All over the internet and there are articles about how loud to make your songs. Most of these say around -14LUFS integrated or somewhere close.
But when you look at chart topping records, it's a totally different story. Here's an article analyzing the songs from the 2021 grammy awards.
You'll see that these songs range from a whopping -5.6 Int LUFS to -9.9 Int LUFS. Obviously all of these are mastered by top mastering people, who have been mastering for years.
So what gives, top mastering engineers and companies all write articles about mastering to somewhere around -14 LUFS, but then master to much much higher?
For what it's worth, I took one of my recordings and worked on it to see if I could get it mastered to -6 LUFS or so. I was able to do that, but in order to do that while still keeping some reasonable mix and level of distortion, I had to put limiters on each individual track and smash them as much as possible, reduce track clutter/reverb/and other things to prevent all sorts of unwanted sounds rising to the top. In the end, I achieved a somewhat ok mix and got to around -5.5 Int LUFS point.
The other good news is that I learned a few things along the way, which was the intended purpose of the exercise for me. But it does beg the question as to why we keep saying master to -14 when the top dogs in the industry are mastering to as loud as they possibly can?
gabo
But when you look at chart topping records, it's a totally different story. Here's an article analyzing the songs from the 2021 grammy awards.
Records of the Year: An Analysis of the 2021 GRAMMY® Nominees
There’s a lot to learn from the pros. In this article, we analyze the tracks nominated for the 2021 GRAMMY® Record of the Year award.
www.izotope.com
You'll see that these songs range from a whopping -5.6 Int LUFS to -9.9 Int LUFS. Obviously all of these are mastered by top mastering people, who have been mastering for years.
So what gives, top mastering engineers and companies all write articles about mastering to somewhere around -14 LUFS, but then master to much much higher?
For what it's worth, I took one of my recordings and worked on it to see if I could get it mastered to -6 LUFS or so. I was able to do that, but in order to do that while still keeping some reasonable mix and level of distortion, I had to put limiters on each individual track and smash them as much as possible, reduce track clutter/reverb/and other things to prevent all sorts of unwanted sounds rising to the top. In the end, I achieved a somewhat ok mix and got to around -5.5 Int LUFS point.
The other good news is that I learned a few things along the way, which was the intended purpose of the exercise for me. But it does beg the question as to why we keep saying master to -14 when the top dogs in the industry are mastering to as loud as they possibly can?
gabo