raising the volume or Limiter

L

livepast00

New member
Hello everyone!


Haven't been on this forum for awhile and I hope everyone is doing great at the start of 2011!


I've been working on my own cover songs now and my first cover is almost finish that I did from scratch and will post them up as soon as I'm done to get some feedback and comments :D


I have this one cover song that only has one vocalist singing only, just the lead vocal, no background vocals or anything and when I compress it, it sounds good and loud and blended in with my instruments, but when I'm mixing and mastering it and bouncing it into the finish product, the vocal is drowned in my instruments. I record and my peaks are from -12db to -18db I made room and lowered my intruments and they all have there own space and no frequency are colliding, and im not over compressing my vocals and its not drowned in reverb or effects, ANY SUGGESTION? :)


this is my lead vocal mixing chain as follow

Desser
waves REQ 6
waves RCOMP


should I raise the volume on the lead vocalist or should I use a Limiter? (L3 ultramaximiser) or raise the input/output in the eq?

should i ever touch the input/output in the eq?







Thank you and I appreciate your time for reading and helping me, and will definately contribute in the future when I have more experience
 
How's the arrangement? Are the instruments burying the vocals because they are competing with them in the arrangement? If not, then please explain this a bit further:
it sounds good and loud and blended in with my instruments, but when I'm mixing and mastering it and bouncing it into the finish product, the vocal is drowned in my instruments.
Click to expand...
How can it sound good when "blended with the instruments" but not sound good in mixing? Those are both parts of the same thing. What's the difference; where does the blending start to sound bad? That's where the path to your answer begins.

G.
 
I'm sorry mr southside glen, let me explain it again. When im mixing and listening it through my monitors, its sounds great and perfect, the vocal is right and instrument isnt overpowering the vocalist, but after i master and bouncing it to the real deal, the vocal is not standing out and it seems drowned in the instruments, like someone lowered the volume on the vocalist and now im thinking of putting a limiter on the lead vocalist or going to try turning up the eq input/output, because i have never done that before
 
Then the question is just what you're doing in mastering to cause that to happen. I'll take a guess, but it's just a guess at this point; you're slamming the whole mix against a limiter in one jump to try an increase the volume to commercial levels, right?

If that's so, what's likely happening is that you are slamming too hard, too much in one jump, and doing that to a mix where there's too much going on at one time to begin with. But because that too much is lower in volume before you slam, it sounds OK, but when you do the slamming, it all becomes the same volume, and the vocals get buried.

Some suggestions:

- Lower the mix volume of your backing instruments before you smash the master.
or
- If you have heavily compressed the instruments in the mix before mastering, don't compress them so hard before you master.
or
- work the arrangement so there's not so much going on duringthe lead vocals.
or
- Don't smash the song that hard in mastering, smash it only until it stops sounding good, then back off just a bit.
or
- a little of all of the above.

HTH,

G.
 
I'm sorry for the newb question but what does smashing means? and do I lower the threshold on my limiter until my master track reaches zero?
 
"Smashing" is what you're probably using your limiter for. It refers to smashing the crest factor of a track (the amount of volume difference between the peak volume level and the average volume level) to next-to-nothing in order to force the overall intrinsic volume of the track up to unnatural levels.

I won't go into the "is it good or bad to do that" argument here, I'm just saying that when one does that a bit too much and/or without care, it's not unusual to get the kind of symptoms you describe. In short, the more you smash the dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and the quietest parts of the signal), the louder the otherwise quieter stuff gets, and the more the otherwise loud vocals will get buried in the commotion.

You have two options when that happens; have less stuff going on in the arrangement when the vocal are happening, so there's less commotion when you smash it all together, or smash it less. Or some combination of both.

I think, in all objective honesty, that you're asking as a followup question whether you should crank your limiter even harder tells me that you're probably a bit overly-concerned with boosting the volume. I won't tell you not to do it, but I will say that you're probably trying to push the mix you have way too hard, even for those who want volume and think it's OK to do so.

Which means either changing the mix to be cleaner and less busy. Think about it: an a capella vocal can never be buried, no matter how loud you smash it. I'm not saying to go a capella, I'm saying that the busier your mix, the harder it's going to be to smash really loud without burying the vocal. Or it means to keep the mix you have, but back off on the limiting and don't smash it that hard. Or it means a little bit of both.

G.
 
livepast00 said:
I'm sorry mr southside glen, let me explain it again. When im mixing and listening it through my monitors, its sounds great and perfect, the vocal is right and instrument isnt overpowering the vocalist, but after i master and bouncing it to the real deal, the vocal is not standing out and it seems drowned in the instruments
Click to expand...
Ah... I bet your ass got Fletcher-Munson'ed.

Equal loudness curves and all that. Try playing the mixed version with the buried vocals on the monitors you mixed with at the same volume used for mixing. If the vocals become unburied, then you were probably a Fletcher Munson victim. If they don't, it might be a technical problem with some wonky setting on your 2-buss during export.

Different frequencies become louder "faster" than others as you take a full mix from soft to loud. If you mix soft and listen loud, frequencies that were "dormant" can jump out of nowhere and mask other sounds when the volume goes up. If you mix loud and listen soft, frequencies that you were counting on to carry a vocal can shrink and hide when the volume is lowered. If you mix at about 70 db (the room sounds loud, but not uncomfortably loud), these problems can be minimized. You should still check your mixes at both very quiet volumes and very loud volumes before calling it done.


If it's not any of that it could be mono compatibility issues if you used any short delays on your vocals.

Or like Glen said, maybe you just smashed it.
 
Let's get to the bottom of this...

What did you do in your mastering process?

If you did any stereo widening, that is a likely culprit. Stereo widening will increase the volume of the sounds panned out to the sides, making the sounds in the center relatively lower in volume. If you like the sound of your stereo widening, simply compensate by slightly boosting kick, bass, snare, and lead vox in the mix.
 
Try using the limiter to only limit anything approaching 0dBFS, not to boost everything below that. Or if you are boosting everything, only boost a couple dB.

Like someone else said, do a fair comparison between the mix and the master by making sure they play at the same apparent loudness. Look at the average loudness (RMS) of both, and reduce the louder of the two. Then, make your comparison between them.

Are you applying any master bus compression during mixing, before getting to the mastering stage? This is another one people argue about, but I'm not a fan of master bus compression during mixing, unless it's used very very sparingly.

Try another limiter besides Waves L3... I'm a big fan of the Wave Arts Final Plug, and Brainworx BXXL.
If you try out the Wave Arts Final Plug, check out the "peak limit soft" preset, but raise the threshold so it is barely doing anything, only boosting things a couple dB. Several presets have it set to about 83% and I would go to at least 90-95%.
 
What does "bouncing to the real deal" mean? Your posts suggest that there's some process going on where you don't have the ability to preview it? How is that possible?
 
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