You're right that it's essentially arbitrary.

I know some globally touring producers who just put reverb as an insert on each channel they want to have reverb, changing the parameters for each - and it still sounds good. I know people who have a setup similar to what you're talking about - one short reverb and one long reverb, and you send your instruments to one or the other (though you wouldn't necessarily want to have one instrument sent to two reverbs at the same time just for the sake of clarity, but that doesn't mean you're forbidden from doing it and it might sound good!) and change where you're sending when you want things to have the SUPER LONG REVERB TAIL. As long as it sounds good and not just different, you can do whatever you want!

And with regards to pre-farder sends, that's an option most DAWS have as either a global option or something that is enabled on an individual send. For example, in Ableton you would go to the bottom half of the master channel in Session view and click the icon that says "Post" to change them to "Pre", which affects anything sent to that return channel. In Logic, you'd just route your track to whatever bus has your reverb on it, then click and hold on the send and select "Pre Fader", which would only affect that one channel and nothing else sent to that bus.

As far as why would that be important? One example would be for the reason you mentioned in the OP - when we hear more of a reverbed signal than we do of the source sound, we perceive that sound as being far away and "washed in reverb". Instead of a vocal sounding like it's right in front of you and you're inside a giant stadium, you can have it sound like the vocalist is shouting from the stands. Another good example comes to us from the world of moving pictures - if you had a person wearing hard-heeled or high-heeled shoes walking off camera down some long hallway with tile flooring, you could lower the volume of the channel without lowering the volume of the send to have the footsteps fade off into this very reverberant place where the echoes would continue well after the source sound was far out of sight.

not too happy with this thread being resurrected cuz it's total drama bait, but TBH I've had my opinion soured by Cymatics over the 3 months since this topic last came around.

i honestly really like the cymatics products in terms of their general sound quality (though like vengeance there's basically no room for processing so you'll be very obviously using their products), but their branding went south from the ableton project files product forwards. they hired those frequency quest guys and one of them posted a (since removed) video about "How to create your own original song with Cymatics Ableton Project Files" describing how you could just tweak a few parameters and change a few sounds and release the project as your own song, thus bypassing all the actual work involved in production.

kinda gross imo, and then they followed it up with a lot of branding for the project files about "steal your favorite producer's secrets and become a great producer QUICK AND EASY" (and lo and behold most if not all of the projects are just recreations of famous tracks in those genres), then acted like your typical meatheaded DoucheBros™ when the producers in question got upset about it and only stopped when someone even bigger called cymatics out for their attitude.

welcome to EDM in 2016, i guess.

i think this is a great first beat! It does very much sound like a beat someone made after only making music for 2 months, but that's not a bad thing! It just means you're new, and you have a lot to learn - but you have amazing instincts and I can tell you have the potential to become an amazing producer.

You have a much better understanding of melody and harmony than most new producers, and your sense of arrangement shows that you know how a song should be constructed. Your sounds are actually fine for where you're at in your production, so keep doing what you're doing on that end!

On the critique side - pretty much all your sounds are completely centered, so when you have multiple things playing at the same time it can get hard to clearly make out what is going on (like when you have your producer tag come in over the beat). The flute has something on it that makes it sound much wider, which helps, but you could try using the panning controls inside your workstation to move things around and give them some more space.

In addition, the song feels like what I would call a "memory of a song" - as if you weren't taking in any outside influences when writing this song, and were going based off what every beat you can remember sounds like. Unfortunately, since you don't have the experience as a producer to really absorb what those beats were doing, you're going off what you felt they were doing, and so you're missing certain aspects that should be there. The best remedy for this would be to practice your analytical listening skills.

See if you can find 5-10 songs that sound similar to the kind of music you wanna make (like some Fetty Wap, if I had to guess), and bring one of them into your DAW. Spend some time listening to the song and see if you can deconstruct it. What sounds are being used, and when are they used? When does the song change sections, and what is the arrangement of those sections? Where are sounds placed between the left and right speakers? Does the melody change instruments at any point? Do the chords?

If you can, try to recreate the song! First use empty MIDI clips that are labeled things like "Kick" "Snare" "Lead Synth" "Vocals", then try to replace them with sounds that are similar to the one in the original song. If you do this whole process with all 5-10 songs you've chosen, the next time you try to make your own beat you should have a lot of ideas on where to go - and if you ever get stuck, you can just reference back to one of the songs you've already analyzed (or start the process over again with a new song).

There's really no introduce yourself thread, though I suppose I could start one. And thank you! I have a few other episodes posted, and I really should get back to it. I'll try to get the next few episodes posted on here soon!

Here's a somewhat convoluted method (though I'm on a mac so I can't verify it):

Open massive inside Patcher (or just route it to a mixer channel and open an effects Patcher), then route its output through three instances of Maximus, where each is set to that the Mid band is in that 400-500 Hz range. Now go in and solo either the Lo, Mid, or Hi band of each Maximus - one per instance. Add some stereo imaging or panning plugins after the mid-only maximus, and then send them all back out to FL studio as one summed signal.

Voila! Band-specific imaging.

The same technique can be applied to any other band-specific processing you want to do inside FL studio.

My next purchase is going to be one of those really small 25 key midi keyboards from Akai or Novation for a more portable production keyboard, but my bucket list is pretty much all hardware synths like the JP-106 and the Virus and modular gear.

Not allowed to buy any modular gear until I'm ready to descend into the world of Bald White Guys Making Techno™, tho.

I wouldn't compress the master channel. I usually only use limiter and stereo effects on the master. Often some EQ.

Psssst. A limiter is actually just a compressor with a really high ratio.

And yeah, Marrow hits it on the nose - only compress when you need to. If you don't know when you need to, just try it on a bunch of stuff and ask yourself "does this sound better, or just louder and/or different?" Experimentation is the key here, as sometimes things you didn't think needed compression sound better with it, and some things you think should almost always be compressed will sound worse.

It's not almost like the more you listen to something the less capable you are of discerning the quality of that sound. It's actually happening.

It's also why the music you make right before bed never sounds as good when you listen to it the morning after: By 9 PM you've had 10-14 hours worth of sounds being sent into your ears and processed by your brain from the world at large, not counting the hour or two you've just spent with two speakers blasting frequencies from the top to the bottom of the frequency spectrum or any music you might have been listening to earlier in the day.