Best way to increase track loudness after production?

[mojobone]

There are genres where that flat straight bar is entirely appropriate, but generally, when you see that, it means you've overcooked it. I probably should have noted in my prior post that the difference between compression and limiting is a matter of degree; with most compressors, a ratio of 1:1 means the compressor turns down one decibel for every decibel the signal rises above the threshold. 1.1:1, 1.5:1 are very gentle ratios; 10:1 and up are pretty much considered limiting, which can sound really harsh-you don't want the signal going above the threshold for more than about 40-50 milliseconds, depending on the amount and timbre of any percussive sounds in your tracks. it's a similar effect to clipping but less harsh and many processors feature soft-clipping which emulates analog saturation-generalizing pretty heavily here, cuz there's so many ways to use a dynamics processor aside from compression/limiting; there's pullup, pulldown, de-essing, gating, and expansion, for starters. As per the free resource linked above, there's way more you can do besides make things louder; you can also increase punch and presence (or kill it entirely) enhance rhythmic motion or increase harmonic density.

[cardell]

Wasn't taking a shot at anyone in this thread here. I'm just still recovering from the "Loudness Wars".

"Make music, not loudness".

Stuart

[sansharbour]

It's a funny thing Loudness

I have been a songwriter for as long as I can remember.
Then I started a band and went on the road
All I wanted to do was write .......left the tech stuff to the sound man

I left the band and got my first cool tape deck a Tascam 688 portastudio
I used to record in the basement , then mix to another cassette in the living room, and then run to the car many times, all in an effort to match what was on the radio
I think the neighbours used to think There he is again sitting in his car going nowhere
So you could say that was the early loudness test

So in 2013 when I got Logic and had to record, mix and get used to plugins I jumped right in
When I would compare the loudness to others mine would fall short in the loudness test

I started to study how to bring up the volume to an acceptable level and what plugins I would need to achieve it
Thats when I started to pay attention to Ian Shepherd
I learned quite a bit on loudness and dynamics. You want it to be loud but not overcooked

As the others said gentle compression x 2 and limiting
Finally there are meters that I use that let me know when I'm in the zone
The meters give me a number to shoot for.

So you could say I use a combination of meters and my ears as a way to arrive at an acceptable level
It's trial and error so try different things.

my 2 cents

some great tips from everyone

For more info
http://themasteringshow.com
http://productionadvice.co.uk/best-of/

[Len911]

I suppose basically, if you aren't pitch shifting, time stretching, or synthesizing, it's all about adjusting loudness.

Eq- adjusting loudness of frequencies.

compressors/limiters- adjusting loudness of the amplitude

de-esser-turning down the loudness of the s's. (or the frequency where the plugin thinks the s's are)

If you didn't notice any hot s's on the first mix, or lip smacking on the first mix, you might after you use a limiter and make the mix hotter, bringing up those unheard of until now problems. If you run a de-esser on the mix, you will create a hole in the mix where the s's were, and may rob a cymbal. You must go back to the track level to apply the de-esser.

Maybe it's unheard of, ?, but it might be best to apply the final limiter setting on the stereo buss for reference when starting a song. I'm not sure how that might work out, as the usual custom is to apply the limiter in the end. Of course you don't render a track with the limiter engaged until the end. Just thinking out loud.

[lesmac]

Michael Stavrou's book "Mixing with your mind" is an interesting read for recordists and one of his passions is analog vs digital.

In this vein he covers what earlier poster's said. If you control your dynamic range early on your track wont suffer so badly from limiting later.
As already stated but for emphasis, a limiter is triggered by a transient and pushes the WHOLE of the signal down.
On the mix bus that's your song/record.

Tape saturation appears to be a good tool when increasing loudness, it's artefacts usually being more pleasing than compressors or limiters..

In deference to the previous posts I'm just learning this stuff as I go, it's great to have references.

Having both VU and digital peak meters throughout the session is great for gain staging. Just started doing this and I have to crank the monitors up a bit but there is more depth in the mix and less overall fatigue.

EDIT: Paul Draper's series of videos has been good for me re gain staging loudness etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Qm6NFIY2E

[Len911]

a limiter is triggered by a transient and pushes the WHOLE of the signal down.

Maybe. Depends on the settings. A slow attack and fast release less so than a fast attack and slow release.

Tape saturation. Over-rated? Okay, so I was the only one it seems that thought when cd's first came out, that it was a yuge improvement in the sound,lol!

Ironically, I also hooked up the Denon cassette recorder into my system. I wanted to see if I could take some old cassettes of my aunt,uncle and cousin (deceased) and effect and put on cd. I gave up. Oh yes, they had been mastered into the red, tape saturation, but they had a nasty "resonating distortion?", that's about the only way I could describe it. I also experimented with mastering to a cassette, into the red for some tape saturation. The result? Almost no difference except for the occasional tape drop out. I suppose that speaks well for the condition of the recorder, the cassette, and the hookup, cabling, amplifiers and mixer I used! If anything a subtle, hissy, degradation.

Pinched - The negative effect of analog gear that sounds compressed, and lacking in clarity.

[mojobone]

If you control your dynamic range early on, your track wont suffer so badly from limiting later.


Tape saturation appears to be a good tool when increasing loudness, it's artefacts usually being more pleasing than compressors or limiters.

These two statements are absolutely correct, in my not-so-limited experience; in analog land, multiple stages of gentle compression and subtle saturation are a recipe for tracks that sound better than real, because accuracy can be ugly. This is why you shouldn't wait 'til after the mix stage to start worrying about leveling and sweetening; you should have a goal for your mix, and a goal for your master, and they shouldn't necessarily be the same goals.

[mojobone]

Tape saturation. Over-rated? Okay, so I was the only one it seems that thought when cd's first came out, that it was a yuge improvement in the sound,lol!

Certainly, PCM digital audio/sampling provided improvements in clarity and signal to noise ratio, but it earned its initial bad reputation; the Nyquist filters in early iterations caused all kinds of ripple, aliasing and phase anomalies and we really didn't know much about how to build better ones, but times have changed. As digital has matured, we've also learned that a lot of that bad reputaion was caused by indifference/greed on the part of labels that assumed that legacy content would be automatically improved in the transfer and didn't need any additional care/mastering for the new format. We know a lot more about what made classic recordings sound how they did and some of the pleasure in listening was down to the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) second and third-order harmonic distortion/tape compression. Speaking as a guitarist, there are many sorts of nonlinearity that actually enhance the music; shucks, sometimes the nonlinearity that enhances the music lies between the listener's ears.

[Len911]

I stumbled onto a site, that showed what the tape sound was, an example of extreme w/distortion, to give an example of what the "tape" sound was, and also a clean example, John Mayer, "Battle Studies" album that used extensive, albeit more flattering example of heavy tape saturation.
http://ledgernote.com/columns/mixing-ma ... t-plugins/

https://youtu.be/pS3ixmsQgCk

(scroll down to song samples)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002V ... 6f34b46731

My reference cd, that is my idea of mix and master nirvanna, of my limited cd collection
https://www.amazon.com/Warm-Your-Heart- ... B000002GJK

I also found this site of "Honor roll of well mastered cd's". Isn't this part of the Bob Katz site, digido??
http://www.digido.com/honor-roll.html?o ... ew=article

It's maybe a little hard to determine what techniques are used exactly unless you can find that info somewhere, there are certain names that keep popping up on the "sound" I prefer, like Doug Sax, George Massenburg, and I also understand that GML (George Massenburg Labs) has equipment way out of my reach,lol!). But what I don't hear is a lot of tape and/or tube saturation, distortion, they may be used, probably are, but within their operating range that they aren't trashing the clarity of the sound.

[mojobone]

Another great way to hear tape saturation/compression is by playing with the drive knobs in Waves' Reel ADT. It's a really old-school tape sound, though it's not very subtle. Probably the best tape saturation plugin I've heard is UAD's Studer and Ampex plugins; they're very accurate, and they let you play with tapes speeds and formulations with or without hiss or head bump; nearly every engineer trick can be easily and swiftly accomplished, (you can even play with tape bias) the control is almost endless. The only thing they didn't include is Dolby noise reduction, which is why I still keep an old portastudio on hand, so I can do the old Mutt Lange trick on backing vocals, using the pre-emphasis without decoding to get a nice airy sheen. But tape compression/saturation isn't the only thing going on in those old tracks, which is why we have console plugins and outboard analog summing.