Book Image

The Music Producer's Ultimate Guide to FL Studio 20

By : Joshua Au-Yeung
Book Image

The Music Producer's Ultimate Guide to FL Studio 20

By: Joshua Au-Yeung

Overview of this book

FL Studio is a cutting-edge software music production environment and an extremely powerful and easy-to-use tool for creating music. This book will give you everything you need to produce music with FL Studio like a professional. You'll begin by exploring FL Studio 20's vast array of tools, and discover best practices, tips, and tricks for creating music. You'll then learn how to set up your studio environment, create a beat, compose a melody and chord progression, mix sounds with effects, and export songs. As you advance, you'll find out how to use tools such as the Piano roll, mixer console, audio envelopes, types of compression, equalizers, vocoders, vocal chops, and tools for increasing stereo width. The book introduces you to mixing best practices, and shows you how to master your songs. Along the way, you'll explore glitch effects and create your own instruments and custom-designed effect chains. You'll also cover ZGameEditor Visualizer, a tool used for creating reactive visuals for your songs. Finally, you'll learn how to register, sell, and promote your music. By the end of this FL Studio book, you'll be able to utilize cutting-edge tools to fuel your creative ideas, mix music effectively, and publish your songs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1:Getting Up and Running with FL Studio
6
Section 2:Music Production Fundamentals
12
Section 3:Postproduction and Publishing Your Music

What is mastering?

When your song is finished being mixed, before publicly releasing it, you take it through a series of steps to enhance it called mastering. Mastering is an all-encompassing term for postproduction activities that include the following:

  • Making the song sound consistent with other songs in the album
  • Editing out flaws
  • Equalization to ensure a well-balanced frequency range
  • Compression to balance dynamic range
  • Stereo width enhancement
  • Limiting to raise the overall volume of the mix
  • Listening to the audio on different devices and ensuring that there is a consistent quality of sound heard across them
  • Any other adjustments necessary to prepare the music for distribution

You should always master your song before publicly releasing it. Mastering should always end up making your music sound better than it did before mastering.

Can you master music yourself?

I personally say yes, or you should at least learn enough about mastering...