How Can I Get Commercially Loud Mixes?

Manslick said:
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.
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Bit of a stretch, isn't it? If the party is really swingin' you'll be lucky if anybody even notices the music at all, unless it gets annoying. It's the annoying factor that one should avoid.
Manslick said:
My point being, things are simply louder now.
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Nobody argues with that. Things ARE louder. Gas is also more expensive, but that doesn't mean one should WANT to pay four bucks for a gallon of gas. As I've said before, they also wore polyester leisure suits in the '70s, but that didn't make them good looking.

And I gotta tell ya, that new Sir Paul album sounds typically over-pushed to me. (Not that the first Wings album was any gem to compare it against either.) I listen to that and I can't get it out of my mind that it sounds like the producer was standing with a gun (or at least a paycheck ;) ) to the ME's temple saying he wants it louder.

G.
 
How Can I Get Commercially Loud Mixes?

Record tracks in a decent room with no muddy bass buildup. have a good monitoring environment that lets you hear the truth, and get a decent mix only using compressors where needed. Make sure you have no "overs" and you should be able to match commercial levels.

I have no problem with this at all (I have over 30 years recording experience but I am not claiming genius by any stretch). In the digital domain, it is easy to get too many transients (overs) that force you to keep turning the volume down. Also, make sure your gain staging from your source all the way through your souncard, Mac Sound Driver, etc are set correctly. I suggest you record something with no percussive transients (no possible overs to contend with) and set your gain staging with that. If everything is right, there is no reason you can't get a comparable volume to commercial recordings.

Good Luck
 
this over compression is at least ONE of the reasons guys like me prefer vinyl.
Everyone thinks we're looking for warmth but I'm looking for more realistic timbres on instruments and vox. In real life, insturments and voices have a wide dynamic range going from soft and delicate to loud-ish. A mashed soundwave just doesn't sound correct and with vinyl, they don't go for max volume because the media simply won't get but just so loud and that's it.
So even though vinyl has a smaller possible dynamic range than CD's, in practice it usually has a wider range actually being played back.
 
It sucks that average-joe-listener will hear a CD that isn't squashed to hell and translate that into a worse sounding song
 
benage said:
Thanks again. I'm starting to think again about it, would you guys suggest no limiting then or maybe a little?
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There is nothing wrong about some limiting. There is no need to keep the tracks ridiculously quite or excessive dynamic. You should find a good compromize so that it plays fine in the most situations possible.
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.
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That's why those devices come with its own build in compressors and limiters which you can turn on if desired. Every manufacturer has their own names for it. For instance, Sony calls them Megabass and AVLS. If you're not sure how it's called, consult the manuals of your players.

In the case you want to play a mixed set of MP3's, try using MP3Gain. It's a great tool to match the volume of several MP3's without affecting their quality.
 
Yeah sounds good, i don't don't mind as much now my mix been slightly quiter as long as its not miles below everything else, the idea of having to distort and even clip my mix to compete doesn't appeal at all, I mean I always thought mastering was to make your mix sound better, not worse.
 
Lt. Bob said:
this over compression is at least ONE of the reasons guys like me prefer vinyl.
...
So even though vinyl has a smaller possible dynamic range than CD's, in practice it usually has a wider range actually being played back.
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This is what drives me absolutely insane about this whole thing. The big promise of digital technology, especially with the advent of 24-bit technology, was that one had all the room in the world in which to plant their recordings. No more surface hiss, no more tape hiss, a noise floor usually some 40-50% below the noise floor of the gear plugged into it, and a potential dynamic range/headroom to match the range of human hearing. One could finally reproduce reality - as far as dynamic range was concerned, anyway - instead of being forced to constrain one's self to the volume limitations of vinyl.

And how do the numbnuts with the tin ears who are paying for the technology nowadays want to use it? By cramming their stuff into the top 10 dB of that range and actually clipping beyond it because they "don't have enough room" at the top.

It's not digital's fault that people are just plain stupid.

G.
 
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SouthSIDE Glen said:
This is what drives me absolutely insane about this whole thing. The big promise of digital technology, especially with the advent of 24-bit technology, was that one had all the room in the world in which to plant their recordings. No more surface hiss, no more tape hiss, a noise floor usually some 40-50% below the noise floor of the gear plugged into it, and a potential dynamic range/headroom to match the range of human hearing. One could finally reproduce reality - as far as dynamic range was concerned, anyway - instead of being forced to constrain one's self to the volume limitations of vinyl.

And how do the numbnuts with the tin ears who are paying for the technology nowadays want to use it? By cramming their stuff into the top 10 dB of that range and actually clipping beyond it because they "don't have enough room" at the top.

It's not digital's fault that people are just plain stupid.

G.
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Not to mention the fact (gone unbeknownst to silly record companies) that when you smash the shit out of a CD and it is played on the radio, it actually has less volume because of the rediculous amount of compression they use. Radio is completely useless these days. Why would I want to buy a CD if all I have to judge it by is destroyed by the record companies AND the radio stations? An overcompressed master is louder, but the compression ratios are the same as the annoyance ratios. My head hurts with most of the new stuff on the radio.
 
If you only could be sure about the vinyl thing. Unfortunately you can't. Indeed, there are vinyls mastered far better then the CD. But there also are vinyls where it is hard to tell the difference, because either both are mastered very well, or they actually took the same master which can reach from very good to very bad. And in the worse cases, the vinyl might sound even worse.

And since you rarely find the information about the masters used, choosing the preferred media is much like gambling and sometimes, there isn't even a good choice. Stupid music industries. That's the reason, I rarely buy music at all. And if I do, I usually buy used vinyls or CD's which are out of print for a long time, so the musicians don't make money from it, unfortunately.

Btw., also music DVD's are sometimes a good alternative. Chances are good that they are more dynamic than the CD version, and you can convert them to CD on your own, if you need one.
 
benage said:
Yeah sounds good, i don't don't mind as much now my mix been slightly quiter as long as its not miles below everything else, the idea of having to distort and even clip my mix to compete doesn't appeal at all, I mean I always thought mastering was to make your mix sound better, not worse.
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What's the difference between clipping (given a good anti-aliasing filter) and a brickwall limiter set to a fast attack and release? Believe it or not, some feel that clipping short transients actually sounds better than limiting in some cases!

Every process adds some bit of distortion, quantization distortion, phase distortion, harmonic distortion, noise, etc. That's one reason why the best processing is usually none at all and why getting things to sound great from the start is so important. Also knowing when and how to use each tool is critical.

When it doesn't sound perfect in the mix, the tools hopefully make things sound better than the residue they leave behind.
 
And as someone who you would consider an "old man", I lived through the times before the volume wars
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FWIW, geoff emerick makes mention of the current volume wars in "my life recording the beatles", and makes a point mention that even in the early 60's, the goal of mastering(aside from prepping the mixes for production, of course) was to end up with the hottest, loudest, mix for the radio

i know that what they did then pales in comparison to the mangling that goes on now, but i just thought i'd mention that trying to get your master louder than the other guy's is something that's been going on for a long time now...
 
Ironklad Audio said:
FWIW, geoff emerick makes mention of the current volume wars in "my life recording the beatles", and makes a point mention that even in the early 60's, the goal of mastering(aside from prepping the mixes for production, of course) was to end up with the hottest, loudest, mix for the radio
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Though, there are differences. Analog set tighter limits on how far you can go. Also the radio stations had inferior technics to those they have now, thus more restricting in that regard.
And on vinyl, there was also the important factor of the playing time. The louder, the less. I've seen records which were that hot, it filled one side of a 12 inch, 33 rpm with only 6 minutes. This was indeed over the top as many record players had trouble playing them without jumping out of the grove.
 
Rokket said:
If you can hear the compression, you've gone waaay too far...
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if you hear compression ARTIFACTS(this isn't even always true, there is no rule against using compression as an effect) you've gone way to far...but if you couldn't hear it at all what would be the point of using it?
 
Teacher said:
but if you couldn't hear it at all what would be the point of using it?
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Preventing the signal to go beyond the available headroom, apparently. This is usually done in combination with a limiter, and was sensible in times when dynamic ranges were far more limited than those available on a CD. And it still is on FM radio. Driving the overall signal closer to the limit allows the station for more listeners, since the noise floor increases with distance. Unfortunately, like with many CD's, they are overdoing it to the point of unlistenable sound. And doing this with digital radio stations is also pointless, but many do it nevertheless.
If you can't even hear the compression, then it is very well adjusted.
 
Ironklad Audio said:
FWIW, geoff emerick makes mention of the current volume wars in "my life recording the beatles", and makes a point mention that even in the early 60's, the goal of mastering(aside from prepping the mixes for production, of course) was to end up with the hottest, loudest, mix for the radio

i know that what they did then pales in comparison to the mangling that goes on now, but i just thought i'd mention that trying to get your master louder than the other guy's is something that's been going on for a long time now...
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The loudness wars actually start way earlier than even the 60s. They go all the way back to even before the "golden age" of AM radio in the 1920s and 30s, when they first pioneered the idea of compression to try and push as much of the signal up towards 100% modulation as possible, because that extended the legal broadcast range of the radio station.

The difference is, though, that the fidelity was limited at almost every stage back then anyway; such signal mangling not only diddn't ruin the sounce, it actually had the effect - if done well - of making things sound *better*, and not worse. (CKLW out of Detroit/Windsor, for example, was famous in the 60s for just plain making 45rpm singles sound better because of the proprietary (read: homebrew) compression circuitry they threw in front of the transmitter.)

And in the 50s and 60s of course they optimized their singles to sound good on radio - though that was not necessarily true of the album cuts; it was often just the mastering on the 45s. And even on the rest of the stuff, things were mixed/mastered always with an eye towards whether it would reproduce on radio well or not.

But the idea from the 1920s to the 1980s was always to used the loudness to make things sound better, not *just* louder. There was a line that most would not cross where they would go for as loud as they could without sacrificing quality. Sure, the medium limited things somewhat, but the engineers and producers did also keep a healthy respect for the content, because they knew that "high fidelity" also sold records, not just high volume. What's different in the 1990-? interation of the wars is that it's pretty much full speed ahead on the loudness, quality be damned.

"How does it sound? How should I know? I just need it at -9dB RMS or better if I'm going to compete. I'll leave it up to the engineers to get that square peg to sound good in my round hole. (Oh, and don't forget to boost the chorus to -6dBRMS while you're at it, because we've already smashed the life out of any dynamic hooks the music may have had in it, so let's use even more volume to put a hook back in."

G.
 
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A couple mentions in there, but I thought I'd reiterate -- A great sounding, dynamic, powerful mix is usually very easy to make "loud" - Not that it should be the deciding priority... Headroom, headroom, headroom, monitoring, room, etc. Not every mix -- actually, on the contrary "the vast majority of all mixes" do not have the potential to be at "commercial" volume.

Experienced mastering engineers with the proper rigs aside -- Even the best engineer is limited (no pun intended) by the mixes he's sent.
I always thought mastering was to make your mix sound better, not worse.
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It sure used to be... I'm not so certain anymore with half the stuff that comes in...
 
Teacher said:
if you hear compression ARTIFACTS(this isn't even always true, there is no rule against using compression as an effect) you've gone way to far...but if you couldn't hear it at all what would be the point of using it?
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... ooops, forgot that word... ARTIFACTS...

That's what I was trying to convey.


And I haven't really heard anyone who was trying to use it as an effect. In my limited experience and knowledge, I couldn't even tell someone how to use it as an effect.
 
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