Need help maxing-out tracks!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Linchpin
  • Start date Start date
I think the point some of us are making is that making it that loud is exactly what is annoying about it. I don't know what you're getting at, falken??
I for one simply turn up the volume to listen to something louder. I can't say that I have ever listened to anything during which the volume knob on my stereo has been insufficient for achieving enough volume :D
I have alot of older CD's that are not nearly as loud as newer releases, and I dont find the quieter levels to be a big deal at all. In fact they usually sound better to me!
 
well if you just turn the volume up it doesn't do anything to the sound of the track now does it?? I want everything louder!!


actually to get serious here for a minute,

I was doing a mix all day yesterday, 11 songs. and I wake up this morning and give it a listen in the headphones, and DAMNIT I made the guitars too loud, like EVERY time DAMNIT. the drums sound like they're UNDER WATER. And I havne't even converted it to mp3 yet. Its freaking horrible. so Im in the car going to work and Im like "ok I"ll throw on the radio and see how they deal with this issue" and on comes offspring. wait a minute..

their drums are underwater too!! WTF! their guitars were SO MUCH louder than mine, the drums sounded like sheeit! I would say that most of the mixes on my local clearchannel station had the same element as mine..the guitars are too loud so you can't hear the drums. or you can hear them, but only in the quiet parts, which is like for 5.7 seconds, in most songs.

so what I mean to say is it is really hard to get everything to sound loud in a mix. it friggin sux when your guitars drop and you want to go 'yeah!' but your drums just fell in a swimming pool. and I experienced this without putting a compressor on the mix.
 
linchpin-dont wory about maxing them out-your music sucks ;).
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
Maybe you're just getting back at me for originally using the term "Screw that" when someone asked how to use plugins to solve their problem. Perhaps you're right and I should have been more diplomatic and not used the term "Screw that".
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Nah, it's because I don't have that kind of time in sessions. Plus, if I'm having to do something along that lines IMHO something went wrong during the recording process.

SouthSIDE Glen said:
But I gotta say that I find the trend these days extremely disheartening where everybody looks to plugins for solutions to basic audio engineering problems.
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IMHO good engineering happens before recording so you DON'T have to do that kind of stuff.

Maybe it's growing up on analog when you couldn't do stuff like that, but my first impulse on a lot of "imperfections" like that is--hey, that's how it happened so let's roll with it... keep it real... the compressor will take care of it just fine. And you know what? It usually does.

I just think it's dangerous to get TOO visual and edit happy with music. We all need to listen more, and not get too carried away with the power at our disposal.

But hey, that's why *I* don't do things your way. You have your approach so go for it. If the end product is good you're never wrong.
 
What about eq?

I find it interesting that everyone is talking loudness and only mentioning compressors and limiters. One of the points that Emily Lazar made at this year's TapeOpCon (which I was able to attend, and I'll say it was awesome) was that digital recordings are often loaded with low frequency junk. Anything below about 30hz is inaudible, but takes up huge amounts of acoustic energy. Filter that crap out and bang, your mix can be louder. If you want really low lows, use something that is perfectly phase-coherent (that means a synth bass, or synth kick) mixed in.

First thing, high-pass filter your mix, set to 30hz, then normalize to an RMS of -6 db or so (I use Amadeus II on OS X, it works great for this), then limit it to -.1 db.

Just my 2 cents.

Oh, and if it's still not loud enough, crank up the mids. Those are the frequencies that "sound" loudest to our ears (something about being evolved to hear human voices over the din of nature) ;-)
 
Every time I see one of these "make it louder" threads, I think back to the 90s with albums like "Nevermind" and "Siamese Dream". Every album today is louder than those two, but why in the hell does anything need to be louder than "Nevermind" and "Siamese Dream"? Those two albums rock as hard as humanly possible.
 
Because now you have to sound like foo fighters and audioslave and they're louder than shit. even the foos first album was slammed.
 
Chibi Nappa said:
Every time I see one of these "make it louder" threads, I think back to the 90s with albums like "Nevermind" and "Siamese Dream". Every album today is louder than those two, but why in the hell does anything need to be louder than "Nevermind" and "Siamese Dream"? Those two albums rock as hard as humanly possible.
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Totally agree.
 
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