sound engineering

In audio mastering, brickwall limiting is the final signal processing before releasing a song. Every brickwall limiter or maximizer will in most cases basic controls such as threshold, ceiling, and release time. It's not uncommon for some brickwall limiters to have extra controls such as attack...

Yes, you can use both Image-Line Maximus and Fruity Limiter software audio plug-in at the same time for your audio mastering needs. This is what you would refer to as your mastering chain where the signal goes from IL Fruity Limiter to Maximus or vice-versa. If you like to keep things simple...

The term "lookahead" in the context of dynamic signal processor effects refers to how an audio software plugin will delay the signal e.g., 0.1 to 1 ms or more, for the sake of implementing the process of analyzing the incoming audio material. And once a brickwall limiter analyzes the input...

Oversampling is a technique of digital signal processing that helps audio software plug-ins to minimize the level of artifacts often caused by aliasing distortion. The process of oversampling is done through means of sampling audio material greater than its Nyquist rate. For example, if you...

The muffled sound of overlapping 808s in Image-Line's FL Studio is often caused by a series of notes played consecutively. However, this issue can be resolved by using FL Studio's Cut itself channel rack menu option which forces previous notes to be automatically silenced. Eventually, this...

The meaning behind the process of "leveling your beats" is just synonymous with the idea of "gain staging" before mixing your music or instrumental. A simple way to level a beat is by identifying the main building block in the song and start gain staging from there. For instance, your starting...

The process of normalizing audio isn't the same as using a brickwall limiter on the master bus. In fact, when you normalize audio this will make the loudest part of the audio material as loud as it can be without going over 0 dBFS. And as for the quieter parts of the same audio file, they will...

If you want to normalize audio in Image-Line's FL Studio music production software, you need to use the Edison audio editor VST plug-in or you can use the sampler's precomputed normalization effect to accomplish this. However, for this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to do it using Edison...

The process of mixing kick and bass should perhaps start with the vision of whether you want your bass to sound fat or whether you want your kick drum to sound lean. Well, audio mixing is a give-and-take process of technical art. This is why it makes sense to decide beforehand what's going to...

The simple answer is no. This is because one of the rules of thumb in audio mastering is you should do no harm since reverberation has an overwhelming potential to make your music muddy and ruin a sound engineer's mix. Best believe they won't ever work with you again. Experimenting with reverb...

Image-Line's FL Studio (digital audio workstation) has this feature called smart disable for all plug-ins, which without a doubt is preddy much useful. What it does is reduce CPU overload in FL Studio by turning off idle VST instrument or sound effect plug-ins after 4 seconds of inactivity...

"Reverb Damping" refers to how much "high frequency" absorption is going to be simulated by a reverb plugin or a reverb hardware unit. For example, a hall that has a multitude of people will produce a unique reverberation sound compared to an empty one. Therefore, we can deduce that a hall...

The main difference between reverb and delay is that we can think of delay as a repeated signal that's held in the audio buffer for a few milliseconds and finally mixed with the original signal. On the other hand, reverb is an ambiance of a room made up of numerous echoes packed closely...

The purpose of creating a buss or a group channel is to make use of a single fader channel that has other multiple mixer tracks routed to it. And in this FL Studio tutorial, I will show you how you can get around this music production technique. Step 1: let's rename and color code FL Studio's...

The amount of RAM ("random-access memory") you need for your machine depends on what type of record producer you are. If you mostly make music using virtual synthesizers then you don't necessarily need to spend your budget on more primary memory without primarily addressing the need for speed...

Mixing in monophonic sound reproduction is a good thing to make sure your music translates well to all kinds of listening environments and there are various ways you can mix in monaural inside Image-Line's FL Studio. Step 1: You can switch a mixer track to mono using Image-Line's FL Studio's...

Given that a mastering limiter is an audio compressor with a very high compression ratio. The main purpose of using one is more often to make things louder whilst avoiding nasty audible distortion (unless if that's the desired sound). All mastering limiters manipulate dynamic range and some are...

There isn't a specific dBFS level as to where your kick (or 808 bass drum) should peak but you can follow an arbitrary starting point of either between -3 dBFS, -6 dBFS, -9 dBFS, or -12 dBFS if you want. I would highly recommend you start at -12 dBFS because if you build your mix around the kick...

Almost any digital or analog audio compressor has a parameter labeled ratio and this allows a beatmaker, a mixing or an audio mastering engineer to set the amount of compression that takes place when an audio signal goes past the "threshold level" of the compressor. For example, a compression...

In music production, an audio compressor is a sound effect (i.e., either an analog hardware unit or a digital audio software plugin) designed to reduce the dynamic range (DR) of the source material or entire mix as a means to either smoothly or aggressively control volume fluctuations...