The multistage frequency-response masking (FRM) technique is widely used to reduce the complexity of a filter when the transition bandwidth is extremely small. In this brief, a real generalized two-stage FRM filter without any constraint on the subfilters or the interpolation factors was proposed. New principles and equations were deduced to determine the design parameters. The subfilters were then jointly optimized using non-linear optimization. Experiential results show that when the proposed algorithm obtains different solutions with the conventional algorithm, the solution of the proposed approach is better with less number of filter coefficients and sometimes with lower delay as well than the conventional two-stage FRM, which can lead to a reduced hardware cost in applications.