How to master loudly

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EightMilesHigh

Member
This is my most important question: Are there any secrets on how to master mixes loudly without appearing to make any serious changes?

I could pay someone to master, but I’m stubborn and would like to do it myself. Generally, I feel comfortable with my mixes and go through a mastering “process.” The results are louder than CD’s I have of 50’s and 60’s rock, but not quite as loud as most music of the last 15 years.

My process is, quite simply, to turn up (in unison) the mix’s left and right channels on my DAW as loud as they will go without clipping, adding no eq or effects whatsoever. (Similar to “normalizing.”)

Are there “magic tweaks” with EQ and compression I could make on the left and right channels to increase volume? Or, is it a real expensive analog processing/coloration box I need? Is there any good software that does this?

Spending a ton could be foolhardy in my case. My music is proudly among the more “raw” end of the spectrum, inspired by 50’s and 60’s rock, blues, garage-rock, and the early recordings of groups like the Black Keys and White Stripes, though I record in digital, not analog. I also do occasional folk-rock, but don’t want things too “glossy.” In fact, I prefer a raw sound on everything I do. Any suggestions are welcome.
 
Louderizing is not exactly what mastering is, of course, but unless you've already squashed the hell out of every individual instrument and the master bus, there's probably plenty you can do to get it louder without seriously impacting the sound.

The best thing to do is go back and analyze the mix itself. If you're peaking at zero, but the RMS isn't as loud as you'd like, then you've got some transients somewhere that are poking out too far. Kick and snare are almost always the biggest culprits. Smash them down a couple db. It might be a matter of just adjusting the attack on whatever comp is already there. If you have to slap a brickwall on there, do it. It'll almost always sound better than clipping the whole mix. Check the other instruments, too. Cymbals sometimes get really big really fast, certain vowel sounds, bass guitars...

If you're careful this wont affect your mix very much.

Now you took care of the really fast stuff, now look
 
A loud master starts with arrangement and continues through the mix process. There's only so much you can do in mastering if the 2-track files don't have the potential to begin with.

The simple approach is to get a decent mastering limiter plugin and squash the mix until it starts sounding bad. If you want to be true to your 50s-60s style you won't have to hit it as hard as more recent musical styles. But if things start to fall apart before you get the volume you want go back to the mix and fix it there.
 
...now look at the really slow stuff. Most of us in HR world cant really hear what's going on in the sub bass world, but most DAWs are "DC coupled" all the way through. That means that they will generate and pass frequencies all the way down to 0Hz. I suggest actually looking at that low end on an analyzer like Voxengo SPAN. Is there anything happening that you didn't put there deliberately? You can get subharmonics and strange resonances, HVAC noise, but also some effects can generate very low frequency waves. Find all of that and get rid of it, preferably at the track by track level. Then hi-pass the mix bus at 20Hz or so.

You should now be getting significantly closer, but probably not up to "modern" levels.
 
I've been doing what ashcat said, basically.... track by track checking... looking for the peaks and deciding what caused it and whether I can do some volume automation, checking frequencies in SPAN, moving a HPF frequency up and down on various tracks with low frequency content to get the balance between sound and level, then using a GClip to raise the volume a bit and finally Stillwell Event Horizon, which I'm finding simpler to control than some of the other limiters.

It's not as loud as commercial, but it's way louder than it was... :D

I could push it higher but somehow I don't want to...
 
TBH - most of my final volume leveling (after I've done everything I mentioned above) I just bring it into SoundForge, go Process|Normalize set to RMS with "compress to avoid clipping" on and basically choose a level .6db higher than I want. I will sometimes look at how far I'll be trying to push the peaks over, but I usually just push the RMS somewhere in the 12s. Then I go back and do Peak at .6 and I'm done. IDK exactly how the "compress" thing actually does what it does, but it sounds better to me than a brickwall limiter. That's my quick and done and good enough for reference/soundcloud process.

My "serious" process for real album work is more involved, and includes several stages of relatively minor compression/limiting/saturation/whatever.
 
GONZO-X said:
wave hammer pretty much makes stuff sound like crap.
Click to expand...

I haven't used WaveHammer much but:

1) Wave Hammer does more than single-cycle level reduction, so I don't know what other features you've used. I'm sure there's some minimal setting where its operation is more or less transparent.

2) Obviously you don't want to do more than lop off the tallest peaks!

--Ethan
 
I have used L-1, mixum,ozone,and renaissance. Usually +1 to +3 dbs of L-1 or maxim is all it needs. For less compressed sound to my ears I will use renaissance on opto fat. GT
 
Loud masters are made by extremely clean tracking, going from a cheap mic and preamp to a Nuemann TLM103 and SSL preamp and convertors added about 4-5db of head room to my mixes before they will distort. My masters are 1-2db less then pro masters which Im pretty happy with. I use Ozone 5 which I think is a great program for the price $250.00 (worth double that IMO)
 
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