Overall volume

[paulie86]

Hey, my band just recorded six songs in the studio, and when i play our songs right after a professionally recorded song, our overall volume is a lot lower. Is there any program that can perhaps change the overall volume of the songs? How can I fix this? - Paul

 

[HangDawg]

Have it mastered would be the short answer. I'll leave longer answers to someone else.

 

[DigitalDon]

Sounds like he might have done you a favor and not squashed (compressed) the life out of your songs. This is done too often just to get the "in your face, louder is better" sound. Even though the volume is low how do the actual recordings sound? If you're satisfied with the recordings maybe you should think about having them mastered if you want to take it farther. It would help greatly if he didn't do any heavy EQ, effects or compression on the final stereo tracks. If so, maybe he still has the unaltered stereo tracks. This will cost you less (time is money) to have mastered if they don't have to work around or try to fix adjustments to the stereo mix. Just my 2 cents worth.

DD

 

[Alchemist3k]

Mastering makes it sound louder. The engineer uses his knowledge to make the song sound louder. I say sound louder because he may not actually change the volume of level of the master tracks but he knows how to give te impression that it is actually louder.

If you can't afford mastering then if you used a pc system to record your material, or even a digital porta-studio, then you could take the master tracks and use the normalise function in any wave editor. That make the master waves as loud as they can be. You should also use this technique on each of the indivisual tracks that compose the song.

 

[jrich]

I'm going to have to disagree with Alchemist here. I am very much a newbie, but the general consensus around here seems to be do not normalize under any circumstances. Basically all that does is find the highest peak of the song, raise that to zero, and bring everything else up the same relative amount. The same goes for not normalizing the individual tracks, just turn the volume up.

As for making the mix louder. I would also say get someone to master it. Basically the way to make the mix louder is by compression and limiting. Limiting can do a ton to increase the volume. For instance, lets say there is one snare hit that peaks three decibels louder than the entire mix. If you put a limiter in there and set it correctly, you can bring that hit down, and bring the entire mix volume up 3db. A mastering engineer will be knowledgeable enough to set the compression and limiting correctly to get you the most volume without sacrificing sound quality (and he/she'll probably add some needed eq adjustments and whatever else those magicians do)

If you have to do it on your own, apply some gentle compression, and add a limiter until you start to hear some nasty artifacts, and then drop it back a bit from that.

josh

 

[riffing]

jrich is on the money except that I'm not sure you should never normalise. The thing is, many people mistake what normalising actually does and many times, it's not what people really want.

paulie86, to add to jrich, part of what's done to tracks when mastering is commonly called "brickwall limiting". Basically, no matter how much you bring up the level of the track, it will not let you go past a certain point - hitting a brick wall. Many times, that brick wall is at -0.1 dB.

If you have SoundForge, you can try Wave Hammer. I prefer T-RackS (www.t-racks.com) although iZotope's Ozone (www.izotope.com) also has that capability.