Thursday, October 3, 2013

Intermediate FL Studio Guide Mastering Your Song





Compression

Most of you probably already know what compression is. Most of you, though, are also probably not using it correctly. The compression of the dynamic range of audio is a common thing and it is using on pretty much every modern audio track. What compression does, is making sure that the audio doesn’t clip: it makes sure that the audio doesn’t exceed the decibel limits so it makes sure that the audio simply won’t be too loud.
Now, this is how it works: when recorded audio is too loud and exceeds the decibel limits the compressor takes the peaks of the audio and compresses them so that they will stay within the limits and therefore won’t be to loud. However, it also takes the very soft part of a track and boosts the frequencies. Eventually, you’ve got a track with an average waveform and the soft parts are being boosted and the loud parts are being reduced in frequency and therefore in volume.
The problem with compression is that these days a lot of people really don’t know how to work with it. When one simply puts a compressor on a track then everything will stay within the volume decibel limits. However, it also really flattens the audio and takes away the soul and dynamics of the music.
When one plays a really emotional piece of the guitar, for example, and then on the end a louder part, then the compressor will make the first part louder to make everything have a common average decibel level. This takes away the emotion in the sound and therefore one should reduce the compression. In modern music, a lot of albums are very loud and undynamic: this is called the Loudness War. These days, it seems that most people are trying to put as much decibels within the dynamic range as they can. This will often result in an unemotional, undynamic track.
There are different kinds of compressors available, both physical and virtual compressors. Virtual compressors are getting more and more popular these days because they are more flexible and don’t require physical space in a studio. Also, they are more dynamic to work with because they are faster. Different compressors have different timbres, characteristic musical sounds. Examples of famous compressors are the VC 76 FET compressor that produces a punchy sound, and the VC 2A Electro-optical compressor that produces a very smooth and warm sound. Compressor choice is personal, and fortunately there are a lot of compressors available these days for different purposes.
Source: Wikipedia
Now that you know a little bit about compression, let’s take a look at some compression techniques. In fact, there is a session right here on beatmakers101 about compression techniques here. This is an incredible handy session as it provides a lot of different techniques on how to efficiently add compression to your track. Also, be sure to find as many resources as you can considering compression to get as much experience possible like (e-)books and other websites.

Equalization

Equalization is the boosting of specific frequencies of a sound. Two examples of EQ interfaces in Cubase are:

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