Okay,

So I know I may get some backlash here by buying into the loudness war, but I believe a great amount of the general public prefers loud music as opposed to quiet music, so, I am asking about any tips here to raise the perceived loudness (not necessarily RMS) of my tracks. I am hoping to bring them closer to comparable to the loudest mixes out at the moment without losing all sense of quality and dynamics in my music (I work hard to achieve those). So, If anybody has any tips or has gone through this type of struggle please reply!

Thanks!

Not so much sound like them, but just get in the same league, so listeners dont get turned off by the difference in volume between some blasted through the roof carnage track and my track

Quote from: Ozone on January 09, 2016, 08:21:51 pm

Okay,

 I am hoping to bring them closer to comparable to the loudest mixes out at the moment without losing all sense of quality and dynamics in my music

lmao good luck.

All these elitist big room mainstream EDM garbage producers just max their threshold and pump up the gain and call it mastered.

Dubstep used to be like that... Don't you remember 2012.

Give Maximus a try. Between the per-band soft saturation and custom "compression" curves, you can get pretty close to a constantly maxed peak.

Quote from: Luke_BadCatholics on January 09, 2016, 08:41:26 pm

There's no harm in wanting a loud track, as long as your not murdering your dynamics in the process - and he's definitely right, there's definitely a notion among listeners that "louder is better".

Might as well just slap 5 soundgoodizers on the master channel amirite?

The go-to.


EDIT: But in all seriousness, I find really exploring how you can make the most of stereo space in a track will help you get some extra volume, between widening sounds or just avoiding having frequencies occupy the same space, it generally will give your track a bigger and louder feel without really having to push the volume.

Okay,

So I know I may get some backlash here by buying into the loudness war, but I believe a great amount of the general public prefers loud music as opposed to quiet music, so, I am asking about any tips here to raise the perceived loudness (not necessarily RMS) of my tracks. I am hoping to bring them closer to comparable to the loudest mixes out at the moment without losing all sense of quality and dynamics in my music (I work hard to achieve those). So, If anybody has any tips or has gone through this type of struggle please reply!

Thanks!

I beleive matt zo said something about having less in your mix increases the overall loudness of the track, because you have less competiting elements that are being balanced out.

and honestly, you're going to run into some issues if you're trying to maximize your loudness with out loosing dynamics. that's just the way optimization works.

if you really want a loud track, make one synthesizer and have that be the only thing you mix lol.


other wise: kick, snare, cymbals, sub bass, bass wubs, lead. that's it man. you can get your balance just right those are the only elements you'll need to push a loud af mix.

But that stuff tends to be incredibly harsh to listen to because of the volume. i turn my volume down because a lot of these "big league"  dudes just crush the shit out of their mix. Caspa does a really good job of this. He gets the loudness out, but doesn't over do it. it's honestly quite excellent hearing any thing he puts out now, because i don't have to turn it down in order to actually hear it.

Compression aside, you can attain louder and cleaner mixes by settling conflicts between sounds that occupy a similar frequency range.  When sounds within the same range conflict (especially in the low to mid range), muddiness arises and you lose headroom unnecessarily.  You can save yourself more headroom by creating EQ cuts at pivotal areas.

Be careful of cutting too much -- that can cause your sounds to become "hollow" and "thin".

All I can say that it's a skill that takes time and lots of practice. A loud master starts with a clean mix.

Sometimes you can use a few limiters in parallel rather than one limiter all together. Try to do all your compression on busses rather than the master.


But seriously, practice x10000