One does not simply loudness.

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Crimsonghost
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Crimsonghost » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:20 pm

Icetickle wrote:Is Crimsonghost the only one slapping Sausage Fattener on the master? Just asking because I have it.
And what would be a "proper" use of it? I don't want to over compress my track! D:\

@mtl6: dafuq?

@wolf89: I don't want my track to be a sausage like those two. The waveforms in yo guys signatures look nice.
I actually never use sasuage fattener. I have it, but only use it when I'm trying to destroy a sound (ie; making nasty bass). If you want things to sound fat, use small amounts of saturation and proper compression.

And don't ever put effects on you're master.
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Crimsonghost
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Crimsonghost » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:26 pm

I just realized I told you to do what the fattener does, but I think it's important for you to understand how to do that on your own.

Of course, if you do use the fattener, use it sparingly. That way you don't kill all the dynamics on you're tune.
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Icetickle
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Icetickle » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:30 pm

Sinestepper wrote:it really does not matter what the waveform looks like though, isn't it more important that it sounds nice?
It already does sound nice. But now I want it to sound nice and loud. And the waveform represents the loudness.

@Crimsonghost: I only put Fabfilter Saturn and Izotope Ozone on my master.
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by fragments » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:44 pm

I'm pretty sure you could have a sausage wave form that sounded weak, quiet and crappy. I don't think it's really accurate to say a wave form represents loudness. It represents the dynamics, rather?


I'd be careful with master bus processing, but no reason to say "never".
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Icetickle » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:47 pm

fragments wrote:I'm pretty sure you could have a sausage wave form that sounded weak, quiet and crappy. I don't think it's really accurate to say a wave form represents loudness. It represents the dynamics, rather?


I'd be careful with master bus processing, but no reason to say "never".
I thought it represents amplitude/loudnes. However I still have no clue what to do.
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by fragments » Tue Jul 23, 2013 2:51 pm

I'm not an expert and I'm not sure. What I am sure of is I've heard weak, crappy, quiet tracks with sausage wave forms.
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by BrainSick » Tue Jul 23, 2013 3:03 pm

To be fair, I think it represents both amplitude and dynamics. More so dynamics, though. Unless it's been compressed/squashed so much to look like a sausage. In which case, there really are no dynamics to be represented. I'm new to this, but from what I've read about it this is kinda what I gathered. Dynamics can misrepresent amplitude depending on the contents of the waveform and whether or not it's been squashed to look like your infamous "sausage". Lol But who knows, I could be wrong.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by mtl6 » Tue Jul 23, 2013 4:00 pm

Sinestepper wrote:
mtl6 wrote:nah man it's legit advice. it gets the song loud enough for soundcloud and when you need to get it actually mastered you can take the limiter off. can you hear any clipping in my mixes?
Its a good way of making it sound crap even if it doesnt clip tho.
do you think my mixes sound bad? i'm legitimately curious... no hard feelings if you do. i have just never personally heard any bad sounds when i do it
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by fragments » Tue Jul 23, 2013 4:06 pm

BrainSick wrote:To be fair, I think it represents both amplitude and dynamics. More so dynamics, though. Unless it's been compressed/squashed so much to look like a sausage. In which case, there really are no dynamics to be represented. I'm new to this, but from what I've read about it this is kinda what I gathered. Dynamics can misrepresent amplitude depending on the contents of the waveform and whether or not it's been squashed to look like your infamous "sausage". Lol But who knows, I could be wrong.
What's the difference between amplitude and dynamics when talking about an audio wave form?
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by BrainSick » Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:43 pm

I think it's how you percieve it. If you look at a waveform and it has those sharp spikes and ridges which I would consider DYNAMICS. Just because a wave form has a big spike doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be equally as loud. Sometimes the dynamics just look like amplitude. Something like a snare snap can cause quite a peak in the waveform but when you listen, it's not "loud". Mostly because of the dynamics of the instrument. And you basically hit the nail on the head about amplitude...
fragments wrote:I'm not an expert and I'm not sure. What I am sure of is I've heard weak, crappy, quiet tracks with sausage wave forms.
Just because it "looks big" doesn't necessarily mean that it will sound big. If that makes sense? It does to me, especially when talking about compression and such.
Last edited by BrainSick on Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by fragments » Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:44 pm

BrainSick wrote:I think it's how you percieve it. If you look at a waveform and it has those sharp spikes and ridges which I would consider DYNAMICS. Just because a wave form has a big spike doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be equally as loud. Sometimes the dynamics act as amplitude. Something like a snare snap can cause quite a peak in the waveform but when you listen, it's not "loud". Mostly because of the dynamics of the instrument. And you basically hit the nail on the head about amplitude...
fragments wrote:I'm not an expert and I'm not sure. What I am sure of is I've heard weak, crappy, quiet tracks with sausage wave forms.
Just because it "looks big" doesn't necessarily mean that it will sound big. If that makes sense? It does to me, especially when talking about compression and such.
We are on the same page then. :4:
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by BrainSick » Tue Jul 23, 2013 5:48 pm

fragments wrote:
BrainSick wrote:I think it's how you percieve it. If you look at a waveform and it has those sharp spikes and ridges which I would consider DYNAMICS. Just because a wave form has a big spike doesn't mean it's necessarily going to be equally as loud. Sometimes the dynamics act as amplitude. Something like a snare snap can cause quite a peak in the waveform but when you listen, it's not "loud". Mostly because of the dynamics of the instrument. And you basically hit the nail on the head about amplitude...
fragments wrote:I'm not an expert and I'm not sure. What I am sure of is I've heard weak, crappy, quiet tracks with sausage wave forms.
Just because it "looks big" doesn't necessarily mean that it will sound big. If that makes sense? It does to me, especially when talking about compression and such.
We are on the same page then. :4:
Glad to clear it up. Again, I'm new to this so this is just how I personally perceive it. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong. But basically that's my understanding after reading the compression article on this site:
http://www.dnbscene.com/article/1474-co ... n-tutorial

Someone shared it the other day on my thread and it helped me understand much clearer.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Ongelegen » Tue Jul 23, 2013 6:43 pm

Dynamics or dynamic range is just the difference in amplitude between the lowest and highest peaks. i.e. a squashed mix will have it's lowest peaks way higher than a non squashed mix, thus having less dynamic range. Amplitude, in this case measured by dBFS does not equal loudness. It's only a relative scale which doesn't give any info on loudness.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by fragments » Tue Jul 23, 2013 6:46 pm

Project EX wrote:Dynamics or dynamic range is just the difference in amplitude between the lowest and highest peaks. i.e. a squashed mix will have it's lowest peaks way higher than a non squashed mix, thus having less dynamic range. Amplitude, in this case measured by dBFS does not equal loudness. It's only a relative scale which doesn't give any info on loudness.
:Q:

OK. More or less what the wavelength I'm on ( :lol: ), but I never have the right words in the right order to make it make sense.
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by BrainSick » Tue Jul 23, 2013 7:01 pm

Project EX wrote:Dynamics or dynamic range is just the difference in amplitude between the lowest and highest peaks. i.e. a squashed mix will have it's lowest peaks way higher than a non squashed mix, thus having less dynamic range. Amplitude, in this case measured by dBFS does not equal loudness. It's only a relative scale which doesn't give any info on loudness.
Right, that is because the compressor squashes those peaks to make the average of the dynamics closer together. Before compression, the peaks are much taller than the fat pieces of the mix. Compression shortens that gap, thus making the fat section look much larger. But for the sake of wondering, could I ask, "If a mix 'looks' like it is very large all the way across, but when we listen it is not loud- then what makes these 'optical illusion' we are seeing so misleading?" Is it that we percieve amplitude or dynamics of a mix to correlate directly with "loudness"? How do you look at a mix and know it's going to be "loud" based on the wave forms?

Maybe like Fragments, I'm not exactly great with wording my questions and my points. But I am on the same page as you, Project EX. It makes sense what you said. I'm just trying to dig deeper.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Triphosphate » Tue Jul 23, 2013 7:35 pm

BrainSick wrote:
Project EX wrote:Dynamics or dynamic range is just the difference in amplitude between the lowest and highest peaks. i.e. a squashed mix will have it's lowest peaks way higher than a non squashed mix, thus having less dynamic range. Amplitude, in this case measured by dBFS does not equal loudness. It's only a relative scale which doesn't give any info on loudness.
Right, that is because the compressor squashes those peaks to make the average of the dynamics closer together. Before compression, the peaks are much taller than the fat pieces of the mix. Compression shortens that gap, thus making the fat section look much larger. But for the sake of wondering, could I ask, "If a mix 'looks' like it is very large all the way across, but when we listen it is not loud- then what makes these 'optical illusion' we are seeing so misleading?" Is it that we percieve amplitude or dynamics of a mix to correlate directly with "loudness"? How do you look at a mix and know it's going to be "loud" based on the wave forms?

Maybe like Fragments, I'm not exactly great with wording my questions and my points. But I am on the same page as you, Project EX. It makes sense what you said. I'm just trying to dig deeper.
I posit that a mix that LOOKS loud, but SOUNDS weak is correlated to a couple of things. Firstly, the dynamics, and second, the quality of the mix. Since loudness is a relative thing, we actively use dynamics to give the listener the impression that something is loud. For example, a track with a smooth, quiet intro that suddenly explodes into a loud drop is going to seem more to have more impact than a track with an intro as loud as it's drop. The latter will seem to have a weak drop, because there isn't enough of a contrast to indicate to the listener that "WOW this track got loud".

And as far as a mix is concerned, you need to take into consideration that what appears to look like a "loud waveform" may not be efficiently consuming it's own headroom. For example, it may have frequencies under 20-30hz or over 18k that aren't being reproduced adequately on a given sound system, but are still being represented by the visual waveform.

Also, a poor mix could make a track sound weak, even when it's waveform looks like a sausage. Say for example that there are 10 elements in a given song, and each element fundamentally takes up it's own space frequency-wise, but because these elements were not wisely EQ'd there are 4-5db of unnecessary fluff to each element. This little bit of 'fluff' not only creates the impression that the mix is sloppy, unrefined, and muddy... it also cumulatively consumes 40-50db of headroom. When you cram the track through a brickwall limiter, thats 40-50db of loudness that you could have consumed more intelligently, and thus have gotten a louder track.

Edit: This thread title is so perfect for this kind of discussion lol.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Ongelegen » Tue Jul 23, 2013 7:52 pm

^ pretty much.

You can't really tell how loud a track will be by looking at the wave. A brickwall/sausage wave will have high RMS, average loudness. Most of the time a higher RMS will mean more loudness, but that totally depends on the contents of the mix. Raw RMS (not A-weighted) is only a rough guide to assessing loudness. For instance, low frequencies will eat up your headroom faster as they needs more power, higher RMS, to be perceived eqauly loud as mid frequencies.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Crimsonghost » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:07 pm

Incase anyone was interested, heres a screenshot of various degrees of saturation and compression on a drum sample.

Image
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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by Triphosphate » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:25 pm

You can do some really amazing things by smartly saturating. I recall a track I was messing around with where I saturated a snare sample, and was able to turn it down more than 10db while maintaining the same perceived volume. It kinda sounded like white noise, tbh. But it worked for the song in question.

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Re: One does not simply loudness.

Post by 3za » Tue Jul 23, 2013 8:26 pm

Crimsonghost wrote:Incase anyone was interested, heres a screenshot of various degrees of saturation and compression on a drum sample.

Image
What DAW is that? Logic 10?

Looks disgusting :corncry:
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