quietness!

[crabfoot]

heres the scoop, i am a newbie to the whole recording music with a computer thing, so bear with me. ok, so i recently upgraded from a 4 track cassette recorder to this: iMac w/ 1.5ghz 1GB ram and a tascam FW 1884 that came with Cubase LE (probably too big of a jump, i know). so here is my story... with this set-up, some crappy mics (CAD drum mics for kick snare and toms), and some good borrowed mics (SM57s on guitar and bass and some really nice looking shiny shure pencil mics for the cymbals), i recorded a local band that has several previous recordings (3 demos and one full album). when i played the recording back on my $100 monitors, the band was extremely happy, they said it sounded better then their previous recordings and it was even better than the guy who had a studio built into his house with foam walls, seperate control room, vocal booth and a gigantic mixing board, and this was just my raw recording!!! needless to say i was pumped cuz this was my first recording so i rushed home, set up my euipment, and began mixing. i added a lil reverb, EQed a bit, and when i thought i had it sounding pretty good i exported it, and it sounded like garbage! first of all, it was really really quiet. even when i play it back on itunes through my monitors its not as loud as it when i play it in cubase without touching the monitors volume knob. the LEDs on my tascam only went up about half way when playing in itunes so i decided to go into cubase and turn the master fader all the way up so the LEDs were blowing out the roof with the top two red lights blinking and all the other lights fully lit, even when i did this when i played it back in itunes i did not get much improvement. i listened to it through several sound systems and i had to turn every one of them all the way up and it still wasnt lound enough. is there something im missing? something im doing wrong when im exporting? ive tried just about every combonation of settings when im exporting, is there some sort of software i could use to make it louder? if anyone could answer any of my questions i would be very grateful

[TimOBrien]

Louder is not always better.

But louder is usually achieved using MASTERING.

Here is a starter article:

http://www.tweakheadz.com/mastering_your_audio.htm

[Waffleness]

Go to the output channel of cubase (Main L and R) and add a Limiter as an insert.

Go into the settings and turn up the input gain until your getting a healthy signal out. You should see some gain reduction in the Limiter. This will make it louder.

And yes, getting it Mastered would make it even louder, but it costs money.

[Slowjett]

You dont want the red lights in Cubase to light up ever. they mean you have ran the signal too hot and it is clipping. Loudness is not ussually achieved on a simple mix by itself. It's almost always achieved in the mastering stage.

A simple DIY to achieve loudness (while it may not be the best sonic solution) is to add a limiter to the master buss.

Do a little research on Limiter's and Gain Reduction so you understand these things. LooK up Clipping while your at it. Mastering too.

Where are you located? Maybe you can find someone in your area to help you in person?

Best of luck.
-josh