How to get a higher gain?

[nzausrec]

Any tips on how to get that full and loud sound (without distortion) through our recordings. I tried compression on individual tracks but that makes less sound quality, like losing the higher frequencies.
And if I put the slider up high on a vocal it often goes into the red.
It's quite confusing.

I can get a reasonable sound but I want to boost it considerably. I open my song in Soundclick on full volume, but when I open others the sudden sound nearly blows my ears off!

Any advice greatly appreciated.

 

[bennychico11]

do you think your music will sound better louder?

 

[Farview]

Do a search on 'mastering' you will find all kinds of info.

 

[bigwillz24]

Well mastering would be the right way. But you probably want to ruin your music like most of the stuff on soundshit so go ahead and put a limiter across the 2mix.

 

[e-dog]

louder not better

Strictly speaking from a volume/apparent loudness standpoint... The way those other tracks sound louder is probably thorugh a combination of expertly (or not) applied eq plus compression. What you're likely referring to is the "Mastered Sound" that is often the scourge of diy home recordists.

Many, many other factors are going to come into how loud a song sounds, like the techniques and gear used while recording and the quality/balance of the mix... But just adding eq and compression is not going to help in itself.

What you might try, simply as a quick fix, is using a GOOD compressor to add about 3 - 5dB make-up gain but using a slow attack (30-200ms) and a fast release (0-100ms) depending on the material and the compressor... fiddle with it for a while. The slow attack will allow "punchy" (possible speaker damaging) attacks/transients through while compressing the surrounding material...
THEN, go in and add some limiting to the top (set the threshold to) 3dB - 6dB.

Assuming you start with a track with natural dynamics, like -20dB RMS, you ought to be able to squish out 6-ish dB of apparent loudness, at the expense of your dynamics. Which will sound quite a bit louder.

Go easy on the compression ratio, max 4:1 on the first step and maybe MAX 10:1 on the second... the lower the ratio the closer it will sound to the actual recording (and better and more natural).

BUT, having a good mix that you eq properly (compare to pro records) will help a whole lot more than ANY compression (it will even seem "louder"), but the overly-compressed, LOUD sound is totally cool these days.

So, there you go.

But louder isn't better, better recorded is better.



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[LeeRosario]

Well I've always functioned off of the concept of clarity over loudness.

0 in the digital realm is an absolute loudness (yes?), so you have to get over that fact and figure out the mental tricks that fool the ears into thinking stuff is louder.

For example, relative volumes in mixing. Make soft parts significantly lower than loud parts. Even if the overall volume is low, at least you still create impact with dynamic range. Which is equally effective, a lot of times more, than straight up smashing the shit out of your tracks just to get more precious volume.

It's all pyschoacoustic stuff. Or as a normal person would say, "it's all in your head".

 

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Strictly speaking from a volume/apparent loudness standpoint...

Not a bad post e-dog; I agree with the overall sentiment, but there are a couple of dangerous assumpitions made in it that lead to misleading information IMHO. Namely...

Assuming you start with a track with natural dynamics, like -20dB RMS, you ought to be able to squish out 6-ish dB of apparent loudness, at the expense of your dynamics. Which will sound quite a bit louder.

I can understand where you are getting those numbers from, but they assume quite a bit in the way of gain staging levels, music genre, track arrangement, and sonic density. Those numbers stand just as much - if not statistically more - of a chance of being wrong for his situation as they do of being right.

Go easy on the compression ratio, max 4:1 on the first step and maybe MAX 10:1 on the second...

Mentioning ratios without corresponding thresholds means extremely little, and thresholds cannot be meaningfully mentioned without a knowledge of the peak vs. RMS nature of the actual mix being compressed. Again, numbers which look good but actually mean very little without any actual context.

But louder isn't better, better recorded is better.

That, OTOH, is spot on target .

G.

 

[e-dog]

SouthSIDE,

Not to nit-pick, I agree with your comments...

But, I did say "depending on the material and the compressor" as well as, "Assuming" X then X...

The question seemed to me to be, "how can i get a more compressed sound, that isn't total crap" and my basic response is, set the gain, then "fiddle with it for a while..."

It took me years to figure out the value of slower attack times.. everyone always talks about smashing the signal, but you can get a better bus/master result through light compression with a slow attack, followed by limiting the transients (with software and VCAs).

I just figured, if whatever other newbie reads this, they might not know what "slow" and "fast" meant without numbers.

If you're just trying to add gain, you add gain and then adjust everything else to compensate.

but louder isn't better.


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