like your sound quality and stuff like that, we all have the same tools, like, you know, we all have serum. We'll have your massive at your disposal. You have these high quality Dawes now, right? So the only difference is how they program their notes and how they're using these types of techniques like that's really the different what differentiates them from us. Or, like, you know, from them from you. If you're just starting at the moment, okay? And our next section of videos we're gonna get into mastering and finishing up this track on the actual master track. Okay, So how mastering works is, you know, all of the's sounds. As you can see, they all go to the master, and this is what you call your two bus on. Here's where you add your effects. You have to be really careful because now you're affecting the whole song. When you're on the individual tracks, you can be way more aggressive because it's just the individual sound. Um, and especially when you were dealing with instruments, you can be even more aggressive when you're dealing with vocals. You have to be careful because since we're so used to hearing a human voice, we can hear when it sounds weird. When you're on the mastering stage, you want to be really subtle, which will be covering in our next section.
13. 4-1 - What Is The Goal Of Mastering: Okay, So in this video or these section of videos, we're gonna be talking about mastering. Okay, Now, I just want to tell you by no means by a professional mastering engineer. However, over my years, I have learned a lot about mastering. I've also learned in terms of like, how to really see through a lot like the myths that are out there online. I didn't really understand what mastering waas. And then once I understood what it was, it seemed very foreign to me. In a sense of like, you know, it's different language than just like making beats. Um, you're actually created like the finished product. Okay, Um and like I'm saying, when you're reading online, it's very, very confusing. Like, I find that you know, there's not really clear information out there when it comes to how to master your track. What tools do you use when you master your track? What's your end goal? And nowadays there is now what's called al You fs um, with like, loudness units and ah, when we're talking about, um Spotify, iTunes, the streaming platforms. And there's actually something called loudness normalisation. Okay, so there's a few things I want to talk to you about before we actually get into the mastering, which I feel is really, really important to get you up to speed about mastering and what's called the loudness words. Now he may know about all this stuff, but I just want to talk about it just to give you clarity before we proceed further. Okay, so in music, there's something called dynamics. Okay, so you have loud parts and quiet parts, and when we have sounds that have no, like the transient of a sound like I was showing you before, So I'm just gonna close the limiter. Let's look at, like, this kick drum. So I showed you, You know, the kick drum has the transient. Now what happens with compression and limiting and these types of tools that affect your dynamics is you can really skew this transient like again. If you're mixing, you could be using that as a creative purpose. Like, that's fine. But once you're really into, like, you know, dealing with vocals or its like again at the mastering stage of like you're all like your two bus which is affecting your whole song, it kind of sucks the life out of the music and it doesn't allow, like, you know, the bounce, the groove, the emotion and stuff like that. Okay, but at the same time, there is that balance. Okay, so the first thing I want to share with you about the loudest words is you guys can check out this video. This is probably the classic video that many people have watched on the loudest. Worse because you could see it was released in 2006. This is what really made me understand what the loudness words Waas. So as you can see right now, like there's that there's, like the transients. But over the years, even if we fast forward into the video, these with the original peaks, the transience I was talking to about. But when we air compressing and limiting very hard in our master track, we end up with this. So the peaks are gone. Okay, this is a really, really good one to check. Okay? Just type into YouTube or Google the loudness wars. Um, and that's gonna be awesome for you. The next thing I want to talk to you about also is you're going to be hearing about all you fs And what integrated loudness should you like, master at? And as you can see, Spotify shows you at minus 14. But we'll come back to this in a moment. Okay? Because, like I'm saying, in music production there's different. Ah, actual skills. There's actual different jobs. So, for example, there are producers, people who make the beep. There's mixing engineers, people who mixed the music. And then there's mastering engineers and these air all different trades within the industry . Okay, if you're everything you know, that's that's awesome. But many times people just specialize in these certain areas. Okay, So to learn about mastering is a lot of information. I'm going to give you a brief overview, get you up and running. Okay, As you can see right here, what I've done is this track right here. So the cool thing with a limiter like pro l from fat filter is if I hold on Ault, you're going to see what I increase. The gain it out also decreases the output. So what that's doing? It's the A and B comparison. So the before and after and you want a fair volume comparison when you're increasing the volume and it's being limited. So in other words, these peaks were being cut off, as you can see, you know, right here, it's like I have no peaks right here, eight. But right here, you know, we have lots of peaks, but because I've increased and decreased the volume at the same time, I'm still able to hear the music at a really fair volume comparison. And I'm able to hear is this limiter actually benefiting my music? Because if we were to master this track and I was just going to simply just increase this gain and I'll play, this is for a second just for you to hear. Okay. Now, if I increase the gain so as you can see, it's being limited more and more and more, and it's distorting right now. But the thing is, when you are, you know, maybe increasing by one or two decibels and you're getting more gain reduction, You really can't hear that. Okay. And it's just nice to be able to, so right now hold on, Ault, watch this game, Uh, slider as well as the output. Okay, So point on all clicking and holding, and as you can see what I'm increasing is decreasing. So what I did, and I'm gonna show this with you, okay? For a fair volume comparison. So this was the original signal. As you see, there's lots of peaks going on. Okay? And then, as you can see now, around here, I started to increase the gain, but then also decreased the output, and it's kind of gotten like this. OK, so as we proceed, you know, and then this was like I would extreme times a distortion was going on, even if you listen to it like, listen, lost a distortion. Okay, so it sounds horrible rate, but even here I pulled back. Okay, so that's a pretty good example. Just did you guys hear that when you are pushing your music too hard into the limiter that it's sucking like the life out of it. But at the same time, you do want a little bit of you know of this compression, limiting clipping, thes tools, you want them going on so that you can get a better balance into your track. Okay? Because like I'm saying, there's a lot of myths out there. People will say, Oh, you don't want to use clipping on your master track. But in all honesty, um, there are tools which I'll show you here to second. Um, so let's go to Dynamics and the T Rex three classic Clipper. There's, ah, plug in that I've used for so long. It's really awesome because you could get soft click clipping as well as hard clipping and or you can dial in between. I'm going to turn off for now. That will be in a later video when I talk about the mastering chain. But like I'm saying so there's all these kind of missed out there online that it's a well, you should never do this, so you should never do this. But like I'm saying, like when it came to light the kick drum, it's like, Well, as you can see, we apply distortion directly onto this kick drum, so there is times to use distortion on purpose, and there's times that you don't want this unwanted distortion. So, like there's two different forms of distortion, the distortion you want and the distortion that you don't want. And when it comes to mastering, it's the same thing. Okay, because, you know, I guess that the technical term of, like, distortion. It's anything like the output is different from the original input. So when we're dealing with that compression, you know, limiting all these different things, it's like we are distorting the signal From what Originally Waas. Um you know, maybe you just some was more transparent. So let me play this limiter for you. So as you can see, you know what I did right here? I recorded it just so you could visually see what I'm talking about. So we have our transients when our gain is at zero. And as I started to increase it by holding on Ault with the outgoing down to, you know, that's where you start to get like this. And when it was around, maybe six decibels of boost, that's where we're starting to hear a lot of distortion going on. So I'm gonna bring it back and let's just actually play the track, okay? And what I've done is I have just looped the chorus. Okay, so here we go. So you're really not caring too much of a difference in my opinion around here. I found it was work balance sounding. I'm gonna increase it should more distortion now. Okay. You know, you're really starting to hear the distortion happen. Will be aggressive. Cancer sounds horrible. Right? So bring it down to build like that, maybe five. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is so what's really awesome with these types of plug ins is I can copy this value, okay? And I'm gonna bring it all the way back down to where it was. So it zero as well as minus one, okay, And I'm going to switch in between them, and it's gonna be a fair volume comparison, and you'll be able to hear is what I've dialed in. Is it benefiting the track? This is not how I would master track. I'm just doing this just so you can see that when the volume is happening and the red peaks that are coming down. That's what's being clipped off from our original signal. Okay, so, again, if we open up Edison again, you know, we have our actual peaks, and as the red peaks are coming down, that's is being clipped off. And as you can see, you know, thes peaks up here, they're no longer okay because it's hitting like that. limiter. And if we have our most so again, if you look in the top left here, So what we're at, um you know, about minus two or whatever. We come down here and rebuilt like minus five. So that's about three decibels of gain reduction that's going on clipping off those peaks. Okay, so let's play this again, and I'm going to switch in between back and forth because, like, I'm saying, you do want to apply some compression and some limiting. Um, I will explain how much you'll you know you want to apply, like once we get into the actual mastering video. But for now, this will be a nice little comparison. You may not hear any any anything at all. So let's listen to the before and after. Okay, so this is before no limiting is really going on on this one. That's dial it back just a little bit. Let's just say maybe a 3.5. Okay, Miss, comparing between that now, I just want you to listen to, like, overall balance. So listen to like, the kick drum wasn't like the base, so they dio So right now I'm hearing that the cake the kick in the face are kind of up higher than the actual melody. For example, this melody right here, this Melanie right here. Okay, So if we listen to this melody and compared to our kick and our base with the limiter all of a sudden, now they're kind of more even a little bit. And that's the thing with mastering. It's really, really settle. Like, if you can't really hear that difference, you know, you might have just have the train your ear to be more aware of these kind of subtle differences. Um, again, make sure you listening on headphones and at the same time, the audio that you're listening at the moment I think it's probably gonna be like 2 56 or 3 20 kilobytes per second if you're lucky. So right now I'm listening to, like, you know, the high quality 32 bit floating point audio. Just another thing to take into account. Okay, so I just wanted to tell you just a quick recap about the loudness wars. Okay, So over the years, what's happened is music has been, ah, pushed louder and louder and louder. And I guess the story goes that, you know, it wasn't so much like the producers and the, you know, the mastering engineers. It was more the people trying to sell the music. Okay, And, you know, they just thought that off My music is louder than someone else's is going to sell better again. That's it. This story that's out there of why the loudest worse has come to be. And so again if we reference back to that YouTube video So, like, you know, back in the day, you know, the music had a lot of dynamics. And then later on, you know, we said we wanted our music, too. Compete with other people's in a sense of, you know, we thought that maybe louder was better, and we're starting to remove these transients. And again, that's harming the music because it's taking away from the original sound you know we're talking about likely, let's take a guitar pluck. Or like a snare. You want that initial transient because that's like what kind of hits you in the chest? Or that's what makes sounds sound natural. And when we start, you know, tampering with these transients thes, thes, thes plucks kind of Then this is what is gonna affect your music. Okay, so over the years, what's happened is we've pushed it. And it kind of got to this point where you know, it's what you call a sausage. OK, that's what people call this stuff. So right here is you can see if we zoom in on it. So you know, it's like there's no movement in that music. It's just constant. It's like flatlined. It's a big, fat sausages what people call it. You know, if I would hit, control it and here and normalize it, that's your audio. Okay, so it gave no life to your music camp. And so what's happened in later years is it's kind of gotten to the point where you don't Finally, a standard came out and they're like, Hey, this is coming to an end. It's over. No more of this pushing it up and ruining music, Okay, because you know you still want to again. You want to master your music. There's that balance between limiting and clipping and everything. But then there's that point of just destroying music. Okay? And that's where it got to got to the point of destroying music and So these loudness standards that have come out is I believe they first came out within like the you know, the TV world broadcast and stuff like that. Because the whole problem there was people would watch their TV show, and then also the commercial would come on and the commercial would be so loud. And the person you know that they have, like, the remote, you know, also, now if they turn down the volume and then also another TV show comes back on, then they have to get the remote again, turn up the volume. And a big problem of that, too, was, you know, if they're watching their show and all of a sudden that said, if they walked away to go grab like a drink of water and also the commercial comes on and the TV just goes so loud, Right? So there was no standard back in the day when it came to the loudness. So loudness normalisation became a standard. Um, and that's where I'm gonna be talking to you with a Hugh lean here. This is an awesome meter. It's free. Okay. As you can see, there's a free and paid version The free version is awesome. Okay? It's currently what I'm using at the end of the day. What I'm saying is that from the TV show to the commercial there now, they now have to be the same volume. Okay? And when someone is in the studio, they're mixing, you know, even the audio for that TV show. They have to mix it to this loudness standard. So now here's the problem. Now when it comes to music, because music is different. Okay, that's not like TV and stuff like that. But again, what's happened is, you know, if you're listening, let's see on YouTube and you know one person's video there, audio was like, way loud. And then you go to someone else's audio. It was like way quiet again. There's like that inconsistency and then seem with like, Spotify and all that stuff if we bring up the Spotify window here so again, you know, like I'm saying now they have introduced loudness normalisation. So what that means is that when you are listening like let's say Ah Spotify playlist or you know, someone's album or whatever they implement loudness, normalisation. They make sure that all there's music is playing at a certain volume. Okay, so now where this comes into play is because I was telling you about you know, if we could come back to Edison. And now we have a like our peaks. Right? So it's like, right here. You know, our music might sound great right here. Okay? And then, But what was happening is people were mastering their music like this, and it was totally destroying the transience, the dynamics, you know, the overall natural sound of that song. And so what happens is just because they mastered their music super loud. Now, what Spotify is going to do is they're going to take this and they're going to bring it down to that minus 14. Al you fs and you're gonna be listening to the Super over process song. So that's why when we master our music in this, you know, in the next video, my goal is to aim about that minus 14. Okay, that's gonna be my goal at minus 14. That's going to give us still some dynamics. But at the end of the day is going to allow us to apply some limiting some compression, some clipping to really get the groove out of our music still, but at the same time, get that polished balance sound that you hear in your favorite commercially released masters. Okay, so that's pretty much the overall idea behind the loudest wars. You know, back in the day, it was it was almost probably two dynamic. And then it got to the point where you know, they're trying to sell the music because they thought the louder they mastered it, for example, you right here. And I think Metallica. I think it was one of their albums that they mastered it so loud that their fans were like , No, we want you to re master this. And I believe that they actually re released one of their like, newer albums because it was just way to over mastered. So, like I'm saying, like, this is a huge ongoing thing that has been happening for a long time, and it's finally coming to an end, and it's pretty cool. Okay, so at the moment, you know, it's called Al you Fs. The standard is I think it's our 1 28 If we look here, So this is it right here or no. Sorry, it's the I T. U R B s one seven seven zero dash for like, I believe this is a standard. And then what happens is like if you're in Europe or like in the States, whatever, what they do is the reference off of this, and then they might kind of tweak it a little bit. But at the end of the day, it's all pretty much really, really similar. So really, really confusing stuff, especially when you're first getting started up. There's a lot of information to understand about mastering. But I'll tell you this. Okay, at the end of the day, in mastering, it's all about managing your peaks because it's your peaks, which are in the way of the limiter. Okay, right, So, like, again every reference back to this. So if the peaks that are gonna be hitting the limiter okay, so it's all about knowing how to manage these peaks in a nice, transparent way to achieve the results you want. So I think I've talked about everything I want to kind of cover just to prepare you about what the loudness words were. Now we have loudness, normalisation. It's a really awesome thing Now your goal is to reach for, like that, minus 14. Another thing I'll say to is every streaming platform kind of has that their own standard at the moment. Now, all this stuff, it will eventually change. Okay, The thing is, is a new standard. It's Comeau. And, you know, I don't like to create courses that kind of talk about this stuff, because what's gonna happen is this This is gonna be outdated. But the information I've told you so far is not going to go away. Okay? That's gonna be something for you to really hold on to. Really valuable knowledge. But in terms of the number here. So when it comes to that minus 14. Okay, so for example, Spotify, I think spineless 14 like YouTube, I think is like, minus 13. And a big question. People ask, Is that while should I master, like, you know, all these different versions to release? And in my opinion, I do not. Okay, I'm asked. Reachable with that minus 14. Um, and then, you know, assumes I'm happy with it. It's like that is my release. I release it out to, uh on the streaming platforms and I'm done. I don't have to. You know, like that Sounds like way too much work in the next video. I want to talk to you about the mastering tools. Okay, So when it comes to mastering, what types of tools do you use for mastering? Um, and that's gonna prepare you for when we actually get into the mastering video. You're gonna understand, You know, why do you have these certain tools to use and how to be careful with them and stuff like that, Okay.
14. 4-2 - Mastering Chain Process: Okay, So in this video, we're gonna be talking about the mastering tools that you can use. This doesn't mean that you have to be using them all the time, but typically on a track, this is what you call it a mastering chains. So in other words, Ah, what order should you be putting your plug ins in? And at the end of the day, it really comes down to preference. But there's some rules which are not preference and are for sure, like, you know, you have to do it this way. So, for example, you always want your limiter to be the very, very last plug in, and then your meter is after everything. The reason for that is because if your audio goes over zero, you're gonna hear distortion. So that's what you have a limiter there because if he goes to in this case of said it to minus one, which will cover in more detail in a moment. So if the audio goes to minus one, what happens with the limiter is it actually turns down the volume. Okay, um, and then you want to make sure that you have a meter at the very, very last plug in. OK. And the reason for that is that you can monitor what your actual output audio is gonna be. So when I master my music, if I am going to use EQ you on the master track because the thing is like so since I master , we're serious. Since I mix and master in the same track, I have total control over the song. Now again, in a real mastering engineers eyes, this is not best practice. I do this because, you know, I've produced the B I've makes the B. Now I'm gonna master all on the same track, in my opinion, is just more convenient for my end. But if I was gonna be working with an artist and you know we're always setting music back and forth and stuff like that, then yes, this this track is going to get exported at, like that minus six. I'm gonna send it up to amassing engineer, and then that mastering engineer is gonna do the thing. So, like, I'm saying so since I can, you know, affect the volume. Uh e que of each individual track when it comes to the e que. Here I might more do that just for a kind of color or more for kind of creative purposes. Now, if a mastering engineer got, you know, one of your tracks that say, you know they don't have control like the way how I have control here. So you know, if they're going to be using e que again, they can also be using it for began their own personal touch on that track, but sometimes they might actually hear a problem in your mix. For example, they might hear that your guitars too loud that you're of the vocal isn't standing out, and they can go in and do creative techniques. For example, if you have an EQ, you like this like I showed you already have, like a mid side mode. This is your mono and your stereo content, so ah, voice is typically it's It's like a mono signal. It's just like one microphone, and that's what you're hearing me over right now. Just a mono signal. So, for example, like, you know, let's say the voice weaken, boost it up or here and the mastering engineer might go like to the model band. Okay? And now they can actually increase the vocal now, At the same time, it is also gonna be increasing. Let's say, like if you had a piano and a guitar. So this is you know, this is what happens in mastering because it's like you're affecting the whole song. But you might be able to kind of get away with Maybe if you kind of boost here a little bit and then maybe, you know, let's say there's, like, a some percussion elements that are kind of getting in the way of the vocal. Maybe you can kind of duck it out a little bit right here. So this might help that vocal stand out because you've boosted like the mono signal. Okay, So the reason why I should Children, that is just because in terms of mastering, they may have to do these different kind of techniques to make your track work. Okay, because again, I have total flexibility. The mastering engineer, they can. Can it be handcuffed when you send them a track? Like I'm saying, you know, that guitar might be too loud and they have to start applying these kind of more advanced tricks like a shoji there. But like I'm saying. So what? I go to apply e que on a track like this, it might be, you know, I'm listening, and I might just Do you know what I think? I just want a little bit more brightness into the track. So instead of going into each individual track and kind of boosting, if the brightness I might come open up, you create ah, high shelf band. Let's go to, um, or zoomed in scale because again mastering his subtle moves. And I might put a list of 8.5 and I might put it, Let's say you know, five K. Now the thing you have to be aware of with an e que, especially in the mastering, is just because I put it to five K. This shelf actually carries over until about, you know, what is this? This is about two K, almost down to 1.5 K as you can see. And if I would have boosted up or bring it back a bit so you can see that you know, now it's going all the way even down almost 500. Now again, it's really, really subtle, But the thing is in mastering you are affecting the overall song, and your subtle moves can have a big effect typically like in the in the super super high end. This is what people would call air it. Sometimes it just kind of creates like that nice little every kind of brightness kind of sound because our human hearing is from 20 hertz to 20,000 hertz and you know, if the older you get, uh, your higher and diminishes, I actually even remember being over at a friend's house one time. And we were playing around like fruity loops when it was actually Froot Loops and like he played like a high pitch whatever. And he was like, he actually said to me musically, that's super high pitched and I was like, I can't hear that. You can't hear that He needs to keep playing is that I can hear that. And it was just like I couldn't hear, like, this super high frequency. So when it comes to the e que, I'm mostly using it just for a kind of create a purpose. Do I feel that the track could be a little bit brighter? Cannot benefit from that, and that's where I would kind of use that. Ah, One thing to mention is with an e que There's also like, um, just like Aniki like this. And there's also, like, a linear phase. Okay, um, I'm not going to get so much into that. I do know that when you are with a linear phase, um, that you can get, like, pre ringing. These are just things that if you want to read more into it Okay, so that's just your eq you now on a compressor. You have to be really, really careful on a single band compressor. So how a single band compressor works and actually, I'll use the e que here because this is actually a great example. Okay, so I'm going to create a band like this. I'm gonna make the queue all the whole thing. Okay, so what happens with a single band compressor is any time, So imagine it's like the threshold. OK, any time the audio goes over the threshold, it's going to reduce the volume of the whole song. Okay, So, like, you know, the songs playing boom, it reduces boom. It reduces, and it's actually reducing the volume of the whole song. Okay, So what happens with, like, a multi band compressor, which is our next tool that I'm gonna be talking about is now it creates actually more bands. OK, so now what happens is let's say, you know, like the low end is going over this band, so let's just click on it. So what's gonna happen? Is it This is gonna act totally different from your middle band, okay? And, ah, sort of what's happening here is because the queue was so wide, so bringing down case. So now the benefit of having like a multi band compressor. And you have to be careful with the multi van compressor. You could totally screw up your song in a sense of its overall natural, you know, sound. But the benefit of a multi bank compressor is especially when you have, like, vocals involved. Okay, so when you have vocals involved in a track and if you're using like, a single band compressor and I'm not telling you not to use one, I'm just telling you, you have to be careful when you use it so again, like up saying, you know, with a single bank compressor, any audio that goes over the threat. This actual threshold is going to reduce it down in volume, depending on how aggressive the ratio, your threshold, your attack and release are right. So when you're dealing with a vocal in that track, you're gonna get this really bad pumping kind of sound, and it just sounds absolutely horrible, which is where now which we're dealing with a multi bank compressor. If the vocals kind of living in this kind of area rate. If the kick drum is going constantly, you know, it's constantly compressing like this, right? Your vocal is gonna sound nice and consistent in your track, and it makes it sound like, really, really professional. Okay, it's kind of a cool little trick to be, you know, if you're not aware of that kind of stuff, the cool thing with a compressor like pro see is you can actually use this filter kind of input. Okay, so what it does is if I'm filtering out like the low end. So, in other words, this compressor is only looking at 325 hertz and up. So in other words, because I think I mentioned earlier to you in this course is like your loudest sounds in your music. Production is like your base, your kick drum and your snare. Okay. And those typically live from, like, 250 hertz and, like, lower around around there. Okay, depending on, like, you know what sound you've chosen. So what's gonna happen is your kick drum you're basing your snare are gonna constantly trigger this compressor, even though you know it may not be benefiting your you know, the actual music. So what's really cool is you can tell this compressor and say, K, I don't want you to listen to any of that low in stuff I want you to listen from, in this case, 325 hertz and up. And the thing is, those frequencies, their actual transients, you know, like you know what the actual like peaks of these sounds. They're a little bit more consistent. Okay, so when sounds are a little bit extra loud, that's where when you go, come in here and you start dialing in like the threshold and ratio. Your compressor isn't gonna be so like dramatic. It's going to be a lot more consistent with your actual song. And because of that. When we get into the actual compression stage of mastering, you'll see that I'll actually be able to have a lower threshold on a higher ratio. And it'll still sound really transparent on the actual master. And the reason for that is because again like that kick, snare and bass is not triggering this compressor unnecessarily. And I'm getting a more natural sound, even out of a single band compressor. Okay, all solder is like the fruity multi bank compressor. Um, this this works fine, But the reason why I like like a pro MB like the fat filter plug ins that is just so visual . You can even go like full screen, for example, which is really, really cool. And then I'll actually just remove this multi bank compressor. This is that the 41 and then I'll actually typically have a clipper. Okay. And so what a Clipper is is It's kind of like a limiter, except it doesn't have an attack and release knob. So, in other words, like your attack and release is literally like zero. And the cool thing about a clipper is you're able to chop off these transient transients in a super transparent way. Okay, so when you push your audio into a limiter, what's happening is is actually like reducing the volume of your audio signal because a limiter is just like a compressor, but just, ah, more aggressive form of compression. Okay, but what's happening is when your actual audio is going into the limiter, right? So you know, has it. The threshold assumes that the audio goes over like the threshold. It's actually reducing the volume. And when it's reducing the volume, it's kind of softening, like the blow of these kicks and stuff like that. But where a clipper comes in is like you don't have this attack and release. So, for example, if we look at the limiter, click the advanced have here soon as you can see you as an attack and release. If I also opened up like the fruity limiter just to give you guys a comparison, you'll see on the limiter here and this this is like victory so you can make it however big you want, which is cool. Um, you can see there's also an attack and release here as well. Okay, so again, the attack and release act, the same way as if the compressor, which I was telling you before. Now, in the mastering world now all these different tools, like a compressor, which can also be like a limiter. Like if I put like 100 to 1, I think anything over 10 to 1, it becomes like a limiter. So, like you don't like, I'm saying so a compressor limiter or a clipper? He's just kind of give you a different sound when you really get into, like the really nitty gritty find details of mastering. It's the subtle, the kind of subtleties that give your music. You know, that sound that you're trying to achieve and using these different tools, you'll know what you can use to achieve these different kind of snore. They left actual sound that you're going for. So what's really cool with a Clipper is it actually chops off those peaks, those transients in a super transparent way. If you have a really long release, what's gonna happen as soon as that audio goes over the threshold, it's going to take long to come back to like it's normal audio. Okay, and then it's really cool with this Clipper is again like I showed you have has a soft me and a hard me, and that just allows you to dial in how aggressive you want the clipping to be. So in other words, this is more of that kind of like a little bit of like an analog kind of flavor. It all depends on the actual tractor working with. I typically find, if I have ah, harder, Ah, hard Ernie that my kick drum hits a bit harder, But it's kind of like, um, I'm not giving, like that nice balance in my music. And when I bring it back a little bit, I'm kind of getting like the best of both worlds like I usually find around here. But again, every single track is different. You know, It might be a little bit more aggressive on some tracks and kind of dial it back and other tracks. But again, I'm just kind of breaking these tools down for you so that once we get into them, you kind of you kind of have a better idea. Okay, And then again, so the last plug in is a limiter. I don't really consider like a meter like a plug in. Okay, I'm talking like your actual mastering chain. This is like what? You you know, if the order of events of how things flow and again anything above the limiter, it's all personal preference. OK, but you're limiter is always gonna be last. Okay, that's something that you you know, it's a must. Okay? And then I always have the meter after that. Because, like, I was already explaining, this is your actual audio that is gonna be released to the world, and you want to be able to monitor it and see exactly what your loudness is. So when you release it, you're like that minus 14 again, Some people said I minus 16 is you want to really conservative or whatever. So let me just talk about the limiter here, though with this minus one. Okay, So over the years, what's happened with the limiter is you know, if you're going to be watching mastering tutorials and stuff like that, you will see that people will come here and they say, Oh, uh, put this to minus 00.1. Okay, so say, you know, put it to minus 0.1. Okay. And then they started coming out when saying, Oh, well, you should actually put this to minus point to. And the reason for that is because some radio players ah, you know, they start to distort, um, after 0.1. Okay, so if we put it to point to, then you know will be safe. And then it actually got to minus 0.0.3. And again, it was all to do with just protected like that head room because, as you know, so what happens is when you convert to formats like MP three, you could have something called Inter Sample Peaks. Okay? And again, this is kind of going off topic, but this is to do with, like, the bit depth stuff. So if you had, like, 2024 bit wave or a 16 bit wave, you know how it works is that you have, like, your actual audio signal. If we open up Edison here on the shortcut is control E. And I'll bring it down to Russia. We could just record this soul, understand it, play Okay, So if we really zoom in here, OK, going to get full screen, we zoom in, you're going to see that we're gonna start to see these little points. Okay, so how audio works is like when you hear the word like, you know, 16 bit. That means that you only have, like, 16 bits or whatever. So we think assignment, for example. It's like if you go from 24 bit to 16 bit, that's where, like this quantity ization air can come into play because it's like it kind of has to round two like the next point. And when you convert to something like MP three, this, uh, conversion process could be even mawr emphasized. And you can get distortion. Um, I think they've even seen like, um, peeks up upwards toe like, let's say, like three extra decibels from what was originally masters. So, for example, let's say we mastered our track. We exported to a wave, and it sounds fine. But then when it got expert to MP three, just do the conversion process. For whatever reason, at certain parts of the song, it was boosted up by three decibels and at thes points in the song you got distortion, which is called inter sample peaks. Okay, it kind of catches you off guard is yours? Like Well, when I mastered the song. It sounded totally fine in my music program, and that is where the minus one has come into play. Like I know I just said, like the plus three decibels, like that boost, but that I think that's kind of a rare occasion. So over the years has come to, like, you know, put it to minus one. It's OK, Um, when it gets converted to MP three, you're leaving like, a lot of like that space just to be safe that you're not gonna get these inter sample peaks again. By having a plug in like this, you could enable inter sample peaks, and you can actually see if you're going to be getting those. If you look right here, I'll hover over that again. It says MP three. So this is any subsequent stages such as MP three, export and stuff like that. Okay, so I feel like I'm telling you, audio is actually there's so much information to know, okay? And it could become really, really overwhelming, So that's pretty much just like the mastering chain. Okay, so when it comes to using e que multi van compressor Ah, riel single band compressor. Ah, Clipper as well as a limiter. And this is typically what I use in my master's unhappy with the results when I master my music, one thing I'll talk to you about quickly is this reference tracks. So sometimes what people do is before they actually master their music is they'll actually bring in one of their favorite songs that is commercially released. You know, it's really, really popular, you know. It's been mastered professionally. You can bring that in, and you could now start comparing it and referencing it to see where your song compares to their song. What other piece of advice I'm going to give you guys is there is in kind of like an industry leader when it comes to this online loudness, normalisation and stuff like that. He's also created kind of like an event every single year. But his name's Ian Shepherd, okay? And he actually has a podcast. I listen to like all of the episodes, like in the early days of when he released it. It was super, super helpful to me. Um, and I just want to pass it on to you. I think that is enough to get you up and running in terms of the knowledge with the tools that I'll be using and why I'm gonna be using them, Uh, in the mastering video, I'm gonna actually explain. You know, if I do use one of these tools, like why I'm using it and different approaches you can take with them?
15. 4-3 - Actually Mastering The Track: Okay, So in this video, we're going to get up and running with a mastering. Now is this is just gonna be a kind of a quick and dirty master. Okay? It's gonna be enough to, you know, make you understand What's the goal? What you want achieve and stuff like that. Um, but I am just like a headphones I used to do master like my you know, my speakers and stuff. Not to make excuses, but, um, yeah. So what I'm gonna do to start off is I'm gonna click here on you. Lean again. This meters free guys could get it. I highly recommend it. It's an awesome meter, and I'm gonna click. Um, there's every sort of disabled, this distribution as well as the hissed a gram. That way, it's easier. You know, I can fit more plug ins on the screen here. Okay, So the first thing I'm gonna do is and was gonna hit Play here, and we're going to see where our loudness is at. Now. Again, you guys can also come to like, um sorry. I've adjusted this kind of stuff, so let's go to default. Let's also make sure that any plug ins case. So, you know, just I haven't adjusted anything now. Ah, cool trick. I'm not sure if I mentioned this to you yet, but when you're actually mixing your music, you can actually have a compressor like a single band compressor. Ah, you could just apply it subtly. And so the benefit of that is so when you're actually mixing your music, if you don't have a compressor on there, you know, it's it's gonna be a little bit harder to get that nice balance in between your actual mix . Okay, But by applying a compressor on the master track, it's kind of a way to kind of cheat the system a little bit. And when you are mixing your music, you know, it's hitting into the compressor, and it's helping gel and kind of glue the overall mix. So in other words, if sounds are too loud, it's kind of bring it down in volume a little bit, and it's kind of like a little bit of a crutch. Now you have to be careful. You know, you don't want to apply too much compression and stuff like that. Um, And then again, if you are gonna be sending off your actual master to a mastering engineer again. He's gonna ask, Can you just turn off all your effects and make sure that it is quiet? Okay. You know, like, uh, minus six. Is your Max Peak when we're looking at the meter just to see how loud this track is? Because if it's too loud, you know, instead of actually going back into the mix, you really can just come here to, like Aneke. You just make sure it's, ah, plug in that gives you transparent gain. And I can actually maybe, just, like, reduce this, But let's take five decibels or something. Um, so that you can actually start working on your master if it was too loud, you know, because again, if minus 14 is our goal and again so zero is the loudest you can get in digital audio, and as soon as you start going lower like minus one minus two minus three, it starts getting quieter like now imagine it was like my like, minus eight. Okay, so, you know, I would come here and I would turn down the volume in telematics. That might is 14. One thing I will talk about just on the meter here just to get you up to speed. So your goal is the integrated loudness of that minus 14. That's what Spotify at the moment is requesting. I think they just recently changed that number two again. Those standards are changing on and as you can see so there's like the integrated loudness . Now what the integrated loudness is is so if we come back to FL Studio and right now, if I hit the X, it will refresh it. So if I hit play right now, Okay, now it's gonna keep this. If I had the X, it refreshes it. Okay, so the integrated loudness is what I hit play. And if I let it play for like, let's say three minutes, that's your integrated loudness. So from the beginning to the end, how loud was that? The average of that music okay. And then assumes you start getting into, like, a short term at the momentary loudness. So the short term is like already to you. So loudness that has measured every second on an audio block of three seconds. This gives an information about the loudest audio passages. So for my readings on other websites. So how it kind of works is every single second. I think it creates like a block and then the last three seconds kind of like overlap or something, and they just create second average again. This that's really, really technical. Okay, I don't want to get into this kind of stuff. And the momentary loudness is kind of just like, you know, it's likely the really, really quick stuff. So at the end of the day, these loudness no streaming platforms like whether asking for is that the integrated loudness again, if we come back to Spotify, you see is you can see integrated wfs. Okay, So let me read this to you though, So if your master is louder than minus 14 again So let's say minus 13 minus 12 minus 10. So when you go up against Louder, OK, so make sure it stays below minus two for your true peak to avoid distortion again. That's when it comes to like the MP three conversion and inter sample peaks. Ah, this is because louder tracks are more susceptible to extra distortion in the trans coating process. So this is why I'm telling you to put it like, minus one of that limiter. So as you can see, everything is kind of starting to make sense. Okay, At the end of the day, what I have discovered is like, this is so much stuff to know. Um, again, like I'm saying mastering engineer there one specific special trade. Um And so as you can see all this information I'm throwing at you, there's a lot to know. Um, I have a general idea of what's going on, but I just want to throw this stuff at you. OK, so when we're looking at this meter, our goal is the minus 14. Integrated loudness. Ah, the short term is more like the kind of quicker stuff. It can be louder than minus 14 but just the overall average. Our goal is minus 14. There. OK, now what I was trying to say there is that Now, if your music is like minus eight, you can open up just like any type of plug in this transparent gain. And you could bring down that volume to get you to like that, minus 14 and then you could start a plan like your compression and these different types of tools to get the sound that you want out of your master. Okay, so I'm just going to reset it, though. We're gonna play. We're gonna let it play from me, Bolt. Maybe 15 20 seconds. And we're gonna listen, toe, whereas So I'm gonna press f five. It's gonna bring up the playlist in F NFL studio, and this is actually good spot to play from its in the chorus. Okay, so I'm just going to click back into the meter here. We're gonna hit play. So you see, it's pretty loud. So in this case, let's actually bring it down. Free bird done by five decibels. Okay, so I'm gonna come back to the meter. I'm gonna hit the X is gonna refresh. Okay, so, you know, you could bring it back up a little bit. Se minus three. Our goals that kind of minus 14 again. One thing to keep into account is this is the chorus. Okay? Because again, the integrated loudness takes into account from the beginning of the track to the end of the track. And, you know, for example, an intro many times was really, really quiet, right? You might not have a kick. Drum and bass might just be, like spoke ALS or something, and it is quieter. Okay, so again, you know, it could get really, really intense in terms of Ah, you know, if you do have your intro and outro on the quieter, just leave them as they are. It's just your overall goal is to, you know, have it at, you know, minus 14. The reason why I say that is because of my readings online. Some people were, you know, thinking that they had to boost up like the intro volume to get it, you know? Ah, at this consistent minus 14. But it just kind of an average of your overall song. Okay? And a really good way to look at it too, is just like the short term, you know, just kind of look at that too. You can kind of work off of both as you go. Um, so I think minus three is fine because I'm not, like, minus 14 here. Maybe we'll put it to, like minus 2.5. Whatever. Because again, that's that's the chorus. Typically, that's it. The loudest part of the song is the busiest pushing a ministro. Well, I'm just gonna say gain. Okay, that's what I'll know for volume. I'm also gonna open up in e que here and we'll hit play, and we're gonna start mastering this track. Okay, so this is this. Listen, maybe that's just just kind a little bit out here. It's a little bit of the mud. Let's be a little aggressive. So without it can turn up the volume by a 0.5 often on. Okay, so I'm a little bit aggressive, right? Because it is like that. That's like three decibels. That's quite a lot. So it's just like minus one. And it's like 2.5 often on. I'll be a little a little bit more aggressive on that minus 1.25 Again, I am just on these headphones here. I don't I really don't know them Super well, in terms of translation, like so, because again, when you're when you're buying reference monitor speakers, um, you know, like your room can also like be lying to you to That's what you want acoustic treatment and your whole goal is translation. So when you mix and master this music, you want to sound good in your studio. You want to sound good on headphones, earbuds, cell phone, speaker TV, Um, and over your years will start to know, like your speakers. And you start, you know, like your room. You start to understand that, and then you'll know, like when you mix your music like you know how it sounds in the studio to how it's gonna translate in the real world. So what I'm trying to say is, like, I really don't know these headphones in terms of translation. Okay, so I'm just gonna leave like the e que there just kind of subtle moves. For the time being, I'm gonna use a single band compressor first. Um, no reason for that. That's just what I'm gonna flow with. And then if we feel that we need multi band compression, I'll add it. I might just do it just for the sake of showing you how I would approach it anyways. But so what I've done is gonna have this, um, filter. And that's the input filters again. That's telling us that anything below 3 50 we don't want to listen to, which is usually are kick drum bass, the snare we want a more focused on, you know, the mid to the higher frequencies where the peaks are typically a little bit more balanced . But we can get a little more control and a more natural sound of this compressor. Okay, so what I'll be doing is that will be just like, in this case, just copied over and on the A and the b of the exact same. And let's say, on the B this maybe go Ah, a lower threshold or sort of lower ratio, But then a low threshold. So within mastering what you could be doing Z, you could be using, like, low threshold low ratios. Or we go back to a you could be using, like high thresholds and higher ratios. Okay, because that's going to allow you to get more transparent results under your master. Another thing you could be doing to is many times in mastering. You wanna have, like, a longer attack on your compressor because that's going to allow the compressor to kind of glue the whole track. It's not gonna so much squash that transient, and then you use, like more like the limiter and the Clipper to kind of deal with like those transients. Okay, so let's hit play here. We're gonna go in between these and just kind of see how it sounds. We would even play with, like, the style of compressor if we wanted to go like a soft knee and a hard knee middle. Go soft on this and we'll hit play and we'll hear what we have. OK, so we're going to start with what we originally had. Turn it off and on, turn down the volume A little bit can go and be so you can see this is compressing quite hard. So I make dial back the ratio and I'm gonna open up the attack to make it not so aggressive . A little bit of a faster release That way it's just don't constantly, always being clamped down often on the truth. Up just a little bit to five. I'm gonna bring this threshold up just a little bit, and I'll be a little bit more aggressive on the ratio. So let's listen to it again. Off and on. Dial back just a little bit. Open up just a little bit more. There's a little bit faster release often on. Okay, so that base is a little bit still, kind of like plucky, which is when we in the mixing stage. I was quite aggressive on it, so I might just kind of turned down the base. And volume is a little bit again. This let the benefit of mixing mastering the same track residency. I only lowered about 0.3. So the super super subtle moves because I'm hearing the track, you know, pretty much complete. I'm just wanted to kind of find tune it So we'll continue here, and I will compress them just a little bit harder on this and a little bit over a little bit more higher on the threshold, often on going to clamp down a little bit more on the attack. I just have a little bit more control over it often on. And if we come here to the actual Uli loudest meter, get the X. So on the you the loudest meter. A good thing to do is once you actually start applying compression and stuff like that. On the short term, let's say it was like from minus 13 to like, let's say, minus 11. Like Bigelow said, it was like lots of kind of movement going on and it's just start compressing. You might see that now is kind of more balancing around like minus 12. So it's kind of, you know, in between there or something like that, because you know, compression is kind of controlling those peaks. It's creating a more consistent audio. Okay, so this is just kind of things just to kind of look at. So let's let's turn often on. And we're just going to kind of see the short term for the integrated and just going to see where we're at so I can go a little bit louder because we want that minus 14. You can see it's kind of dipping around from minus 14 to like minus 15. Okay, so if I turned off the compressor, then we'll wash the short term. So it's pretty much the same. We're not being too aggressive on our compressor anyways. Sure about this, Media 1.5. Now, let's go back to a in here. How that sounds okay. Let's be a little more aggressive on the ratio. Corporately attacked us a little bit. The struck Florida one, pretty aggressive and mastering, can lower that threshold a bit minus 18. So is open up the attack. Let's try be Okay, so this is something a lot more balanced, A lot more kind of open. It is a little bit louder than a So let's put this like 1.25 So I'm finding that be just sounds more natural. It also sounds like I have more control over the audio. And the reason for that is because I have a lower threshold, even though it's a little bit of lower ratio, actually, quite a bit of a lower ratio, because again like 4 to 1 is so extreme and mastering like, you know, typically, if I'm gonna be using for the one have quite a high threshold. And you know what you could also be doing here. Like I explained to you on the base when I was mixing that with you, I used to compressors because if you use one compressor, sometimes you can get too much artefacts, prevent that one compressor. So if you kind of cut the effect into two, you know, then you can kind of get like a more transparent sound. So sometimes a cool technique that you can use in mastering is you can use one compressor. Ah, with like a high threshold. And then ah, high ratio. OK, And then you can also have another compressor with, like, a low threshold and like a low ratio like this right here. This is that even also quite aggressive compression for mastering as well. But I'm kind of liking how it sounds. That sounds very Ah, natural, very balanced and really, you know, having control over the music without it, um, you know, sounding squash or sounding compressed. So let's move on to the multi band compressor. So the multi band compressor is an extremely powerful tool. And, like I was already mentioning, you could really skew the balance of your music. And what I mean by that is because you just don't have one compressor. So again, when you have one single band compressor, any audio that goes over, it's gonna reduce the whole overall song. Okay, but when you have a multi band compressor, you know, they're all working kind of individually all these bands. So, for example, you could just like DoubleClick. Uh, you're, like, discreet, always for bands, and you can kind of, ah, add them together like that. And you know, you can create tons of different bands in pro MB here. Um, but I typically don't. I usually have a boat. 3 to 4. Let's keep it simple. And they just say we have three, okay? And you're gonna have, like, your mids, your highs And like your low end, Um, And one thing I learned from Ian Shepherd again, he was the one with, like, the mastering podcasts and a really big advocate behind the loudness normalisation of stuff like that. I heard him say It's like on a mass are on a multi band compressor. It's like you can still treat it as like, a single band compressor. So what do you know what he was saying by that is so you know, you can have them all at the same ratio. As you can see. I can highlight all the bands. So if I enter in a value here, it actually gets imported to all of them. So instead of light clicking on like, you know, the low end and coming here and let's just say like 1.25 that I have to come here and you know, now it's for right. So if I have it all 1.25 and let's say we open up our attack, let's say like 45% or something like that. This is kind of cool, because percentages rather than actual milliseconds. But as you can see, if I go from here to this one, you know, the ratio is all the same. Um, it just kind of a cool way to do it. You want to be careful, because if you are using a multi band compressor, it can skew you know, your frequency, you know, balance. So if we just listen to what we have here and again, I'm going to go into, uh, you know, more zoomed in scale. Okay, so we'll grab it. Let's go a little bit of the longer release said 35. Let's put this to 60 and the school a little bit lower on a threshold 20 and will increase it by one decibel. So one decibels, a bit aggressive pickle like point point five. Can this turn off and on? So now what I can also do here is you can turn off and on a band, and you can hear you know, like so right now, Because see, like I was saying so your low end your kicked your base, your snare is gonna be triggering this compressor mawr than, like the mids and the highs. Let's play it again and just watch that you're going to see that the low end is eating compressed more. See, it's reaching down here in the midst are compressing quite a bit with the highs, like not so much, right? So when it comes to that, like many times, you know, I might have to add maybe 0.65 Okay, So, like I'm saying So this was 0.5, this one's 0.5, But because of the compression happening, you know, I might have to kind of put it a little bit more on the base. So this is just some kind of things you have to be aware of in your mastering. Okay, so let's just listen. Is it benefiting? If it's not well just disabled, it will move on to our next plug in so off. So it's a bit loud. I'm gonna go minus 25. Okay. I think I like it. You know, it's really, really subtle. Um, it added I feel a little bit more like the balance of the overall track. Now I'm gonna introduce you to a Clipper. Okay, So a clipper so powerful, Especially in, like, hip hop. When you have this really, really kind of aggressive drums, you can really drive it into a clipper. Really, really nice. Get some extra loudness of your music. Uh, really transparent as well as it really helps giving those drums to hit hard. So, like I'm saying so you can kind of go for more of, like, an analog sound or more of, like, digital kind of more aggressive sound. Okay, so it's just Dallas back just a little bit here, you know, like I was telling you earlier. This is kind of this sweet spot I usually find for this clipper. But every track is different. This is just a good starting point. So let's hit play. We're gonna watch our, um, are volumes. OK? Okay. So we're getting really, really subtle of gain reduction going on here so I could boost this up a bit and again, you know, like, what I want to do is I put this up by two. We're gonna come here and I'm going to go minus two. Okay? You know, just like that fair volume comparison. Just hear how it sounds. Okay? Lets just boosted up a little bit more being more aggressive into the Clipper. Let's just say, uh, 3.5 and then minus 2.5, come here. We will reset it. So let's play around with the analog to the digital kind of sound. Okay, So is going to see more gain reduction is happening because it's kind of rounded now again , You know, when you have these types of plug ins that Elijah A and B comparison, you know, I really like to take advantage of it. So, for example, that just copy this, you know, this is gonna be a We're also gonna copy it to be okay, and then I'll be Let's maybe make it more like over here, and then we can switch in between them. And that's a nice, quick way to hear these changes to see. Is it actually benefiting your song? Or isn't it? Okay, okay. So when I'm listening to this, I'm hearing that a sounds a lot folder. It sounds more like a complete song, whereas be It kind of feels as if, Ah, you know, the track isn't jelled together. It kind of feels that, like the kick drum is louder than, like the rest of the song. So really focused on the kick drum here. Okay, um, again a. It's more. Sounds more like a complete song. Be it kind of sounds like that kick drum is hitting a little bit harder. So let's start with B. I'll bring it up just a little bit. Listen, listen for that kick drum was turned off and on, So as you can see, you know, you see all like the transients, like the pluck. So it's hitting the limiter. What's happening is our clippers coming in, and it's kind of being like the limiter, Okay, except it zero attack zero release. And it clips it off in a really transparent, fast way to get nice loudness. So as soon as I enable it to see all these peaks, they essentially are gone. Chopped him off. Okay, they're gone. So if I disabled it, you'll see the peace come back. Okay, so, you know, we're chopping off maybe 23 decibels from our peaks, But that's allowing us to get more control over our song, I would get a little more balance consistency out of it. So I turn off the Clipper. How does this sound came? You were a little bit aggressive on our Clippers style of back plus a three. And I'll put this to three as well. And at the moment, you know, we're about 40.4, so we can boost this up a little bit. So let's just put this to let's just say 0.5, okay? For 3.75 way will reset it. See where? Rap? That's pretty good. We're gonna go about 0.5. OK, so again, this is kind of a rough starting point. We're really, really close to get our, you know, our actual integrated loudness. Now, the thing is, we don't know how this sounds in context over overall song. Okay, so, you know, I just kind of mastered like the chorus. Now, what I would do is I would now listen to the overall song, and it's just like a do. I need it to be a little bit louder, because again, since this meter, is that the loudest part of the song? Well, yes, it's gonna be it like that minus 14. But it's not taking into account all the different quiet parts. Like I was saying before they hear intro might just be just a vocal. So it might be really, really quiet. And then the chorus comes in, and the average between them might not be minus 14. It might even be quieter, right? B minus 17 so you might be able to actually increase your volume. And you know your limits. Hit your limiter a little bit harder again, always taking into account of Are you now adding unnecessary? You know, unwanted distortion. Um, or you might have to add more compression in so that you can, you know, keep your loud parts more consistent, which are quieter parts. And this is where, like, you know, the mastering comes into play. Another thing, too, is like if you have compressed your music ah, pretty hard. But the thing is, let's say it like the quieter parts. That sounds good, but the louder parts it doesn't sound good. What you can do is you can actually like automate your compressor. So, for example, like let's say in your chorus, which is like your loud is part of the song you could automate like the ratio just to kind of dial it back. But in addition, you're also gonna want to dial back the volume because, you know, with less ratio, which means that there's any more loudness. So you'd have to automate both the ratio and the volume. And then the last thing I'm going to talk about is just dither on your limiter. Okay? So with something like pro L you know, they have, Ah, dinner right here. So you go, like, 16 bit, and then you can even go like, you know, different noise shaping. And again, this is just do it with super super quietest parts is your song is called The Noise floor Toe help with quantum ization air, um, or with NFL studio. If you come file and you're export, and I will show you this later, Okay? Like in one. Once we get how to export your audio, um, you also have did their here. So if you are going to do there, you know, don't do both. Select one okay again. Whenever you're changing bit depth, you're gonna want together. So in this case, if you exported this toe. A 24 bit wave even to send off to your mastering engineer for my readings online. You want to, uh, dinner? Okay, so if you're exporting this to 24 bit wave sending off to mastering engineer dither and sent it to him Now, if he's going to send you back, like a 16 bit wave, then you know he should be applying dither Now, please do not care. Stuns with this stuff. I'm just explaining, you know when to use debtor. Okay, did there is so little to care about. You want to focus on your music, you want to focus on you know, your minus 14 again, that number could always change, because right now we're at the early stages of all this loudness kind of stuff. But if you are going to do there, now is the time to do it. You did there, you export. And then you got yourself a track. You're going to go. Okay, so that's kind of like my process of how I would approach mastering again. I just mastered the chorus again. I'd have to listen to the overall song and just kind of here, where that loudness is where the average. I'm actually achieving my desired number. And if I am, then if I'm happy with it that I'm good to go now for myself. I over the years I've typically started to work with beat tapes. So ah, if I'm going to be working with this track like, I don't just create one individual track and just release it out there to the world, I've just found that it was really it was really beneficial and actually created a course on how to create a beat tape. I've actually created, like a physical beat tape over my years and throughout my production career. I know nowadays, like CDs are super, uh, you know, good to have because, like, you know, CDs air kind of outdated, like laptops and cars aren't even coming with CD players anymore. But at the end of the day, it's pretty cool, like it's a little business card like, for example, if I'm like on the plane with somebody, I can handle this beat tape to somebody and it's just like, you know, it's very well, professionally done. They're like, Oh wow and said my emails on their my websites on their so they could still reach out to me . And, like, really? You know, business cards are pretty expensive, even themselves. And like, it costs me about a dollar a CD anyways, so it's pretty comparable, even like the price of a business card. And at the same time, if they had a CD player, they could just pop it in. If not, they can visit my website. Now. The reason why I want to tell you about like a beat tape is because over my years, I started to release beat tapes can. And when I come to master a track, you know? So now you know, this track is mastered. Okay, So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put them all into, like, ah, folder, which is like, a make you know what the official folder that's done for that beat tape. And then what I do is I'm gonna put onto like, my phone was some type of player where Aiken listen to it. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna listen from track to track to track and again. So right now I haven't talked to you really about intro and outro. Uh, NFL studio. I don't really focus ever on the beginning because you don't really have much flexibility. Like you'd actually have to highly all this and, like, you know, bringing over. You know, in this case, let's say, like, would be or however you want to do it, you can do it that way. I never worry about the beginning. I always have my songs typically always Only the one boom My song starts where I start working with the intro slash outro is just like in the Outro. And I already showed you right here. I just extend a pattern for how long I want. Now again, if I'm listening to that beat tape And you know, I've selected, like the order of the songs It's okay. I think I want them like this. I'm gonna listen So, you know, from one track to the next, First of all, in the sitting is the overall volume. Is that consistent? Does that sound good, right, like so you know, is one song way too loud or one song like way too quiet or even like in terms of e que I don't worry about the eq You balance too much But for example, if one song is like super super bright, and then when songs like Super Super Dull, that is something that you may want to address. But typically, you know your tracks are all pretty good that way. But it is just one thing to be aware of. It's always something to keep in the back of your mind. Um, so yes, so volume. You want to make sure that's good frequency balance and then the intro slash otra times. That's one thing to also take into account because, you know, at the end of the day, when people listen to your music, they are probably listening to it on, you know, different playlists sold, in other words, the lessons like this artist and then this artist and then you and then someone else, and then you and then someone else and then someone else And then, like you know, so that intro and outro time really doesn't matter that much, because, you know, when you listen to all these different songs, it's like, well, you can never plan for that. But if someone does listen to your album, your beat tape, your you know, whatever. If they listen to it in order than how you have set it up. That's the way how you wanted it. Done. Okay, so those were just different things to think about before you actually export your song. But I think this is going to get you up and running pretty good. Hopefully that you know, that's enough information. Like I said, I'm not a mastering engineer. But over my years, I have been able to achieve, you know, quite a lot of knowledge and understand what I'm doing for the most part in order to compete with kind of commercial releases. So I hope it helps you out, and we will get into the next video.
16. 5-1 - How To Export Your Song Raw: Okay, So in this video, we're gonna be talking about actually now exporting your audio, making the official copy that you would upload if you're going to be sending it to, like, let's see on Spotify, iTunes, all these different types of streaming kind of platforms. Or if you want to upload, let's take soundcloud and stuff like that. Okay, so the cool thing with audio is that it's a lot more simple in, compared to, let's say, like a, you know, exporting video. So let's say you you recorded some video. You edited it up anyone to export it. There's a lot of different features and options that you can select in video editing, and, you know, it's very, very confusing with audio. It's pretty simple. It's just a matter of do you want high quality? If you do, you keep wave. Okay, that's like a lossless file. Or you can choose MP three, which is, ah, lossy format, a lossy container. So what that means is that it's actually removing content. It's actually moving frequencies from within the audio so that the file size could be smaller. Okay, we'll talk a little bit about that as we proceed one thing I forgot to mention to you within mastering is sometimes people do apply wide nous. Now, be very, very careful on how you are listening to me say wide nous Okay, so when you have tools like a pro MB so again it's like a multi band compressor. Sometimes people will come here to like it's like the highs or maybe like the mid highs. And here you actually have an option to, uh, you know, remove some of the middle content to make it sound wider. Um, now, in this instance of this track, I didn't touch it, and many times I really don't. But sometimes if you're listening, um, if you add this a little bit of wide nous and like, let's say, like the high end and stuff like that, you can kind of create more clarity in the mix because now you're allowing, like, the actual middle content to kind of shine through, and then you're also allowing kind of like the wide nous to sound a little bit wider again . These they're just kind of just different techniques that you can apply. But again, you have to be careful like I would not recommend just going and putting like a wide nous plug in like this on your master track because that is widening the whole song, including at the low end and everything. And you never want to touch your low end. Typically, you want your low end to be mono many times on, Let's say pro MB on the low end. Many times people will even take this and totally remove the serial content. Um, just like you saw me do with the base insert here. So if we click it so again, you know, what I did was I took the stereo band, okay? And I removed the low end of it. That way, the low end of it is is hitting nice and hard. You could even do that with your kick drum to, um but again, you know, these are just different things that you can apply in the mastering stage. Okay, so now we're onto exporting audio. Okay, So I'm just gonna give you just kind of brief overview of you know what you want to do when you export your audio. So NFL studio computer file, You go export. Now there's a shortcut. Control are or control shift are I'm just gonna select. One of them will save it here so you can actually export both away file and an MP three at the same time. I'll just talk just a little bit about these audio containers. OK, so there's something called lossless. And then there's also lossy format. OK, so let's talk about wave. So Wave is has been like the standard for many, many years. It's very, very compatible with pretty much every single audio player out there. These newer formats, such as like 00 G and F L A c file. Um, you know, they're kind of newer, so you know, they might not work on older audio players, but really, nowadays, it's like things are becoming. You know, technology is improving pretty pretty, pretty fast. Okay, so you're wave is high quality. You can export it at 16 bit or 24 bit, depending on what you're mastering. Engineer asked from you. I personally know just to just 16 bit 44.1 kilohertz. It's very high quality at the end of the day when when a person actually listens to your music, if they are listening to it on a streaming platform there listening to it in, you know, a very, ah, low bit rate. Okay, so, you know, right here, this is high quality wave 16 bit. They're gonna be listening to your music. And, like MP three is like 1 28 maybe 2 56 Okay, It's all about your music. Does your music, you know, is the melodies catchy? Is it mixed? Well, stuff like that, that's what's gonna matter. OK, now, let's just talk about MP three. MP three is a lossy format. So what that means is that your actual audio? So when exports, you know, has all its different frequencies through science, they have discovered when we listen to music, there's certain frequencies which our ears aren't. As, um, we don't pick up certain frequencies as well as other frequencies, and they tend to remove these frequencies out of your music. And the benefit of that is that you get a smaller file size, but then you get some artifacts, So typically, this is more like the high end of your audio. Typically, if you listen to, like symbols and stuff like that, it kind of sounds like swirly. That's kind of the best way how I could describe it, especially once you're getting into, like, the 1 28 in 1 92 and stuff like that. If you are gonna be exporting to MP three, I would say to 56 or higher, um, Wolf, pretty much to 56 or 3 20 If you're gonna be going any higher than that, I would say Go wave. Okay. Now O. G is kind of like a newer format. And what's kind of cool with Ogi is it's really similar to MP three in a sense that it's lossy, so it's actually removing frequencies from your actual audio file. But it's a variable rate. Okay, so what that means is that if there's not much content going on in your song, it's not gonna have as much of, you know, bit rate. So therefore, your file size is gonna be smaller. Where's MP three is constant, so it doesn't matter how busy your actual audio signal is. If the song is three minutes, the file size of an MP three will always be that same. Size doesn't matter what. Okay. Org. You can vary a little bit, which is kind of cool. Another thing is Ogi is also an open source format, which is cool. You know, it allows the public to work on the container. F l. A. C is also kind of a newer one. It's kind of cool because it's still lost lists in a sense that it's not removing actual content out of the audio. But it's still compressing the actual file size. Okay, so when you hear the word compression, you have to be You know, you kind of understand what they're saying because it's many different uses for the word compression. Okay, so Inter actual music when I was using the proceeds pro and be that's audio compression, that's to do with dynamic compression. But then there's also compression my file compression like natural file size. So, for example, you know this wave. If we export it at 16. 44.1, you know this file size might be, ah, 40 megabyte file. Okay, If we go to MP three, it might be like an eight megabyte file. Okay, so we've actually kind of compressed it. We've removed audio out, and we've made it smaller, so it's easier to send in an email to somebody and stuff like that. Okay, so with that said, all you have to do is just, you know, select wave 16 bit ice. Like the re sampling 5 12 high quality fall plug ins. I believe this is more for, like, an actual fl studio plug in and everything that you see right here. This is typically how I have my expert setting set up. So it's pretty simple, like, for the most part. Okay, um, all these different options here, these are just a few enable MP three, as you can see now it's enabled. One thing I will mention is if you ever hear about the word stems. Okay, so imagine you're collaborating with somebody. So you made the B, but they may not have the same ves teases you are like the same sounds or whatever. The easiest way to get across that is to go split mixer tracks. And what that is going to do is gonna export this song in 16 bit 44.1, and it's gonna export each individual mixer inserts. So instead of it being one file on your master track, Okay, You're actually gonna have 1234 you know how many of these mixer inserts and they're all gonna be their own individual file with just this sound, okay? And it's gonna be the whole length of the song. And you What you would do is he would, you know, zip it put into, like, dropbox or something like that. You would send the link to the person you're collaborating with, or if you're sending it off for mixing. This is the same thing at the end of the day. Exporting in music production is super super simple. It's kind of like Do you want high quality? You're gonna get wave? Do you want it to be a a smaller file size that, you know, you can send it in an email to somebody you know you want it to be making that's a five megabytes, Then just select MP three on, you know on a stand particles to 56 K And if you want any more information on exporting NFL studio again, any single time and efforts to do, you can f one on the window that's open. So F one and what's gonna happen is it's going to bring you to the help manual So if you want to learn a boat Ah, the today You know the pattern mode here or at the tail. So in this case mode, you'd want that to be song because he wanted to export. Ah, the actual playlist que you want to export this? If you are exporting, if the pattern then it's just gonna export this pattern at the moment. Um, you know, I believe remainder is like the tail. This is more if you do like sound design and like the looping feature stuff like that, as you can see it just like it just depends where it puts the tail. Another cool trick with these usually like this one isn't clickable, But many of these images are clickable. So if you want to learn more information about something, you would click right here. But a little cool trick that I would do is I'd press control and f And if I want a little tail, I might have the right like tail or leave remainder. So, like, leave re Okay, so see, it brings you right to the detail and stuff like that. So that's typically how I use the efforts. Did you help manual. And if you do want to change your actual sample rate in FL Studio, So, for example, if you're mastering engineer asked for 24 bit 48 K So here's the audio, and this is where you can change your sample rate. Okay? And if I do select it, you're gonna see it's gonna pop up. He's gonna say I have Teoh close the project if I want to do that. So I was gonna cancel, and I'm going to stay on 44.1, okay?
17. 6-1 - Staying Organized With Music: okay. And the last topic I want to talk about with you in this course is just thing organized. Okay, so I just want to let you know that I do have a course. It's called a specific music production folder. I explain my own music production folder. I walk you through it. I show you why I set things up. Because over my years, I've had, you know, missing files and stuff like that. And it's a horrible experience with FL Studio. And again, over the years, I've just come to the point where this is I've just set up my folder a certain way that I don't have to worry about missing files. I'm organized and or exactly where everything is. Andi just want talk about organization a little bit in this video just to kind of get you up and running to prepare you for the long run. Because right now, if you're just making music, it's it's fun, right? But if you start taking music a little bit more seriously, you know you're starting to release commercial releases. You want to know exactly where your files are. You want to make sure that you're backing up all your files for each song. Ah, and you're organized. Okay, So, like I was saying in my later years, I have started to create beat tapes. Okay, so I've actually created many beat tapes there on Spotify and stuff like that. You guys can check him out if you want. Speed takes by gratuitous. That's the Siri's name. So let's just go to my latest one. I'm working on nine at the moment, So here's eight. Okay. And I'll show you how to back up the individual sounds in a second, but this is what I do for every single release. So this is volume eight. And as you can see, I think my artwork a demo compilation. This is just a little teaser if you know, if someone wants to listen to, like, you know, just a little idea of what the B tape sounds like. And then here's what the mastered these are all the actual files I would upload to something like Destro kid District. It is a distributor, and what they do is they will allow you to put your music onto Spotify iTunes, all for you. Okay, so you know, district, it is like a monthly fee. There's lots of different distributors out there. I'm not going to get too much into it. But as you can see, if I click these you know, each files about 46 megabytes. 41. And again, this is like the 16 bit 44.1 wave. This is the final Master. Okay, I also create an MP three version, and I also I d three tag it. So I'm just going to open up a program here. It's called MP three tag. Okay, so this is a program called MP three tag. It's really, really cool. And what it does, is it imbeds Ah, 83 metadata into the actual MP three file. Therefore, if someone is playing this on, like, their phone or something like that And this is typically if someone actually comes and downloads the beat tape from my website again, if I come here and if I'm uploading the actual wave So again, this doesn't have any of this. 83 information in what happens is when I uploaded to destroy kid, You don't have to upload with my artwork, my artist name, you know, all that type of stuff and it embeds it all for me, okay? And then, you know, it gets distributed to all these different platforms, like Spotify and stuff, and that information is always there. So you know, But if again, if someone comes to my website and they download the beat tape, I want it so that if they do download it, if they do end up putting it on some type of device to listen to it in their car, off their phone, I wanted so that they can see my artwork, that they can see my artist name that they consider the years released. They can go to my website and stuff like that. And this is a totally free program. He's just MP three tag. You just simply just dragged your MP three in here. Um, in my case, what I would do is that highly all of them first. Okay. And then what I do is I input the information that relates to all the songs. For example, like the composer name, the album artist. Uh, the actual You know, the comment. You don't have to put anything here. I just did my website district for branding. Ah, the album name you know, stuff like that, the artist, because you don't want to input it for every single one and then for each individual song. Then you go to them individually, and then you gotta put like the title and stuff like that, and it's just a matter of clicking save, and you can, ah, upload an image. I usually have it around this size. That way. It's not. It's not making the MP three bigger. Like, you know, a 63 kilobyte covers very, very small. If you're uploading like a 2000 by 2000 image, you know you're gonna add to two megabytes onto that MP three unnecessarily. Okay, so just a kind of little heads up there. This is what I do. You know, these are just the kind of cool little tricks that people don't really share with you, right? I also create a zip file of this MP three. This is actually the actual file that people can download on my website. If they would come to its gratuitous stock home now in the mixed. This is where I'm working with each individual tracks. So in this case, you know, this is the FL Studio intermediate course mastered. And as you can see, I want value version one. And the reason why I did that is because, you know, if I recorded the video and I wasn't happy with the master, I probably would have done like a V two, Okay, but it turned out fine. So we're gonna go to mix. And so now what I do for each song, I create its own folder. Okay? And then inside that folder, all I do is I just put the actual f l P. This is the FL studio project, and then I back up the sounds, OK? And if I was working with vocals, I would also create, like, an ambition and vocals, too. Okay, Um, now, in order to back up in fl Studio, it's really, really easy. You just click file, you go export, and you're gonna go project data files, and you're just going to save it into that same I save into this folder. Okay, um, and one thing I'll mention to you with vocals. I always put like the acronym of, like, the actual song name. Just so I prevent missing files. So, for example, if we just go back to my albums. Okay, This is gonna be a really good way to explain it to you. So, for example, if I go, what's it gonna be? Life or death? This is one of my albums with vocals and I'm going to go to Mixed okay. And I'm also going to go, let's say enduring till the end, OK? So as you can see enduring tell the end. So that is what I do like even for the sounds and for the vocals That way you don't My folder names aren't super long Now, if we go toe vocals you can see that I have enduring Tell the end And the reason why I have set it up like this is so that you know, if you're working with the song and you put verse one and then you go to the next song and you also label it verse one Now, if you ever it'll change around folders or switch computers. Later on, FL Studio is gonna pull in the first verse one that it finds. Okay. So over my years, I have tagged each individual verse with, like, the acronym of the song name And this way if if efforts did you cannot find the actual file , it will say missing. You know, it's a missing air now in fl studio, You want to make sure that you don't save just just like, close it. Go find that missing file and then you can really reopen fl studio. If you save it, fl Studio is going to think like, Oh, well, yeah, You want the missing files? Okay, so you know, this is kind of off topic from, you know, the meat of this course in terms of like mixing, mastering and preparing it for release. But I'm just more talking about the organization. OK, so that's pretty much how I would organize my music, my beat tapes. Now you know, it's kind like a spoiler for even like that other course, but I get is called a specific music production folder. I explain my music production folder. You know, it's taken me like 78 to 10 years to really solidify this folder, and I'm super happy with it. Now I can really focus on my music. I don't have to worry about, like, five hold management or anything. It's just really, really easy. Okay, so again. You know, over the years, I have started released beat tapes. I just find that it's more effective for my brand for my time. It also allows my listeners to get a better sense of my music if they were to listen to a beat tape rather than individual beat. Um and yeah. So I'm just gonna create one more video. It's gonna be like the Outro video, And I hope you guys have enjoyed the course so far, okay?
18. Conclusion / Course Wrap-Up: Okay. Guess well. Thank you so much for taking the course. We have covered a lot in this to prepare you for what it's like to be a producer. And really get your music out there at, like, a professional level allowing you to compete against your favorite producers and your favorite music. That's out there. So, you know, as you can see, this is pretty much our curriculum that we covered. Okay, so listen to what we got. So that was our very first video. So I already created the Be OK. And the thing is, now we're going to go mix that beat. First of all, you want to listen to what it is now with FL Studio. Typically, you know your track is going to be too loud, so just kind of grab your favors, pull them down. Now, things that you want to listen for is like, you know, is there frequency clashing? Going on? Are certain notes not standing out so frequency clashing is more to do with e que. If notes are standing out, you can be adjusting velocity of certain notes or if it's a vocal, you could be using volume automation to bring up certain words in hand with compression two . So we also just prepared herself for the mix. That was more, uh, actually routing the individual sounds, too, like the mixer and stuff like that. Ah, the gain staging again. There's a lot of myths out there and then explain to you about like the third a bit floating point like that's what Daws are. Therefore, if you're on the individual mixer insert, you can drive it really hard as long as you turn it down. And then, at the end of the day, your master is not going over zero again. If you're working with analog plug ins, you have to be careful there because they emulate riel analog gear. Therefore, you do have to use proper gain staging in a sense of you do not want to drive that audio signal into it super hard because you'll hear distortion that you don't want again. There is. There's to chip in types of distortion, you know, intentional distortion and unwanted distortion. Even on the master track, you'll hear people say, Oh, don't don't clip, but as you can see, you know, they actually make a tool called a clipper you know what I mean. So it's like you have to be careful with what You listen. Uh, this could be used as a very, very powerful tool. It's just how you use it. And ah, it's all about intentional versus unintentional. Okay, we talked about E que. The most important thing with CQ is be careful of mixing and solo cuttings really, really powerful as well as the fair volume comparison. You know, A and B as well as if we talked about compression now. So, you know, when I was using these different types of tools and I was using the, you know, a and then B super Super powerful, just make sure that, you know, it's a fair volume comparison that way. Who is using kind of compare, like two different versions of that compression, And it will just give you a better mixing workflow. Okay, we set up some subgroups again. I also created a course called FL Studio Beginner's Course that was going to get you up and running about the basics of FL Studio. How I like to set it up in terms of short shortcuts like, for example, like ghost notes and and stuff like that and what go stones are is, for example, that right clicking go like piano roll. You'll see, like the grain oats and behind. Okay, and to enable it. It's just helpers. And there's goes channels. Okay, and that's notes within the same pattern. Okay, Just added six, um, blaring to the collapse again. That's just kind of a cool little trick. It'll bring it into the chorus or even just play it whenever its ads whiteness, especially if you pan one left one. Right? I showed you some side chain compression. It's a really, really powerful trick. And then we actually mix the track. Okay. And then we actually arranged the song again. I have that course song structure. An arrangement by gratuitous That's me on die. Break down. You know what is arrangement how to use arrangement effectively. Your mind said he should have. I also talked to you about audio painting, a term that I coined. I've also written a book on audio painting. It's on Amazon. Um, you know, if you want more information on that or if you want to take the course. Okay. So in this course, though, you know, I talked to you like you know, you have to be thinking like, does your song actually flow? Ah, you know, do you have different parts, like your intro? Your verse chorus? Do you have, like, a pre chorus on getting all songs have toe Have this, um, And also, um, the cool thing with arrangement is like, you know, like I was saying, there's no rules. OK, so that's where you can be as creative as you want, but you have to always be listening. It's like, Does it flow? And if it's not flowing, that's where you can apply, like audio painting, which is, like, you know, adding some type of transition before we get into changing stuff for adding and instruments . And it's just all about communicating with your listener. Okay, we broke apart the actual instruments. That way we can actually build like a verse one overs to and stuff like that. And then yes, so you know, like I was saying, like, does your song flow like, you know, listen to your shock over and over and listen for areas that either sound rushed or don't flow naturally, and you can fix these areas by adding him like transitions, symbols, white noise. Silence is a really powerful one that people forget about a lot. Ah, you know, And then also at this stage, let's say you've already mixed it a little bit. Let's say you've arranged it. Now when you're listening to it over again, you know, if you're listening for if things aren't transitioning well, also be listening to like your mix in a sense of, you know, this is instrument too loud or, you know, is the EQ You kind of imbalanced? Can some instruments maybe stand out a little bit more? Do you have to cut some frequencies in some sounds we got into mastering. You know, that is a huge subject in itself again, you know, with the loudness wars. Now we have loved this normalization, which is really, really cool. That way you don't have to squash your music and wreck all like the transients, all with the peaks, all the dynamics You still wanna have some, you know, some breathing room in your music. But in my opinion, you still want to, you know, you know, compress and limit it just to get that nice, overall balanced and polished sound. But what was happening with the loudness words is, you know, they kind of abused it. They push it to the next level to the point of really wrecking music. You know, obviously when you're limiting and compressing and clipping you are, you know, damaging the audio. But are you actually benefiting it? You know, at the same time, like, does it sound better if you listen to it on multiple speakers and stuff like, does it translate better now because, you know, let's say we talk about like, a car system, you know, cars where they have, like a sub and I speakers and stuff like that. If your music is too dynamic, it's just like all you're gonna hear, just like base, because like your kick drum is just hitting so hard. So you do want to have that nice balance so that it just sounds like a nice, clean, tight base. But you're still hearing like the vocals, and you achieve this by, you know, controlling those peaks. So a lot of the tools I use I showed you on e que, a multi band compressor, a clipper limiter as well as a single bank compressor again, you have to be careful if you're using a single band compressor. Because, um, if this was all they hear, it's like now you're actually using the kick drum, the bass and the snare. And, you know, if you are, you just want to be using really, really subtle adjustments, but just the benefit of having a compressor that has this filter this input filter Ah, you get more control because again, like the mids and highs, you know, they're not gonna They're not gonna fluctuate as much. And compared to, ah, you know, like your base and your your kick, for example, if we do, if we just listen to this for a second, let's just look at an e que at a frequency spectrum again. If we hit play, you're going to see it's like, you know, our bases loud and compare it like the rest of the song. So here we go. Okay, so you can see it. So if we were actually compressing our music, what's gonna happen is full are kick drum is constantly triggering that, um, you know the compressor. Okay, these are things that you'll start to discover as you proceed and progress in your productions. Okay, so I just can't talk to a little bit. But like mastering chain and the process again, this is the mastering change. So, you know, feel free to apply these in different areas you always want, like your limiter last with the meter at the very, very end. And I put this to minus one just for that safeguard against the MP three conversion and the Inter sample peaks. And then we actually kind of mastered the track. Um, we also talked about like, the value fs again. This is like a new standard. Now, I was going for, like that minus 14. But again, if you look at, like, YouTube compared to Spotify and all this different know all these different streaming platforms, they all can vary a little bit. But again, I recommend just one. You know, just master toe one volume and you're good to go. Minus 14 seems to break the industry standard at the moment. And then when it came to export in your audio, so I personally just go 16 bit 44.1 and it's super simple. Okay, if you're gonna go MP three, I would say to 56 or 3 20 And then you also wanna idee three. Tag it, and that's just really bad officials. You know, again, that's adding in like all the information. So when someone plays your music in their car or whatever, it pulls up all the information about your artist's name. Uh, your artwork and stuff like that's really, really powerful. And then I just introduced you to the, you know, staying organized again. I've been producing with bottle of the beat tapes in later years. I just find it more effective for my flow. Um, and I also have the course of a specific music production folder if you want to learn how to stay organized and why I set it up a certain way. Okay, so I'm gratuitous. Hope you guys enjoyed this course. If you guys have any questions, you guys can always reach up to me at high at its gratuitous stock calm. And I'd really appreciate if you guys would leave a review. It would help me a lot with my online course business here, so I hope you guys enjoyed and hopefully I'll see you guys in future courses of mine
Riley Weller, FL Studio Trainer
