Why are my mixes so quiet?

H

HeatSinks

Member
I'm a mid-to-late twenty-something, and I am about ten years behind.

Back in high school my musician friends were making their first recordings and I recall that the levels were always very low. I'd play my friends' CDs in my mom's minivan and I'd have to turn the volume up to 100% to hear it. I remember thinking, "Why didn't they just turn up the volume of the mix?"

Now I've finally gotten around to making recordings of my own. First finding: when I mix, everything sounds fine. I make an mp3 and it sounds fine. But when I have my iTunes on shuffle and my song comes up, I realize I have to turn up the volume. What's the deal? Should I just turn up the gain of the mix before exporting to mp3, or is there something else I'm missing?
 
You're comparing your unmastered mixes with mastered mixes. I'm guessing I'm probably not using mix bus compression when you're mixing too? This and Mastering compression will make the loudness of the track a lot higher than yours even if you're peaking your mixes at a reasonable level.

What are you mixing in and I could suggest a few ways of coming closer to the right volume, but other than mastering they're always going to be a bit quiet. Don't worry everyone's are.
 
If your mix will take just 'turning up the gain' then yes, you can do that.
I wouldn't if you're going to have it mastered though.

The problem is that there's only so much room and if one thing reaches peaking level, like a snare for example, the whole thing will have to be turned down so that snare doesn't distort.

So you just turn the snare down and the mix up, but then your snare doesn't get heard.

Next you realise you have to make 'room' for the snare. It shouldn't have to be loud, it should have it's own space, so you start eqing guitars and things to make room.
Snare sounds great but now the guitars are thin...



It goes on and on.

I don't focus on loud mixes but I do find even getting close can be very difficult without destroying the sound.

You can slam a limiter on the master track and squash everything.
It'll sound loud, but almost certainly not good.


I replied at the same time as Dougal, but he's right.
Mastering can make a huge difference on a good mix.
I'm sure any mastering engineers on here would say they prefer to receive mixes that are nowhere near peaking levels.
 
To rephrase the above, you can turn up the overall volume until you run out of headroom for peaks.

When you reach that point you have to get into the difference between peak level and average level. In order to increase the average level you'll need to lower the peaks. The usual tool used to do that is a peak limiter.
 
Dougal: What's mix bus compression? I am using Audacity. I realize I am limited by Linux, but for now I'm unwilling to concede and switch to one of those other platforms. I get enough Windows and Mac at work. You are also right--I am comparing mastered mixes to unmastered mixes. To be honest, I don't really know what mastering is. My understanding is that I can mix everything to a single .wav file, then hand that file off to an unbiased mastering engineer who will meticulously go through it and make it sound better. If my understanding of mastering is correct, I don't think I'm quite *there* yet. I don't intend to subject anyone to my recordings; I am simply trying to get my ideas down, to document the songs I wrote when I was in my twenties and maybe one day have something an interesting keepsake to find in the attic.

Steenamaroo: That makes a lot of sense. Will keep working on that balance of making room, changing levels, making room, changing levels, etc.

BSG: Should I be applying limiters to individual tracks or the entire mix or both?
 
HeatSinks said:
BSG: Should I be applying limiters to individual tracks or the entire mix or both?
Click to expand...

It's up to you to decide what sounds best. The normal process is to make the mix sound as good as possible without putting a limiter on the mix bus, then export/bounce/render the mix to a high resolution uncompressed file and apply whatever processing is needed to get the final sound you want. But you could add the final processing on the mix bus. In the "real" world of professional recording the final audio processing is done in a different studio by a mastering engineer.
 
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