tonesponge
New member
Everytime I get my mix done and bounce it down and transfer it to my jump drive and listen to it on my laptop, the loudness is so low I can't even hear it. Normalizing it to zero dB doesn't help much because I have some ridiculously huge transient peaks on the beat.
If I put a compressor and limiter on the stereo bus almost to the point of audible artifacts, and bounce down through that, I can get it quite a bit louder, but then I still have to turn the volumes on my laptop up all the way to hear it, and other people in the room can't hear it well enough to even understand the lyrics.
Recently, I tried normalizing the mix to zero dB instead of compressing, and then applying multiple stages of the backwards compression technique to address those transient peaks (compressing, bouncing down, importing track, reversing, compressing, bouncing down, importing track, reversing again). That really got it loud without obvious artifacts, but it really seemed to mess up the balance of the mix; for example, the formerly crisp drums sound muddled and boomy.
I'm considering trying just bouncing down the stems, and then using backwards compression to bring those individually up to whatever point they each can tolerate well, then mix them, bounce down, and normalize. But that will take a lot of time to do, so I would appreciate some guidance here before I go potentially waste a bunch of time.
Thanks in advance.
If I put a compressor and limiter on the stereo bus almost to the point of audible artifacts, and bounce down through that, I can get it quite a bit louder, but then I still have to turn the volumes on my laptop up all the way to hear it, and other people in the room can't hear it well enough to even understand the lyrics.
Recently, I tried normalizing the mix to zero dB instead of compressing, and then applying multiple stages of the backwards compression technique to address those transient peaks (compressing, bouncing down, importing track, reversing, compressing, bouncing down, importing track, reversing again). That really got it loud without obvious artifacts, but it really seemed to mess up the balance of the mix; for example, the formerly crisp drums sound muddled and boomy.
I'm considering trying just bouncing down the stems, and then using backwards compression to bring those individually up to whatever point they each can tolerate well, then mix them, bounce down, and normalize. But that will take a lot of time to do, so I would appreciate some guidance here before I go potentially waste a bunch of time.
Thanks in advance.
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