making your tracks louder help!!

D

Dub Logic

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ez.. im a hip hop producer (usin logic) and am reasonably happy with the way my tracks sound. However the other day i gave one of my beats to a mate to play at an open mic hip hop nit to see how it sounded throuhg a cub system and realised how much quieter my tracks are than others that he was mixin... now iv not got alot of headroom on output 1 and 2 so would have to use other plugins etc to make things sound louder. my mate tweaked a load of things i never use mainly enveloper, expander, stereo spread exciter etc etc and more distortion than i would normally use...

just wanted to know how u guys get the volume of ur tracks to the same volume as established producers without compromisin an organic sound... below is the beat before all this extra processin... i like the soun of it its just faar too quiet.. wot do u guys do any suggestions?

http://soundcloud.com/dub-logic/beat-12
 
first step, get your mixdown as close as you can, nice track btw, kick and bass need to come up in the mix I think, the strings are very dominant

I wouldnt bother with stereo spreads and stuff like that to much, you dont have much panning on the track, you can very quickly open up the stereo field by panning your sound about (except the kick and bass of course, keep those mono center)

2nd step, gentle compression on the master (tame the spikes and big sounds aswell as bring out hte details), start at 1:3 and bring the threshold down until it starts flickering, make sure u havent got any unwanted distortion going on

3rd step, limiter (boost the volume essentially), this is down to taste really, but a gentle flicker is usually more than enough, over do it and you will loose dynamics

all of that should give your track allot more life, the Mixdown is the most important part really, but steps 2 and 3 will give you a reasonable master to play with until you can get a mastering engineer to do the job properly (no substitute for a good engineer!)
 
^ good advice. if you're using logic i'd recommend using the adaptive limiter on your master, leave the threshold at 0db and crank the gain until you're happy with it, you can normally get away with boosting it a fair bit but yeah make sure nothing distorts and you don't loose the dynamics. I run a multimeter on my master as well so you can see where everything is hitting
 
I can see from your wave form you've used no compression,or very little, a small bit of compression would do the trick, just to beef up the bassline and glue it together a bit, all this louder business is nonsense, It's like stereos don't have volume controls,
nice tune btw,

sounds fine mate!!
 
also, ozone is the absolute shit for mastering. it even has a "loudness maximizer" section which is a glorified limiter but it has heaps of other good stuff to make your stuff shine.
 
mix down properly and turn it up on the master using a limiter or gain plug : p should get pretty loud, check the track through a spectrum and compare the loudness with professional tracks. its relatively easy to get shit stupid loud with no distortion and no effects on the master aaand no redlining
 
Get your mix good ^ as above. Then bounce to a wav, then run it thru some mastering plugins like ozone
 
Make sure you smooth of any peaks in the mix too, that way if you do start to boost using a limiter or compression, you wont end up ducking things out to make room for different elements.
 
TongueFlap said:
Get your mix good ^ as above. Then bounce to a wav, then run it thru some mastering plugins like ozone
Click to expand...

this!

Just use ozone mate, even just one of the presets on the master wav will boost the volume without dampening quality.
 
Nice to see a track with dynamics for a change. I bet if the DJ cranked it, your track would have sounded better than the one before it.

It's the never ending compromise, level vs dynamics vs sound quality.

Each and every mix has it's potential before the downsides override the upsides.

There are numerous techniques all with trade offs.

Cool tune. (and good advice from the first reply for increasing level generally)

cheers
 
Nice one guys bare different techniques to try iuot... ima giv all of these a go over the next week or so see wot works best will leave a some comments on this thread to see wot i got out of each technique... cheers peeps!

---------- Post added at 13:54 ---------- Previous post was at 13:00 ----------
miszt said:
first step, get your mixdown as close as you can, nice track btw, kick and bass need to come up in the mix I think, the strings are very dominant

I wouldnt bother with stereo spreads and stuff like that to much, you dont have much panning on the track, you can very quickly open up the stereo field by panning your sound about (except the kick and bass of course, keep those mono center)

2nd step, gentle compression on the master (tame the spikes and big sounds aswell as bring out hte details), start at 1:3 and bring the threshold down until it starts flickering, make sure u havent got any unwanted distortion going on

3rd step, limiter (boost the volume essentially), this is down to taste really, but a gentle flicker is usually more than enough, over do it and you will loose dynamics

all of that should give your track allot more life, the Mixdown is the most important part really, but steps 2 and 3 will give you a reasonable master to play with until you can get a mastering engineer to do the job properly (no substitute for a good engineer!)
Click to expand...

Have given this a go... compressed the master and usin the limiter got it peakin at just under zero.. havnt pushed it too much with the limiter to avoid too much squashin of the sound... managed to get a fair bit of volume boost without affectin the sound too much but despite it peakin at around zero and the sound bein more compressed it still sounds about half as loud as tunes of similar styles on my itunes... gna try a few other suggestions and hit back...
 
great track, i forgot it was on and actually did some work, i thought it was wax tailor for a few minutes there. ace. but really fk loudness man, if someone needs it they can just crank the gain
 
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