How to make a song louder without quality lossand clipping?

[Argle]

It's possible you heard the difference, it's also possible your mind kind of produced or exaggerated it for you, ya know?

Ever had one of these moments where you're fiddling with a knob and think you're doing some subtle but noticeable fine tuning, then realize it was the wrong knob, or the fx plugin was turned off or something?

Placebo effect in music production is kinda interesting, hehe.

But i'm just talking about my own experience, maybe your brain works a little more analytically. Pretty OT anyway.

oh fuck yes. it's very embarassing, and shows that mixing music is NOT a rational process at all.

[SnappleMan]

Everything in mixing and mastering can be looked at as a battle for headroom.

Mastering to -0.2dBfs is done to make sure things stay safe as noted earlier.

What's more important are the terms RMS and crest factor. RMS is more of an estimation of your general loudness, when you use a plugin to gauge RMS and loudness what it's really doing is showing you a value based on multiple readings, one being the crest factor. The crest factor is the dynamic range between the peaks and the RMS (or the headroom between the two).

Anyway, to make your music louder you need to understand what music does. All musicians today have a set hard limit that we cant go over: 0db. You cannot go past 0dB. When you create a song you see a lot of peaks and valleys in your waveforms, these are great things to have in music because they produce clarity and fidelity to our ears, but each one of them has the potential to hit 0dB. If they go over 0dB then you get painful clipping and you can damage your speakers, so we use normalization which raises or lowers the volume of your song with respect to the highest peak. This means that if you have one really loud sound in your mix that's far above the rest of the sounds, your song will be too quiet because the volume level is based around that loudest sound.

To get around that issue we have Limiters. a limiter will create a virtual ceiling for your peaks by cutting them off after a certain point. This lets you raise the volume of all the softer sounds in your mix, but now you've cut off all the clarity of the louder sounds, so your song will sound weaker (but "louder"). This is why limiting properly is very hard and requires a lot of skill.

To get around the issue OF limiters, we have distortion. What distortion does is take your peaks and "moves them around" the spectrum by boosting different harmonics in the sound. There are many different kinds of distortion, not just the one used for electric guitars. So now you have your loud sound with the high peak, you apply distortion to it and what happens is that different harmonics in the sound start to become louder, so the peak is not the only thing that carries that important sonic information. Now your sound is fatter and the peak is a little less "important". What you can do now is lower the overall volume of that sound and it'll still be clear and audible in the mix, which means you can now raise the overall volume of every track and get a louder mix.

So to get your songs louder, spend more time with your individual tracks. Use compression and subtle distortion to fatten up sounds individually before mixing them together and they will be heard much easier, reducing the need for extreme amounts of clipping.

Also, look into "maximizers" or harmonic distortion limiters. A maximizer more or less does what I said above about distortion but you can use it on the entire mix, this really helps you get stupid high volumes in your tracks.

[theshaggyfreak]

You know, I think this is a great subject for a MAGfest panel or video pod cast. While there are isn't a single way to do this sort of thing, I think it'd be nice to give those less experienced a visual aid as to how it all works. Having watched Zircons past videos, maybe this might be something her could do in the future since he seems to be quite adept at explaining stuff like this. It's one of the toughest areas for people to grasp since the concepts can be complicated.

[Nabeel Ansari]

Yeah, I mean immediate volume adjustments (I didn't know about the 3dB = twice the volume thing; are you sure? Not 10dB, or are we on different scales?), but in terms of entire song comparisons, even different songs, I think that's what the website I saw this on was referring to. In EQ though, yes, at least for me, I've been able to hear differences in 0.4 dB occasionally, but it depends on the frequency you're boosting as you know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dB-point

Also, it doesn't matter what scale you're on. The definition of dB is constant, it's the reference point you use that gives rise to things like dBFS, dBSPL, etc.

It is worth mentioning that when I say "power", I am referring to the physics definition of power (basically work/time or energy/time). This has nothing to do with loudness perception. So no, I didn't say "twice volume", I said "twice power".

Edited June 23, 2014 by Neblix

[timaeus222]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dB-point

Also, it doesn't matter what scale you're on. The definition of dB is constant, it's the reference point you use that gives rise to things like dBFS, dBSPL, etc.

It is worth mentioning that when I say "power", I am referring to the physics definition of power (basically work/time or energy/time). This has nothing to do with loudness perception. So no, I didn't say "twice volume", I said "twice power".

Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense then.

[timaeus222]

Everything in mixing and mastering can be looked at as a battle for headroom.

Mastering to -0.2dBfs is done to make sure things stay safe as noted earlier.

What's more important are the terms RMS and crest factor. RMS is more of an estimation of your general loudness, when you use a plugin to gauge RMS and loudness what it's really doing is showing you a value based on multiple readings, one being the crest factor. The crest factor is the dynamic range between the peaks and the RMS (or the headroom between the two).

Anyway, to make your music louder you need to understand what music does. All musicians today have a set hard limit that we cant go over: 0db. You cannot go past 0dB. When you create a song you see a lot of peaks and valleys in your waveforms, these are great things to have in music because they produce clarity and fidelity to our ears, but each one of them has the potential to hit 0dB. If they go over 0dB then you get painful clipping and you can damage your speakers, so we use normalization which raises or lowers the volume of your song with respect to the highest peak. This means that if you have one really loud sound in your mix that's far above the rest of the sounds, your song will be too quiet because the volume level is based around that loudest sound.

To get around that issue we have Limiters. a limiter will create a virtual ceiling for your peaks by cutting them off after a certain point. This lets you raise the volume of all the softer sounds in your mix, but now you've cut off all the clarity of the louder sounds, so your song will sound weaker (but "louder"). This is why limiting properly is very hard and requires a lot of skill.

To get around the issue OF limiters, we have distortion. What distortion does is take your peaks and "moves them around" the spectrum by boosting different harmonics in the sound. There are many different kinds of distortion, not just the one used for electric guitars. So now you have your loud sound with the high peak, you apply distortion to it and what happens is that different harmonics in the sound start to become louder, so the peak is not the only thing that carries that important sonic information. Now your sound is fatter and the peak is a little less "important". What you can do now is lower the overall volume of that sound and it'll still be clear and audible in the mix, which means you can now raise the overall volume of every track and get a louder mix.

So to get your songs louder, spend more time with your individual tracks. Use compression and subtle distortion to fatten up sounds individually before mixing them together and they will be heard much easier, reducing the need for extreme amounts of clipping.

Also, look into "maximizers" or harmonic distortion limiters. A maximizer more or less does what I said above about distortion but you can use it on the entire mix, this really helps you get stupid high volumes in your tracks.

Awesome post. <3 This explains it all very well, bro. I've bolded the most important parts IMO. In fact, for me, I just say this: If you mix well enough, you don't need much of a mastering [bus signal] chain. Hell, I usually just use a simple EQ (only 2 bands used) and a limiter, and that's it, and I'm happy with the result.

Edited June 24, 2014 by timaeus222

[SnappleMan]

I think it's important that we start using "Stereo Bus" or "Master Bus" instead of "Mastering Chain". Having a compressor/limiter on the master bus is not the same as mastering a track. Too many people confuse the act of gently rounding a mix out with mastering, and they end up smashing the life out of it for the sake of volume.

[timaeus222]

I think it's important that we start using "Stereo Bus" or "Master Bus" instead of "Mastering Chain". Having a compressor/limiter on the master bus is not the same as mastering a track. Too many people confuse the act of gently rounding a mix out with mastering, and they end up smashing the life out of it for the sake of volume.

True; I guess I should say "Master Bus Signal Chain".

[Mak Eightman]

Everything in mixing and mastering can be looked at as a battle for headroom.

Mastering to -0.2dBfs is done to make sure things stay safe as noted earlier.

What's more important are the terms RMS and crest factor. RMS is more of an estimation of your general loudness, when you use a plugin to gauge RMS and loudness what it's really doing is showing you a value based on multiple readings, one being the crest factor. The crest factor is the dynamic range between the peaks and the RMS (or the headroom between the two).

Anyway, to make your music louder you need to understand what music does. All musicians today have a set hard limit that we cant go over: 0db. You cannot go past 0dB. When you create a song you see a lot of peaks and valleys in your waveforms, these are great things to have in music because they produce clarity and fidelity to our ears, but each one of them has the potential to hit 0dB. If they go over 0dB then you get painful clipping and you can damage your speakers, so we use normalization which raises or lowers the volume of your song with respect to the highest peak. This means that if you have one really loud sound in your mix that's far above the rest of the sounds, your song will be too quiet because the volume level is based around that loudest sound.

To get around that issue we have Limiters. a limiter will create a virtual ceiling for your peaks by cutting them off after a certain point. This lets you raise the volume of all the softer sounds in your mix, but now you've cut off all the clarity of the louder sounds, so your song will sound weaker (but "louder"). This is why limiting properly is very hard and requires a lot of skill.

To get around the issue OF limiters, we have distortion. What distortion does is take your peaks and "moves them around" the spectrum by boosting different harmonics in the sound. There are many different kinds of distortion, not just the one used for electric guitars. So now you have your loud sound with the high peak, you apply distortion to it and what happens is that different harmonics in the sound start to become louder, so the peak is not the only thing that carries that important sonic information. Now your sound is fatter and the peak is a little less "important". What you can do now is lower the overall volume of that sound and it'll still be clear and audible in the mix, which means you can now raise the overall volume of every track and get a louder mix.

So to get your songs louder, spend more time with your individual tracks. Use compression and subtle distortion to fatten up sounds individually before mixing them together and they will be heard much easier, reducing the need for extreme amounts of clipping.

Also, look into "maximizers" or harmonic distortion limiters. A maximizer more or less does what I said above about distortion but you can use it on the entire mix, this really helps you get stupid high volumes in your tracks.

Very interesting!

You said about distortion.. I use tape emulator to master track(bus?) and multiband comp after it. This makes my mix softer but powerful and loud, without compression issues, plus sound scape becomes more.. tide? Of course, before I use this things I make all tracks fit well.

Is this because of distortion and saturation which tape emul provides? Or it's just because all tracks mixed well?

[timaeus222]

Very interesting!

You said about distortion.. I use tape emulator to master track(bus?) and multiband comp after it. This makes my mix softer but powerful and loud, without compression issues, plus sound scape becomes more.. tide? Of course, before I use this things I make all tracks fit well.

Is this because of distortion and saturation which tape emul provides? Or it's just because all tracks mixed well?

How does the waveform change? If the dynamic range flattens some, then it may be because of saturation and/or distortion.

[SnappleMan]

Very interesting!

You said about distortion.. I use tape emulator to master track(bus?) and multiband comp after it. This makes my mix softer but powerful and loud, without compression issues, plus sound scape becomes more.. tide? Of course, before I use this things I make all tracks fit well.

Is this because of distortion and saturation which tape emul provides? Or it's just because all tracks mixed well?

It's a combination of both as far as I would guess. When the tracks in your mix are balanced well before they reach the stereo bus you generally don't have to use as much master compression or saturation to get good results.