can I get his louder??

Fender

New member
Got a question for ya. I just recorded a piece, its a world beat type of piece, its really cool. I mixed in Cubase and I was really impressed with the sound. Then when I was finished, I went to "create file" and then burnt it to CD. When I went down stairs to my CD player and played it I had to turn it up about 3/4 of the way up!! It was crazy. Will I need a mastering program to make it louder or am I doing something wrong? All my levels in Cubase were up as loud as they could go, just peaking a little bit. Is it just that I don't have $1,000,000 of gear? Thanks for your help!! I don't know if I need wavelab or something?

Adam.
 
My first question would be "How did the overall fidelity sound?" I ask this because I have found that many people tend to mix with way too much bass in the mix, and low frequencies eat up a lot of metering.

"Placing" the low end in a mix is probably one of the hardest things for hobbiest engineers to do. Bad signal chain in the monitor path, not so good monitors, low frequency heavy source tracks, and washy reverbs are usually the culprets to this.

Good luck.

Ed
 
I don't think its the monitor chain. I use monster cable for them. I'll try lowering the bass a touch and maybe the reverb. I put a really small amount of reverb on the whole mix, is this a bad Idea?

Thanks.

ADam.
 
You are an adventuress man!!! Reverb on the whole mix......WOW

That is a practice I have never done. I have played with it but found that is really does take most of the impact out of the mix. Things tend to start getting washy..etc....I think we have found your culpret.......Try just a little reverb on the snare, toms, guitars maybe......a tad on the vocals if the vocal part truely needs that effect. I tend to use much shorter reverbs now than I did a few years ago and have found that my tracks have much better impact. The long reverbs just tend to jumble up the mix too much, unless it is a ballad.

Ed
 
WIth the severity of the lack of volume you mentioned, make sure the .wav itself is normalized, and not just the mix you're previewing. In other words, maybe the S/W is compensating for the low volume of the .wav
("All my levels in Cubase were up as loud as they could go...") instead of actually rewriting the .wav with the normalized levels. And Sound Forge XP is dirt cheap.

[This message has been edited by drstawl (edited 12-29-1999).]
 
Look at a Metallica .wav. Its all signal!
Look at your .wav. It probably has peaks and valleys much greater than what the pro .wav's look like. Heres how I get mine hot.
Either compress, or limit.
I do it in Samplitude. The peaks are usually 2 or 3 db higher tan the 'meat' of the .wav. So limit them, then normalize the entire file.
"that will kill the dynamics of the song and lose the feel, blah blah blah" some people may say.
Look at the Metallica .wav and tell me that.
You dont need to over use this idea, just try it and see what I'm talking about. I understand you are not metallica, but I bet many other pro files look like that too.
 
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