How Can I Get Commercially Loud Mixes?

benage

New member
:)Hi, i've just joined the forum and I have been making pop rock and dance tracks on my apple mac for a few years using Logic 6 and I am trying to make my final mp3's as loud as commercial tracks but I always seem to be a couple of decibels short. So far i'm multiband compresssing them at a ratio of 1:1.7 then using a peak limiter that came with Logic as much as I can get away with before the music noticeably 'dips' when the beat and loud bits occur but still it sounds quiteish, Do i need a better limiter maybe, like an ultramaximizer? any tips welcome, thanks.
 
The first step is to take your original mix (without compressing the entire thing) and turn up the master volume so that the loudest peak never gets above maybe -2 or -3 dB on your meters. Then you can put on your compression, and then try a limiter like the TLsMaximizer (it's freeeeee!). See if that will do the trick if all you want is loud mixes.
 
make it mono

take all the bass out of it

whatever bass is left make as static as possible

Distort to dogcrap

Now you have a piece of crap just like the loud mixes you have to compete with
 
You have four options:

1. Burn your mix to a WAV file on a data CD. Place CD on an anvil. Strike CD repeatedly with a sledgehammer until your mix is crushed as flat as a crapola commercial McMaster mix.

2. Or realize that louder is not better, and that if your music is with listening to, people will want to listen to it without giving a crap about a couple of dBs of perceived volume, and that if they don't want to listen to it, volume won't matter.

3. Or get your stuff tracked, mixed and mastered by pros with the experience and the gear to be able to make flat-as-a-laser-beam masters without the music becoming 100% unlistenable. Because the chances are that the quality of your home recording tracking and mixing, combined with the quality of your mastering gear, just won't let you squeeze out that extra dB or two without sounding pretty awful.

4. Or ignore everything that's been said by everybody so far, and actually try mastering your own brick. First, try two or three stages of compression before limiting, with perhaps (only if and as needed) a little corrective EQ in between the steps to fix whatever the compression may have broken. Second, use a quality limiter and push your poor helpless mix against the wall to the tune of no more than two or three dB of limiting. If there's still any life left in your mix whatsoever and you still need a dB or two of flattening to get it to sound like a McMaster mix out of L.A., you can destroy the rest of it by exporting your mix back out to analog and bringing it back in to digital, letting your A/D converters clip at the peaks just a bit. Like with the limiting, this trick requires some quality hardware to pull off and still sound halfway serviceable.

The smart money is on option #2.

G.
 
thanks

Thanks your help guys, I see loudness is not a priority here! I do understand your arguments about sound quality and I've ummed and aahrd about that for years but in the end I decided I wanted to be able to compete when my cd went on at a party or on the radio (it could happen!). the maximizer one of you suggested was just for PC not mac so I downloaded the L1 Ultramaximizer demo which worked well and then found the free W1 maximizer which is not quite as transparent as the L1 but seems a little better than the logic limiter so i think i'll use that. I found setting the release time to zero seemed to keep the limiting the most transparant, does anyone know if thats a bad idea, are longer release times preferable for any reason? thanks for your help guys
 
I fully agree with the answers already given. And here is a nice demonstration video for you: http://www.turnmeup.org/

Besides this, if you really want to damage your mix that way for some mislead reasons, there are plenty of topics right here about ways how to do it. Just read through this forum.
 
I found setting the release time to zero seemed to keep the limiting the most transparant, does anyone know if thats a bad idea, are longer release times preferable for any reason?
Judge by your ears. Shorter release produces more distortions, while longer release produces more pumping. It sure would depend on the kind of music which one is more distracting.

Btw. you know that radio stations compress by their own and their compression works best on material without distortion to begin with. Basically, you won't gain anything there. See link above for detailed explanations.
Same for the typical jukeboxes in pubs. Since there is no such thing as replaygain in those, they unfortunately are forced to compensate different CD's with compression as well.
So what's left to "compete" with then? Your home stereo, boombox etc.? Hardly. The costumer has a volume knob, and he will turn it down when a hot CD is played.
 
Thanks again, I would like to keep more dynamic range in my music but I suppose what it is is I feel I have no choice. Your arguments about Radio Limiters and duke boxes are interesting but if thats all true it makes me wonder why virtually every cd out there is pressed so hot still. I suppose I decided to try and keep some dynamic range and limit it a medium amount to try and get the best of boyh worlds but you've given me something to think about again so I may change my mind.
 
it makes me wonder why virtually every cd out there is pressed so hot...

That's some record company executive making that decision, not a truly pro sound engineer.

Follow the advice of the guys who posted in this thread. They own mastering houses and studios. They know what they are talking about.

Leave your mix alone. If it goes into a cd player at a party, turn the damn cd player up and mess with the eq on it to bring out your song.

You may notice that 90% of the cd's that come out, you can't turn them up much past 40-50% of the max volume on your cd player. It's because it's been squashed so much that all the life has been squeezed out and what is left is just harsh pink noise.
 
Thanks again. I'm starting to think again about it, would you guys suggest no limiting then or maybe a little? the only other thing that i'm thinking is I heard someone on the radio complaining about a new album that wasn't very hot, saying when listening in a car he had to keep changing the volume so he could here it over the traffic and then turning it down as it was too loud for him in the choruses, I admit i've had a similar problem listening on my mp3 player in town getting it a steady volume over the noise of the crowd?, just playing devils advocate.
 
Thanks again. I'm starting to think again about it, would you guys suggest no limiting then or maybe a little? the only other thing that i'm thinking is I heard someone on the radio complaining about a new album that wasn't very hot, saying when listening in a car he had to keep changing the volume so he could here it over the traffic and then turning it down as it was too loud for him in the choruses, I admit i've had a similar problem listening on my mp3 player in town getting it a steady volume over the noise of the crowd?, just playing devils advocate.
That happens when peeps put out cd's that aren't mastered properly.
 
Yeah that is emasculating, for lack of a better word, when the place is jamming and your disk rolls up and is perceived as weak by comparison.
Any more emasculating that when your disc rolls up and sounds awful because it's been pushed as flat as a commercial mix in order to try and "compete"?

Volume does not help one "compete". It's the music that counts. If your stuff is worth listening to, people won't care if it's 3dB quieter. If it's not worth listening to, kicking up the volume by 3dB isn't going to change anybody's mind.

Of course there's always another answer: Stop trying to fool everybody by sticking you song in the middle of a commercial playlist. Keep your homebrew playlists and your commercial playlists separate.

it makes me wonder why virtually every cd out there is pressed so hot still.
Because there are two classes of people making those decisions: The first are the label suits who just don't know any better and think that mo louda automatically means mo betta. Remember these are the same braniacs who thought it was a good idea to make those annoying over-modulated TV and radio commercials louder than the TV or radio show. How many times have you felt like shooting your TV or radio whenver that happened?

The second class are the fine but misinformed folks exactly like you who, when they do get their break, go to the engineer and say the exact same things your saying because that's the wiki-myth that you guys just keep perpetuating on the Internet. The engineers more often than not just shut up and collect their paycheck by doing what you ask, and then one day go home after leaving the studio, take a stiff drink of Chevas, and calmly put bullet in their head.

Consider this: The Loudness Wars began sometime around 1990. Which is about the same time that CD sales started to decline (4 years before the Internet and 9 years before Napster - so don't blame pirating for the decline.)

Sure there are a few good logistical reasons that assist this, but without a doubt, the fact that recorded music just hasn't sounded as good, even if only on a subliminal level to the average consumer, is the main bad seed precipitating the decline in sales. If people thought todays mixes were worth listening to for more than a couple of days, they'd buy 'em.

I mention a "couple of days" because there is a definite fatigue factor with smashed mixes. You tell me; your average song today stays on your primary playlist for how long before you get tired of it? Or if you're on a long road trip, how long before you gotta turn it off and have some silence for a while? Both are natural occurances, but both happen faster to squashed mixes than they do to ones that actually sound good. You want your songs to have staying power beyond that lame party you were at? Keep at least a couple of dB of dynamics.

G.
 
As mentioned "loudness" is achieved mainly by sacrificing dynamic range. It's a combination of a good clean well-balanced mix, some compression to pull the mix in a bit closer and add density, and then a combination of limiting and even potentially even clipping a good quality converter.

EQ also plays a part. The ear is most sensitive around 4-5K so boosting this makes a mix seem louder but can also make it sound more harsh.

It's pretty much just some some combination of the above and then lowering the overall volume by about .2 to .5 db to help prevent the dreaded 0 dBFS and clipping (though with intersample peaks it likely is anyway).
 
your mix needs to be more balanced...better mix the easier it is to make loud and the better it will sound...
 
Thanks again. I'm starting to think again about it, would you guys suggest no limiting then or maybe a little?
Nobody here is saying that you can't give it a little more volume perhaps. But develop your critical listening skills and use your ears carefully; there comes a point in almost any mix - certainly any mix not handled by pros all the way down the line - where if you push the mix just one dB farther than that, the sonic quality starts to break apart and/or the song starts sounding "pushed". Take it to that level and back off one dB is what I personally recommend.

The hard part about that, to be brutally honest, is that there's not a lot of folks who have the ears and objectivity to find that point. But it can't hurt to give it a shot.
the only other thing that i'm thinking is I heard someone on the radio complaining about a new album that wasn't very hot
Have you ever heard them say, man that was great music, but they won't play because it's not hot enough? Nope. If it's great music, they may sometimes think they want it hotter, but they won't stop playing it. Whereas if they don't like the music, it won't matter how hot it is, they still won't play it.
when listening in a car he had to keep changing the volume so he could here it over the traffic and then turning it down as it was too loud for him in the choruses, I admit i've had a similar problem listening on my mp3 player in town getting it a steady volume over the noise of the crowd?
First, I'll let you in on a secret re those choruses: you are actually falling victim to the volume wars there, just the opposite of what you think. A very popular tactic in the past 15 years or so is to push the choruses a good 3-6dB in RMS louder than the verses; they tend to be even MORE smashed than the rest of the song. If the producer had simply decided to let things fall where they lie, your would not need to be turning down the stereo when the choruses comes on.

And as someone who you would consider an "old man", I lived through the times before the volume wars, and even during times when most cars did not have air conditioning (so our windows were always open). Also thirty years ago cars were nowhere near as soundproofed as they are now, if at all. Yet somehow we never had a problem hearing our Pink Floyd or our Humble Pie or our Led Zepplin when we were cruisin' around in our cars. And that was on 12-watt 8-track or cassette tape through a couple of Jensen 6x9s, not fine CDs played though the high-powered, Bose-tuned 6-speaker stereo systems found in the acoustically isolated and air-conditioned car interiors of today. Kwityerbitchin, and just enjoy the tunes, guys. :)

G.
 
Thanks for your help. I been experimenting with different compression and limiting setings and trying without anything just for refence and the mix does have more impact dry espcially when the load parts kick in and the whole thing sounds 'fresher' less like white noise but also sounds a bit sparse so i'm going to add some multiband but less this time like 1:1.2 and limit like you said as much as I can without losing too much impact and turning the mix to mush, Thanks again
 
Thanks for your help. I been experimenting with different compression and limiting setings and trying without anything just for refence and the mix does have more impact dry espcially when the load parts kick in and the whole thing sounds 'fresher' less like white noise but also sounds a bit sparse so i'm going to add some multiband but less this time like 1:1.2 and limit like you said as much as I can without losing too much impact and turning the mix to mush, Thanks again
Yeah, the bottom line, IMHO, is finding the balance between quality of sound and quantity of it. Some people might be willing to sacrifice a little less quality for a little more quantity, others vice versa. But just don't totally ignore either one for the other.

Your welcome. Stick around here for a while, it's not a horrible place to visit :D.

G.
 
Any more emasculating that when your disc rolls up and sounds awful because it's been pushed as flat as a commercial mix in order to try and "compete"?
G.

Sadly, at a party - size matters.

Few if anyone at a party will notice the difference in fidelity; but they will notice a drop in volume which equates to the overall energy of the scene.

Only geeks like me notice these things and nobody cares what the hell I think.


ETA
Just for grins.

Put Paul McCarney’s first solo album in your disk player along with his latest one, Memory Almost Full.
MAF is noticeably louder but does not sound over compressed or squashed to me.

Yeah yeah I know his is the master and has billions at his disposal.

My point being, things are simply louder now.
 
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