Dubstepforum.com

Fight the loudness war!

It's killing the music and our hearing!

http://www.turnmeup.org/






http://homedir-b.libsyn.com/podcasts/a7 ... ss_War.mov




.

Totally agree. Noobs will learn one day

i agree as well, it was one of the first things i learned about when i first started trying to put tracks together, you should always be looking at your final output levels too see if your kicks and snares (especially) are still coming through cleanly
i really dont like the sound of overcompressed music it just becomes a horrible mess of noise after a short while.

wot wot

If your worried about your hearing get some earplugs! I mix down my tunes as loud as I can get them usually +6 to +8 unless I'm using a limiter on the master volume then I still drive the sound a lot. My tunes don't sound messy or overcompressed cos I've been producing since 1996 and I know what I'm doing. If people are putting out overcooked tunes then its cos they don't know what they're doing and may well be the fault of the mastering engineer also - I've had plenty of my earlier records overcooked by crap mastering engineers. The fact is if you know how to mix properly then you can get your mixes extreemely loud without audiable distortion (and without compromising dynamics audiably) but if your crap and you try to limit/compress the mix to get it louder then its gonna sound shit! So I think your thread should be calling for a ban on crap mixdowns not loud mastering!

Rob Sparx wrote:If your worried about your hearing get some earplugs! I mix down my tunes as loud as I can get them usually +6 to +8 unless I'm using a limiter on the master volume then I still drive the sound a lot. My tunes don't sound messy or overcompressed cos I've been producing since 1996 and I know what I'm doing. If people are putting out overcooked tunes then its cos they don't know what they're doing and may well be the fault of the mastering engineer also - I've had plenty of my earlier records overcooked by crap mastering engineers. The fact is if you know how to mix properly then you can get your mixes extreemely loud without audiable distortion (and without compromising dynamics audiably) but if your crap and you try to limit/compress the mix to get it louder then its gonna sound shit! So I think your thread should be calling for a ban on crap mixdowns not loud mastering!

amen mr sparx

this is the 21st century, the age of digital music, start pushing boundaries people, don't get bogged down by the 'history' of production, lets concentrate on the FUTURE!!

Where can I grab one of your tunes Rob? I'd like to see what a good mixdown should look like when I load it up into Audition

Rob Sparx wrote:If your worried about your hearing get some earplugs!

I'm not worried about loudness... im worried about DyNAmiCs

see how that word has ups and downs?

music with super blasting loudness has NO DYNAMICS!

The listener owns the volume knob, not the creator of the music

Yea and usually music with extreme dynamic changes like what your talking about is usually classical or jazz - there's plenty of dynamic range in jazz music but it doesn't exactly rock the dancefloor does it!

Loud music can have dynamics if you boost the transients (attack)of the beats/bass so they are even louder - that way you can still have clarity at super high volumes as transients are maintained and the tune doesn't become a mess of noise. Its only when producers don't EQ/compress/limit their mixes properly that transients are lost and the overall dynamic range is squashed.

Amisane if you look at 1 of my mixdowns its usually like a square box apart from the intro and the breakdown - everything is boosted as much as I can get away with and I do my own mastering so I don't worry about reducing the master to -2 or any of that bollox (sorry Reso!). In my mellower tunes you might be able to make out some of the waveforms but in the harder ones they are so squashed they almost look distorted (although importantly they don't sound distorted!).

Dynamics are there in most tunes aren't they? The whole build-up/drop business is all about using dynamics.. i.e quiet to loud. It's just achieved more through the adding or taking away of sounds, rather than changing actual velocities.

as in.. taking out a couple layers from your kick or snares for a 'quieter' section of the tune (e.g intro) is dynamics surely? As the snare therefore sounds quieter, then when you add in the rest of the layers it becomes louder. i.e. dynamics.

OK that's interesting... If one of my tunes looks like a solid block I always turn the master down until you can make out a waveform. Would you say that is bad practice?

I looked at lots of professional tunes, and some of them look like solid blocks, and some don't. I guess there's no right or wrong, just different ways of doing it.

whatever sounds good is the right way. theres good tunes where the amplitude is going from -inf to 0 the whole time, other songs are the solid block. its how that solid block comes thru and the balance etc.

Amisane: "If one of my tunes looks like a solid block I always turn the master down until you can make out a waveform. Would you say that is bad practice?"

Yes that is bad practise - the volume you mix down at depends on whether you want to master the tune yourself or get someone to master it for you. If someone else is going to master it then usually they'll say get an average of 0db which might be a peak of +2/+3db on the master volume (a little bit squashed but not much) - too loud and the mastering engineer won't have any headroom to work with so won't be able to do much with your mix although cheaper engineers will overcook your mix just to prove they've done something 2 and you might actually end up paying to make your tune sound worse! If your doing your own mastering (not recommended if your mixdown aint perfect) then get it as loud as you can.

Even if your not going to master your own tune then I'd still say keep the volume in your tune as loud as you can get it WHILST WRITING (you can reduce the volume later on) - this is a good idea because at higher volumes any dodgy frequency overlaps become very obvious in the form of distortion then you can solo the offending channels and eq/process them until there is no distortion. Write a tune at a lower volume and you might not hear the distortion until later on when the mastering engineer attempts to limit your mix and can't get much boost on it because of dodgy frequencies present in your mix which you didn't even notice!

EDIT: Forget that last bit I was getting a bit carried away - can't whinge too much about mastering if I'm not sitting in on the sessions.....

Most of the time people who whine about this on the internet are people that couldn't do a tight mix in the first place so they go on about bringing back the dynamics as if to say 'Yeah this mixdown is shit but hey, I'm bringing back the dynamics'.


It seems the trendy thing to say right now but few people spouting it are in a position to really comment on what constitutes a good mix IMO.



Far more important are depth, weight and punch. Fuck talking for hours about loudness.

99% of modern day D&B mix downs = shit.

thats my contribution to this discussion

D-Code wrote:99% of modern day D&B mix downs = shit.

thats my contribution to this discussion

thank you, i agree, and its happening to some dubstep

i dont mean dynamics as in make it a jazz tune

but dont give me solid blocks and say thats how its supposed to be for dance music

yeah big down master compressors.

it's so worth lower average loudness to have a drop that blows the shit up.

decklyn wrote:yeah big down master compressors.

it's so worth lower average loudness to have a drop that blows the shit up.

exactly, because the DJ or the home listener has the volume knob

Rob Sparx wrote:If your worried about your hearing get some earplugs! I mix down my tunes as loud as I can get them usually +6 to +8 unless I'm using a limiter on the master volume then I still drive the sound a lot. My tunes don't sound messy or overcompressed cos I've been producing since 1996 and I know what I'm doing. If people are putting out overcooked tunes then its cos they don't know what they're doing and may well be the fault of the mastering engineer also - I've had plenty of my earlier records overcooked by crap mastering engineers. The fact is if you know how to mix properly then you can get your mixes extreemely loud without audiable distortion (and without compromising dynamics audiably) but if your crap and you try to limit/compress the mix to get it louder then its gonna sound shit! So I think your thread should be calling for a ban on crap mixdowns not loud mastering!

Rob,
Would you mind posting a small clip of one of your tunes so that we can have a listen.
Regards
Jason