How do they get waveforms this BIG without clipping?

[Chrisulrich]

Dear Anyone.

My waveform.

And the Ref. Track waveform.

That's the ref. track. Now mine sounds just about as loud as his - but how the heck are they getting theirs that SIZE!?! Every piece I've ever written looks like wiggles in cotton, wave-form wise, compared to these guys - there's Something Dead Obvious I'm missing. I've put a limiter on mine and I know if I turn the Threshold to the left the waveform gets bigger, but then mine gets TOO loud. So I turn the instruments down so it's not too loud - and it's back to wiggles-in-cotton, but with the threshold knob turned farther to the left!

Please, I'm NOT trying to say 'my piece would sound as compositionally awesome as theirs if I knew this' cos it wouldn't, the guy's much better than me. It's just sheer 'how the BLEEP are they doing this without clipping?' Mine's almost as loud as his but it's much nearer clipping than his is despite having a tiny-in-comparison waveform.

What am I missing here? All answers will be tried out, promise!

Yours baffledly,

Chris.

 

[TalismanRich]

Once you've recorded the track, you can use the Normalize function in Audacity. Set it to give a bit of headroom, like -2dB and it will look at the largest peak, calculate how much increased volume can be added to set the largest peak to that limit, and add that amount of gain to everything. It's just an automatic way to amplify the signal, just as you would get if you moved the fader up and exported the track.

The Amplify function is similar, but you can allow it to clip if you so choose, although I don't know why you would want that.

 

[rob aylestone]

The other thing is your dynamic range stays very constant, the other starts, then increases, then increases again, and then gets to the loudest bit. Without listening we have no idea of your spectral content, but if it's any consolation, my go to sleep, easy listening music is very much like yours, not the other.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

The size of the waveform doesn't matter, but one way to do that is have some percussive sound with high peaks but a low average level. The peaks will visually merge and make the level appear high when you zoom out.

 

[markmann]

My individual tracks look like the top wave form but when I render all tracks to stereo it looks more like the bottom one. Compression and limiting will cause the wave form to be more consistent but will also reduce dynamics.

 

[ecc83]

Right click in the left of the track and as you can see you can zoom the wave size without changing the audio level

Dave.

 

[Steenamaroo]

As said the size of the waveform isn't necessarily important but, looking at your two pictures, the main difference is going to be dynamic range.
Hard to say but it looks like the loudest peaks in your audio are nowhere near zero so there's probably room to turn the entire thing up a fair bit via normalise or gain in the DAW or some plugin but, in addition to that, your waveform has some peaks which stick out - around 0:45 and 1:30, for example.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing, necessarily...Just answering the question.


The loudest peaks limit how much you can increase the gain/volume of the whole track, because they'll be the first thing to hit zero or clip..
Notice the fuller waveform you posted doesn't really have any of those.

If you were to increase the gain of the whole thing to the point that your loudest peaks are at or near zero, and you were still not happy with how loud, or consistent, the audio sounds, then you would need to do something about those peaks.
Reducing them, somehow, would create room and allow you to turn the whole thing up a bit more.

Common approaches are to find out what these peaks are and tame them with eq or volume automation, or to use compression or limiting.
It's easiest to do this in a multitrack session. If, for example, you found that those two large peaks were just over zealous snare hits, you could volume automate or compress/limit them at the snare track.
That would make the whole track, and session, slightly more consistent and give you more room to make the whole thing louder.

This is the kind of thing people have been taking too far, in my opinion, for years, releasing audio with barely any dynamic range at all and waveforms which come close to looking like a brick.
Hope that's helpful.

 

[TalismanRich]

If you really want to get a handle on how loud your track is compared to your chosen reference track, you should download the Youlean Loudness plug in. It will tell you the average loudness, peak volume, short term loudness, and your dynamic range. You can then begin to understand if you need to simply increase the overall gain, compress the file, or maybe do some surgical limitation on a few peaks. Unless you're experienced, just looking at a waveform won't tell you "why", just that it's different.

It's a free plug in,

Youlean Loudness Meter - Free VST, AU and AAX plugin

Youlean Loudness Meter is your ultimate free VST, AU and AAX plugin for loudness measurement. Featuring LU, LUFS, LKFS, LRA and PLR measurements.

youlean.co