Mastering for loudness!!

[dullatron]

Ok so I read the whole thread kind of through so I might say something that someone already said but anyways, here's my advice:

Loudness is a stupid concept but I know you just want your tunes louder. Well the first place to start is to listen to the mix. Is your snare loud and crisp or is it kind of there but not quite? High end makes most of the "loudness" you're talking about. Next thing to listen to is the overall balance of the drums. The high stuff(hats, perc etc) should be audible but still a bit lower than the bd and snare. The stuff that "hits you" should be more toward than stuff that's just basically chopping the beefy parts up. or you will have the "minidrums" effect. I hear it a lot on the forum's productions....

Make sure everything that shouldn't have bass or even sub-low frequencies, is high passed. You can be quite aggressive with the HP filter especially when it comes to wobbles or other mid range bass sounds. The sub is where most of your headroom goes, as far as a single instrument is concerned. Lower sub volume = more loudness. Although, less sub might also be too thin or just wrong sounding. You have to experiment. Try some heavy compression and limiting in the mixing phase of the drums. You can then "have it lower" signal wise but it'll be as loud as before limiting. Some tape saturation couldn't hurt either. All you need for the master now is 1-2 db of normal, slow compression and a limiter/clipper taking away MAX 2db.

hope this helps

[FuzionDubstep]

you must master like this and it will be fairly loud

[Ldizzy]

^ Shit peaks like cray-zee yo :'(

[safeandsound]

It's quite simple, conceptually; if the mix is right it will go loud with greater ease, without sounding squashed. If you have to compromise the sound to get the level to where you want it, most likely there's more you could be doing in the mix.

There are certainly exceptions to this rule and it appears to be an over simplification IMO.If the mix is right the transients will be squashed in the same way that a bad mix gets squashed. The snare and kick will suffer first.It's a generalization that makes little sense.There are sometimes very good mixes that sound so good when they are played that when a limiter is applied there is immediate degradation and trade off. Any mastering engineer with decent hearing accuity will recognize this in an instant.

In addition "where you want it" could be completely innapropriate for the given material and the client should
be diplomatically advised for the sake of their own music.

Obtaining level does not have any mystery about it. Good mixes, equalization, dynamic range control, clipping.

The mastering engineer has the same tools available (with the exception of high end monitoring which presents trade offs earlier)
The difference is that they should have the hearing accuity, equipment, monitoring conditions and understanding to make a better job of it. The "understanding" part when it comes to level increase comes from discerning how relatively the small adjustments cascaded together give it the "level" edge.

In the end the perceived level is entirely over rated anyway.

[Littlefoot]

You can see this from many angles and get as emotional as you want about it.

But as a producer of bass music and a mastering engineer, I have kinda to and fro opinions of this.

When producing I DO use Voxengos clipper on the drum buss, and also clip other channels where I know they are going to be peaking in the 2 bus mixdown. This is for loudness reasons and nothing else, it's a very musical sounding clip algorithm and my music is very digital and cold sounding on purpose, so perhaps I "get away with it".

Essentially, the less the mastering engineer has to do to make it loud, the better it will sound, as a rule of thumb.

A well balanced mixdown will go loud easier because you should be able to compress it, without any particular areas of the mixdown causing the compressor to do anything untoward. But at the same time, a mixdown with loads of ultra dynamic peaks is going to hit the limiter sooner when pushed.

There is a balance to be struck here, but it's very hard to strike it without good monitoring and trained ears, so I would suggest that for people looking to make loud music, to take some mixdowns, run em through some compressors and limiters, see what happens to them, then adjust, then list, repeat until you can mix knowing these problems might occur..

[FuzionDubstep]

Mixdown first, loudness second

if your mixdown is clean then making it loud can be done without any mastering engineers quite easily ..

[Ldizzy]

Mixdown first, loudness second

if your mixdown is clean then making it loud can be done without any mastering engineers quite easily ..

amen.

to me,

loud is a quantity... of which u dont want a lot if the quality is not there...

a good quality to look for in a beat would be, massive, huge, heavy... ud want a mix thatd end up being a "loud" tune, to be that in the first place...

then u could put it louder and it wouldnt sound like shit...

cause really, anything could be as loud as zero ... its so easy to tackle shit against the zero db line... whats hard is to do it and not sound like shit...

[Littlefoot]

I know it's been touched upon, but one thing I think is really important when thinking about loudness and how your mixes can "go loud" is that loudness and physical level are two different things. Loudness is something our brain calculates, yeah sometimes meters allow us to work out why it sounds loud/good/bad, but it's all about how the mix is constructed, not about any magic wizardry the mastering guy can do...

Composition, tonal balance and any psychoacoustic trickery is always a larger factor than "an extra dB" into a limiter when it comes to achieving loudness.

Sometimes also it's worth thinking about your track objectively, "does it actually need to go loud?" "will this composition/mixdown ever compete with X reference track, and if not, is that the end of the world?"

[mindsetAUS]

I used to be obsessed with learning mastering till one day I sat in on a session with a mastering engineer with a (what I now regard as) terrible mix down of mine and there was very little he could do to improve it. He was a good ME, my point is from that day forward I thought "forget mastering, I'm gonna get it all sorted at the sample selection and mix down stages and then only ever put a gentle limiter on". Still working on that but I think once my attitude changed it really helped my mixdowns.

I like that analogy of the fat on the meat too.

What about doin mixdowns In headphones ? Surely it would be possible to learn ur headphones enough to get good mixdowns, eliminating the room ? Not saying I do this but might have to soon when I start traveling