Wait. So does that mean that this song contributes to the "sad state" of music because it monophonic, drop based, and lacks a consonant melody?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-X6qF7sF9eo

I don't think that this song is any less or more art than listening to a bach concerto. It's still music... just different. Musical complexity isn't what brings the art to music.

Besides... It's not like that track was made by big names or anything...

You got me wrong there. I'm not saying songs like that are somehow less art than others. It's even more dificult to make track simple, but great. All I'm saying is, that by their nature they appear easier to achieve for starting guys. They are wrong and they're gonna find it out, but untill they do, forums like this recieve fair share of not that great tracks in similar style.

I get what ZAU is saying. ...and to certain extend, he's right. I think this actually appeared with the rise of drop-based generes. A lot of drops consist of monophonic seemingly simple and almost "child-ish" melodies. Kids google out some tutorials, find out it's just a few notes and say: "Hey, I can do that!" ...what they don't realize that there's actually art to it. Even simple melody needs to use pleasant intervals, needs to have some direction, themes and closure. ...and big names know that, because they grew up listening to musically more complex stuff that was popular few years back. Or as you said, they were in a band or something.

Another reason for this is that american dream everyone hopes in. You can force yourself to the "I do it for the music" opinion as you want, but when you're sixteen, becoming new Madeon or Garrix wouldn't hurt. So you call it "hoping for the best" and move on. But a lot of times it's still there. And it forces you to make rushed descisions, post medioker tracks on forum etc etc...

but ... BUT! ... This just shows, how important it is for us, who do this thing for a while, to go in that damn WIP section a listen to some stuff. I know when I started, I was posting on one little Czech music making forum like crazy. ...and though it was discouraging at times, "It sucks." was the best advice I could get. Somebody has to give it to them too. It doesn't take long. You can jump through that song, if it's really hopeless. ...but if we don't tell them, they'll never realize they need some musical training. (...or they'll do, but really late and painfully.)

Due to work I need to be pretty mobile ... so 2.6GHz quadcore i7 MSI laptop, 16GB Ram, little Focusrite interface. ...and I'm good.

Quote from: ZUDDOX on February 26, 2016, 08:50:25 am

How do you guys compensate for the loss of volume in your final master, or is the Loudness Wars truly over already and this no longer matters?

I would stay away from the loudness wars, some genres just sound better with some dynamics.
Then there is kick & bass, people just try to make that as loud as possible.

We have to distinguish between "staying away from loudness war" and "being R128 compilant". The first mans leaving some dynamic range, but still controlling the dynamics. The second one means, whatever dynamics there are, your integrated (average) loudness should be on -23LUFS. ...which essentially means forcing yourself to making moreless 23db of headroom for any kind of dynamics you can have there. (thus making it intentionally really quiet) ...and whether there is dynamics or not depends on where you made R128 correction. If pre or post limiter. ...so it depends on sound you're after I guess.

Oh and if you want to get really fancy, then companies recomanded by EBU (and the whole broadcast indusrty) are RTW and TC. They both usually make (really similar, lol) hardware meters, but they sniffed out opprtunity and made also plugins. I think this is most R128 compilant as you can get:
https://www.rtw.com/en/products/software/rtw-loudness-tools.html
http://www.tcelectronic.com/lm1n/

Edit: ...and when there is a buck to make, Waves appears rather quickly. http://www.waves.com/plugins/wlm-loudness-meter

Thank you. If i were to send it to him, would I have to lower my volume to the reference of LUFS -20K weighted and get about -4 on that scale before sending it in to him?

This depends on the meter. Some of them have -24 (or -23, I believe it got changed in one edition of R128) set as 0. (Those should, in theory, measure in LU, not LUFS.)
...so simply grab any meter that can show LUFS correctly. (Like https://www.meldaproduction.com/plugins/product.php?id=MLoudnessAnalyzer) reset it, play the whole track from beginning to the end and the integrated value should stay on -23 LUFS at the end. (I think there is -+1db tolerance) If not, compensate the difference and run it again.

I believe there are some off-line tools for that, but I haven't searched for them yet.

EDIT: Oh, I'm sorry, wrong info. M-Loudness Analyser is by default also -23 = 0. ...but there's a LUFS preset ... or you can target that zero.

I work at TV broadcast company, you can trust me on this:
It's "recomandation" by EBU (European Broadcasting Union) called R128. It's targeted especially at commercials being much louder than the actual content at tv/radio.

That paper dercsibes three main things:

1) It defines LUFS. They are essentially full scale decibels, but with a twist. For meaturing LUFS manufacturers need to build precisely described high-shelf filter into their meters, that compensates ear's sensitivity around 3-5k. So if you measure 1k sine with LUFS, it will return same value as dBFS meter would. If you measure 5k sine of the same volume, it fill go up by I believe 4LUFS.

2) It defines integration times and measuring gates. That means it tells you (and meter's manufacturers) how to measure average Loudness across whole "program" you're making. ...leaving silent parts out of the measurement and so on...

3) It says that the recommandation is, for all TV's and radios, to normalize all their content to -24 LUFS. That way, in theory, you shouldn't have those huge volume jumps when commercial spot goes on.

...problem that I have with R128 is, that it's far from perfect, but engineers tend to praise it. It's totally useless for certain types of content (classical music, some football matches etc...). Lot of engineers (I guess including the one you spoke to.) think it'll save the world and they require everyone and everything to target at -24LUFS. But in music bussines, as far as I know, nobody gives a damn about R128, so you would end up with intentionally quiter mix than everyone else. ...I'd say, just leave this to radio station engineers. It's essentially their problem.

EDIT: If you're interested, here's the R128:
https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
...and here's the ITU paper it refers to for definition of LUFS measurement:
https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bs/R-REC-BS.1770-4-201510-I!!PDF-E.pdf

Yeah, don't worry about it too much. When you were little, you were able to hear even 22k without even knowing it. It will go down with age. 20-20k are just two nice numbers they've chosen to describe human hearing. It just so happens that you're at the age when it fits perfectly. I'm 26 and I'm pretty much dead on 17k. (having to crank up the volume on 16.5k to hear it at least a bit)

But in real world, highest sound you're gonna work with during music production (harmonics of hihats) are around 12-14k. So no worry.

Edit: Oh and also, few years back, I watched a tv report about this with my mom, around 45 at the time. She also stopped around 17k ...so I think it doesn't fall of in a stable pace.