Do I need to Hire a Mastering Engineer?Ī lot of producers and professionals say that mastering should be left to the professionals. And even though I’m do not consider myself to be a professional, they might help you.

So if all that sounds a little too familiar, I recommend checking out some of my guidelines for mixing electronic music. Your song needs to sound balanced and as good as possible before moving into to the mastering stage. So, before you consider experimenting with mastering, it’s essential to learn how to mix first. You need to achieve the “commercialism” as much as possible during the mixing stage. Mastering isn’t a way to fix major mixing issues and also it isn’t “magic” that will turn an unbalanced mix into a polished, commercial song. The truth is, if your song is not mixed properly, amateur level mastering isn’t going to do you any favors – in fact, it’ll probably make it worse. Keep in mind that mastering goes hand-in-hand with mixing.

Or if you’d would rather skip all the info and get right into the detailed steps, just click here. Now that we’ve set some expectations, let’s go over a few house cleaning details before we get into the tutorial. It may be a slightly too much squashed, but anyway, compare the difference: This is an example of something that you could easily do with the same setup.Īnd here’s the mastered version. Here’s an example song that’s been mastered with the FL Studio mixer state file from this tutorial (download link below). After mastering, your song should be ready to go public. It’s also preparing a song for the proper medium (i.e. It’s the process of improving the sound quality and perceived volume of your song (if possible and/or needed) with the aid of such tools as an equalizer, compressor, limiter, stereo enhancer, etc. Mastering is the final step in music production.

Mastering fl studio 12