Thanks so much for helping, always great to hear your perspective on things, especially great to hear so on my own music! The comment section is full of interesting observations as always too!!
Your album sounds great. Scooping the mid range has eliminated that harshness and allowed a lot of the other musical elements to cut through. In fact I think it's one of the better mixes I've ever heard in terms of clarity, I can hear everything without my ears trying to 'close up'.
@@worstproducerever119 It is not. You can use almost any single knob throughout the song development from the player's fingers to the final output volume knob to make it sound like crap, but none of those work alone to make the song sound good. They all have to work in harmony to make it happen. So, the volume knob is rather "sound worse" knob.
@@drrodopszin Noisia isn't really music though. It's discordant, satanic masturbation.
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I'm not saying that Dan is the only person we should listen to when it comes to loudness. But we should probably pay some heed to the person who won the loudness war.
@@jasoncruizer 100% agreed. If you go to for -14 even -10 LUFSi for edm it will sound weak AF. Really depends. So never always go for -12 or some "recommended" number. Use your Ears! BRO! xD
One of the hardest things to learn is having some confidence in your own mixing and production decisions. We tend to be our own worst critics, and it's easy to notice differences between your mix and other mixes and decide that your mix must be deficient in some way. But it might also be that it's just different, and maybe that's okay. What's the point if everything sounds the same, anyway?
I do realize I don't have that confidence myself and I have identified at least one big reason why that is. And it has nothing to do with my confidence on my skills even though the result is exactly the same. It is that I cannot trust any other people to be able to say if the song is good or not, so I cannot get any affirmation. I haven't got any other kind of trust issues whatsoever and I have no idea what causes this, so I don't have any solutions to it either. I only know that those trust issues are in my head and not their fault, but knowing that doesn't really help solving them, if just a little mitigating them.
I took a listen to a few songs on the album (on spotify) and my first thoughts weren't "This sounds good, but it should be louder" it was "Damn this is a vibe and it sounds smooth". Personally, I think the songs are perfect where they are. One of my favorite songs and examples that loudness means nothing is 'Autumn' by Caligula's Horse and the beginning of the song is incredibly quiet, but it absolutely serves a purpose being that quiet. It's supposed to be delicate and contrast the triumphantly loud ending.
It's amazing how 3:52 of you talking can erase over a decade's worth of mix anxiety. I've wasted so much time worrying about loudness, but the simple truth is what you said; the listener will take care of it.
Dan-thank you-your videos are a wealth of information and I've learned so much about loudness, phasing, and EQing principles that are muddied up by the thousands of other videos on the subject. One of the more common issues I experience when trying to achieve a decently loud mix is the meter peaking while the overall volume seams relatively quiet. For years I would try to make very careful EQ moves, then compress / multiband sidechain the hell out of each individual track, then compress/limit again on the master to get close to the same loudness as a reference, but to the detriment of the overall quality of the mix. The mix would be loud, but lacking in depth and compressing/limiting would bring out all sorts of nasty sibilance and other unpleasant frequencies that totally "ruin the vibe" as the kids say. Although I remember your advice that it's more important to make the mix sound good rather than loud it's still a bad habit to do this I'm trying to unlearn, call it cognitive dissonance but I myself find it annoying when listening to a playlist with tracks that vary widely in volume, even when I turn that silly "normalization" thing on. Anyway, what I learned is to get out of MIDI and render to audio to better see phase relationships on the grid, and most critically (to me), to examine the transients/peaks of each individual sound relative to the rest of the signal and to try to process the transients/compress to gain as much headroom as possible while still maintaining the character of the source. I'm not saying this is the case for the mix you are going over in this video, this is just my experience trying to make silly boom-boom untz-untz dance music. TL;DR... first principles... more headroom = more room for pushing the levels with a limiter / clipper, use subtle compression or transient shaping to make the signal have *slightly* less dynamics while maintaining it's character. If you compress and limit too much your mix will be loud, but sound flat and maybe even a bit obnoxious to listen to.
It's amazing. Dan, being absent for some time, returns for a video on a (for me) trivial topic and still manage it to drop one or two things that switch on the light bulb. Not that I wouldn't have known these things before but Dan brings back forgotten things so effortlessly to my awareness that it has something of an old wise man on the top of a stormy mountain. "Noone listens to music any louder than they want to", for instance. Screaming loud masters, do you listen?
pro songs all sound vastly different, i found this to be more noticeable when i started mixing songs and using reference tracks, some pro songs seem to have very little low end i was kind of shocked as i didnt really notice before. I stopped listening so critically using reference tracks against my mixes and just use them for and overall feel.
Dan! Congratulations! Out of all of my favorite channels, you are the very first one whom I am sending a bit of my hard-earned cash towards with a membership. I had to plan this out, because now that the ball is rolling downhill, I need to make sure I don't start sponsoring 30 channels, but eventually I plan to upgrade... Keep the great work coming, please. I know it's few and far between, but when you get into a subject or product, it's very much worth it. I have a rather important question (and possibly a video request): Not long ago, Mr. I-won't-even-try-to-spell-it-because-I-just-learned-how-to-pronounce-it at White Sea Studios... Yeetzuh (I'm from Alabama, I have to mock the culture to keep from crying) shoved a comment in sideways about Plugin Doctor. He said that he was under the impression that it's not nearly as accurate and telling as we all think it is. That made me immediately think of what you'd have to say about it, and I wondered if that knock has been brought to your attention. I respect Yahtzee almost as much as you, so I can't really take that statement with a grain of salt. Care to retort? Thanks for all you do!
Thanks for the support! I think Plugin Doctor is useful, and as far as I'm aware it does the tests properly. But I often see people use it in error, most often: trying to use the 'linear analysis' to measure non linear plugins. There is indeed a video on the subject coming soon (ish).
I love how you talk about something many many producers forget and its so important: an artistic and esthetic (like phiosophical discipline) point of view.
I think when people say "louder" the sometimes mean "clearer." When you hear a song in a supermarket and it sounds super-clear, it's not loud; the speakers they use in markets have crossovers that cut most of the sub bass signal out. A good test is to put a shelf filter on your mix that lowers everything below 60-80hz by like 10db. If your mix gets quieter, then the bass is the major driving force. If the mix stays at about the same level, then you're balanced. If you hear bass notes at the supermarket, it's probably harmonics added for presence.
I'm a mastering engineer, and I have the most difficult time explaining the extent to which low frequency information (especially sub-sonic stuff) eats up overall apparent volume. . .
very well put, couldn't agree more. this has always been my argument - we're all humans who can figure out how a volume knob works so we can each listen at the level that suits us. the loudness wars were stupid and unnecessary to begin with and over-compression and limiting has ruined many otherwise great productions. it really is time to move on from this silliness. just make it sound good
IMHO, and not advocating for LOUD IS BETTER, but I'm not sure about "Their volume knob for your album is where they want it to be..." because nowadays we listen to so much more music than before, song after song, in an endless stream of songs... and we don't change the volume for each song... so are we in a "volume knob"-less listening experience, where apparent loudness matters? Maybe it has always been like this I'm thinking radio, public spaces, other common listening situations... for the majority of people.... is anything that is not an 'album focused' listening a "volume knob"-less experience?....
Yeah, you try and explain that to a client. At the end of the day if your track isn’t as loud as everyone else’s then that is perceived to be a big problem. I’m not talking the loudness wars of the 90s, but more keeping it relative to everything else on Spotify. No amount of “well just turn up the volume knob” will cut it with a fee-paying client. Get the mix sorted and constantly compare to reference tracks already on Spotify/iTunes/Amazon etc.
Once I dug deeper into this topic and realized the Streaming services and TH-cam would simply set the loudness of whatever you feed it to their preset standard, but recommended -1db of headroom I stopped caring immedeately. Now the limiter simply gets set to where I feel it adds without negatively impacting the sound, which for me and my mixes appear to be where it shaves 0-2db-ish of the louder transients with a -1 on the output. Thank you Dan.
While I agree with the core message of the video, I don't agree that loudness will "take care of itself". Yes, streaming services are going to normalise your mix to -14 LUFS, but there's different ways to get that result, and they sound different, so you ought to have a say in how to get there. Due to the limiting, the mix shown has lost a lot of transient information, which plays an important role in loudness perception (I think that's backed up by research but take it with a grain of salt). If the inevitable normalisation is kept in mind while mixing/mastering, then you could hit that number while maintaining dynamic range, so you get a louder sounding mix. I think 'I Won't Freeze' is a good example of this: the percussion at the end of the track doesn't slice through as much as I would like - there's just not enough volume difference between each hit and the background levels, and it gets somewhat lost in the mix. Contrast to the percussion in a track like 'Screening', by Mr. Bill. While obviously a different style, it meters about the same -14 LUFS, and still sounds smooth (to my ears), but with more dynamic range. I also disagree with Dan's point that nobody listens quieter than they want to. If I'm listening while washing the dishes for example, I'm not going to stop and adjust the volume - I would either need to clean my hands, or get grease on my gear, so I just won't bother. Same goes for when I'm wearing gloves, or working in the garden, or riding a motorbike, and so on. I set the volume to the level that sounds good for most tracks, which is pretty consistent thanks to normalisation, so when a quiet track comes along, I simply enjoy it a little bit less. It's small, but it might be the difference between checking out their other releases or not. This is probably even more true for the listeners who skip tracks in the first 10 seconds if they don't immediately love it. The loudness wars happened for a reason: it sounds good. There's something to be learned from that. And yeah, the end user's devices do have volume controls, but that's not a perfect solution. An extreme example is that you could export at -80dBFS, and it will get turned way up by the platform or the user, but since you're going to be approaching the noise floor of a 16 bit file it's going to be a pretty poor sounding result. Also, adding gain isn't always going to be as clean and linear as in the 64 bit float signal path of a DAW. So I do think loudness matters, and you should try master to the specs appropriate for the medium. Just like you need to be considerate about low end causing the needle to skip on vinyl, you should be deliberate about how normalisation will affect your track for streaming. But none of this is relevant if it compromises the sound that you want - which is of course Dan's point. Nobody is mastering orchestral recordings like this, and that's fine, it suits the genre. Sometimes you want a super low & clean sub bass, which just doesn't translate to a phone or laptop, but who cares? All choices are a compromise. For the record though, I liked the album (particularly the vocal production and low end), and it was plently loud enough for me. Favourite tracks were BREAK & Closing Statement.
There is no statistical correlation between loudness and commercial success. The loudness wars happened for two reasons: insecurity and ignorance. And a lack of industry standards. Three reasons.
I'm glad those streaming services/TH-cam low key put an end to loudness wars. Makes mastering for bedroom musicians so much easier in terms of dynamics, EQ and limiting.
When I make music on BandLab and post it to Spotify it is so much quieter than other songs. Other amauter artists using the same program as me seem to have no problem but for some reason it happens to my songs. Do you know how I can fix that?
The thing is that if you master at -14lufs it will be too quiet next to classic tracks, even with the normalization turned on...Not so long ago I remixed one EP I did and uploaded it to Spotify, the target level I aimed I believe was -11 lufs, Loudness Penalty at -3, the thing was that one day I was listening to Spotify randomly and I thought "Hey let's see how my track compares to this" and it was incredibly frustrating to notice my track sounded quieter and I had to turn the volume up even with the normalization turned on...In my opinion people who listen to playlists won't take the bother to be changing the volume all the time...The solution for me it to choose a classic album or song you like how it sounds and try to match that loudness because if you grew up in the 90's, early 2000's your music will sound quieter than anything mastered for CD and if you make a style you would like to fit in with those classic songs you cannot be so much quieter...I"m not talking about super squashing the thing but make it loud enough so you can be in the ballpark with this other classic tracks, if not your track will sound smaller, weaker and boring next to those classics and it's super depressing...On top of that if you listen to music with a USB stick in the car you will need to make it loud if you don't want to be super quiet next to all those classics in the road...
PS: To add to the bad news, as far as I tested it TH-cam Music doesn't normalize and I don't know if it allows you to turn it on so the loudness wars will continue in TH-cam Music and if you master so low you will not be competitive on this platform which may end up being the biggest one someday...
sometimes i’m in the red yet lufs loudness isn’t hitting even -14, which i figure isn’t loud enough for streaming (assuming bringing level up might sound bad?). vid is still vague on sensible non loud levels, if normalization is -14...
a number of years ago i recorded an EP with my band, and i insisted that the mix engineer had the mix too loud and showed imaged of it clipping and it was audible, i was so upset. The worst thing was, my bandmates agreed to keep it loud and ignored the clipping, "as it was quieter that my other CDs" and "i don't want to have to change the volume for each CD"
Some people had already figured out your last point by the 70s, Dan. I can remember quite a few albums that featured the printed exhortation to "PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD!!!"
We made at work (speaker manufacturer) raw comparison between streaming platforms and turners out that Spotify is really lacking loudness, but even more important the quality changes into "shit" when we get the loudness matching. Don't know what they're doing there, but if you want to have 'that musical moment' try something else than previously mentioned platform... For casual listening and background noise, it's ok!
No, welcome back to you! And I would make the music even 5dB quieter if it were to be nominated for allowance in my music collection. My question to you would be: why didn't you use more of the dynamic range? It would have looked so much better without the limited peaks... Thanks for the video!
@@mal2ksc Thanks, and yes you're right, it just instantly reveals whats's going on. After I wrote the comment I realized the volume adjustment was done by spotify, so the peaks could have been touching the ceiling in the original track. Spotify used to add some compression as well, I don't know if they still do, but it was enough for me to not give that a chance at all. And Dan has taken the responsibility of teaching the world how to be aware of and enjoy dynamics.
The mixes weren't overly dynamic to start with, I only clipped and limited by a total of 3-5db per song (if I'm remembering correctly). I'm not a big fan of the way limiting sounds being pushed hard on a master. The reason the sings probably look more limited is just cuz there's a lot going on in the songs. I think the transients still get throhgh when I listen back to the songs.
I do agree with your points. But I understand way people think this is a problem. Many people listens to songs in a playlist, in a random order and may not adjust the volume song to song. And many tests has shown that humans think something sounds better if the volume is slightly higher. I know headphone, speaker, room and much more also influence the sound. But for some music some songs might sound less interesting between other songs on a playlist, and if people adjusted the volume they might love the song more. And I know that if you take this thought patton to its extreme we end up at the loudness wars. I feel like it is a problem with no solution.
The solution: just stop worrying about it! If your mix is a couple of dBs quieter in a playlist, that's not going to stop someone loving it, and if they love it they'll crank it up!
@@DanWorrall I think this position takes for granted the listeners patience, particularly when dealing with unknown music consumed somewhat passively. The idea that if your music is ''good enough'' (whatever that actually means) it will ''grab them'' or something doesn't hold up in the real world, especially with certain long form styles of composition or structure. It assumes all forms of music behave equally and it also assumes that the listener is perfectly happy being an active mix engineer throughout their evening commute, while they make their dinner, do their homework or talk to their friends...turning up good songs, remembering to turn it back down for the next one, I know for myself I have on multiple occasions been immensely frustrated by a very aggressive follow up track when I've returned to what I was doing and the song I'd ''cranked'' finished playing. The amount of music consumption that is consumed in the ''background'' and to be perfectly honest, validly so, means the problem people are asking advice about is still a relevant one that is frequently waved away. When I'm asked this question sincerely I tend to focus more on education around perceived loudness, which admittedly you did touch on in this video, rather than dismiss their worries with the same ubiquitous sentence they probably heard the very first day they saw any video on production. It's all well and good to say someone is gonna crank your song if they love it enough, it doesn't help the matter for a smaller artist trying to establish themselves in an industry increasingly centered around algorithmically curated playlists which are often meant to be played in the background and if not, are meant to be consumed en masse with a million more options for those lacking the patience to be level matching as they go. Overall I do think the issue is negligible at the end of the day, if there was an area of improvement for someone's career this likely wouldn't be the highest priority to work on in 99% of cases if the goal was more engagement with their music however I do get frustrated by peoples quite reasonable concerns being acknowledged but overall waved away. It falls into the same logical fallacies as the effective altruist movement.
@@fiachnaodonnell7895 this is all beside the point really. The fundamental reason you want your mix to play louder is because louder usually seems better. But if you have to make your mix sound worse to achieve that loudness, what have you gained?
@Dan Worrall Surely you can acknowledge that a reasonable compromise can exist and therefore this will not be beside the point? Any artist has experienced compromise in the vision to achieve something deemed more worthwhile to the vision. Given human hearings immense fallibility yet very high sensitivity to level difference, I think it is yet again...Still relevant.
I'm not trying to be smart, but why is this news to people these days still? The more you clip the more distortion so it will be louder but actually sound worse. Maybe not worse in the very short run but listen to it long enough and your ears will get annoyed. We have people moving to vinyl to restore something organic that they feel is missing. What is missing are all those waveforms that have been clipped because someone wants it to be mastered "louder". It's not louder it's more distorted. The listener not the engineer determines the final loudness. So we have people, embracing a format (vinyl) with more distortion to somehow cover up or make up for everything that is being clipped. This is backwards on so many levels. The problem with wave clipping distortion is that most people are not even really aware of it. Their ears over time just get annoyed and they stop listening. Sorry if I am just repeating the obvious. If so, move along nothing to see hear.
Hearing louder music does fool us into thinking it sounds better, so when a track appears in a playlist and it's comparitively quiter, that impression is lost. Your point does stand though, but in isolation or in an album setting. Both of which aren't very common.
i think it's definitely a genre thing. some genres are designed to be very loud, while others need to be quieter. i tired out the clip to zero approach on baphpometrix's channel and i found it helped my mixing decisions, however I'm not trying too achieve the insane loudness of -6--7 lufs that that method was designed for. it helped uncover flaws in my mix that i wouldn't of otherwise heard until the final master phase which is very helpful in that regard.
I think it's more useful to say "some genres have less dynamic range," since loudness isn't a useful creative decision since it can be undone so easily by the volume control.
My dark Industrial electronic album has around -15 LUFS of integrated loudness, I don't care it sounds "quiet" at first because, as you said, once you turn up the volume knob you can feel those transients and good dynamic range that could have been lost if I decided to make it loud just for the sake of it. Thanks for still advocating at stopping this loudness war nonsense.
@@mal2ksc hopefully Spotify decreases the default loudness standard in the future as low as Apple has it now so that stops being a problem, I have in my spotify settings in the volume normalization set to "quiet" so the loudness parameter goes down to -18 LUFS and then there is no more volume changes, only more or less dynamic range songs
The voice of reason, and just good plain sense. Lacking elsewhere, I know I can always find a healthy spoonful here, and it all feels better once again.
"The fact that it might make it seem quieter in a direct musical comparison to a completely different mix shouldn't really be a consideration. So What?" The answer is a lot of musicians seeking to be discovered don't want to sound quiet next to other songs on the radio, or in a playlist or in multiple other obvious contexts. That isn't unreasonable.
It's just insecurity. With most pop music you're unlikely to get more than a dB or so of difference after normalising. Not enough to stop someone loving it.
I first noticed this element of good sounding mixes in Shellac. I'm not sure if he mixes them himself, but in any case, he is an experienced studio engineer and I like to believe he knows what he's doing and I expect that is reflected in the final masters of their music. They sound awesome to me. And to the point, Shellac, in any format, sounds quieter than a lot of the other music I've listened to. I often use a simple mp3 player because, despite the name, it will attempt to play back any format it has within it... and comparably, Shellac needs to be turned up. Same when I listen on a streaming service. It's clearly not a bug, but a feature.
Steve wants it that way. But since he is busy wearing two masks over another while he is alone in his studio during skype interviews and telling the cringiest bullshit why analog and xformers must be better in his pov I am out even if I once liked his music very much ;) When a punkrocker tells me my music must be recorded on an expensive snobby tape it tells me that this has nothing to do with punk anymore. His argument that tapes last longer because of the different digital formats is so flawed that I even can´t laugh about it. What I know is that I can buy a bunch of old PCs with an old logic or cubase version on it plus a backup HD which will play my old projects for decades for free with no degradation or expensive servicing including obsolete parts. This is not true at all for your heavy 24 track analog tape machine for sure.
You mean the band Shellac? So Steve Albini, who also produced/mixed In Utero by Nirvana, and a couple of PJ Harvey's records? (Amongst many many other albums too). He's great! I really like his sparse and honest production style. I've seen Shellac live, and they were fantastic. You're absolutely right, his mixes need to be turned up when you listen to them, but they sound great once they are! (He even put suggested tone control settings in the liner notes to In Utero!) This is also true of Pantera's back catalogue. Listened to at low volume the guitars can sound a bit thin and buzzy. Crank it, through decent speakers, and it suddenly makes sense. It was mean to be listed to LOUD, and the power and brutality of the mix comes across.
IIRC Steve avoids compression (especially with his own band) which is why the balance between the band members sounds more like a live band than a pop record, and why it sounds best at live volumes. Shellac is like audiophile art rock for that reason - or it would be if audiophiles listened to them!
@@timpanic believe it or not some analog formats will last much longer in a dry room than any other digital support can without the propper expensive mantainment (perpetual backups). We're talking decades here, not months.
@@miquelmarti6537 Not convinced. I have three Tape machines and I offer digital conversion to my clients. 90% of the tapes I get are a sticky mess. Half of the tape sticks at the head after playing them once and you can see through the tape because its so worn out. Beside the myth of no degradation ( maybe at a dry room at NASA with expensive employees) you have to have a perfectly mantained and alligned machine to play that format correct. Beside of the normal degradation you have when you don´t spool the tape from time to time caused by self magnetization, a normal RAID system is much cheaper and have no degradation. So what are you talking about? I have a lot of tapes from the 90ties...all have degradation and all have kind of speed problems at the end of the tape. Maybe better than people would think but worse than I prefer the resolution. After I convert them I better avoid working from the tape. Beside that I have digital files from the 90ties...all intact and no degradation. Expensive mantainment? I just have to copy them on a fresh raid system and I am done for the next 30 years. The point was that your modern setup won't play your songs with all the vsti and plugins anymore but how I said it's much easier to have an old machine with win xp and your old daw than to mantain your expensive heavy tape machine over the years when you were too lazy to bounce your single tracks down to wavs! Ever mantained a studer machine and replaced heads? Ever saw tape jitter on an oscilloscope? After that you will laugh about any digital jitter! Alone that video where steve is cutting tape at the wrong position just to copy a part somewhere else is middleagestyle with offering no plus on any art at all. Sorry I am a big analog lover and love my tape machines just for the beauty but I don´t need them to write and mix a good song and I would be ashamed if I had to ;) its more a state of mind thing not a thing of pure Materialism.
Probably a bigger issue for most is, why does no one listen to my music on Spotify? One "loudness issue track" vs the other 80-90 million tracks there.
Thanks Dan. On Soundcloud (which, as far as I know, doesn't have loudness normalization like Spotify/Tidal) this *problem* is more exaggerated, and causes me [irrational] anxiety on a regular basis... I have only realized in recent months that the main reason my mixes sound too quiet isn't because I'm not pushing the integrated lufs high enough, its because I've always subconsciously mixed my tracks quiet in the upper-mid range. My ears like this less-harsh or "smoother" sound, but I'm learning the average listener usually (and myself, sometimes) hears this upper-mid range loudness difference as muffled/clear instead of smooth/harsh like me. This video has helped me confirm my recent thoughts, and relax my anxiety a bit.
What headphones have you got? Because i just avoid any and all headphones, no matter how many people recommend them, and they do tend to get recommended for production/monitoring use, which have pretty angry anomalies up around 8-10k; and which have nothing at all going on above 12k, which is another unfortunate trait. Of course speakers aren't quite immune from these issues either, but that's... more avoidable.
@@SianaGearz While mixing, I swap back and forth between my Paradigm bookshelf speakers and a pair of Skullcandy Hesh ANC (with the noise cancelling turned off). I think its important to make the mix sound good on speakers and average consumer-tier headphones, both. I know they are not professional grade monitoring headphones, but that's kind of the point. I assume that you are thinking my choices of monitors are leading to me mixing the upper-mids quiet, but I think that my ears are just overly sensitive to those frequencies.
@@superactivitylad To preface i wasn't thinking quite along these lines. After all a lot of highly recommended monitoring devices have a very harsh and unpleasant top end, more so than random HiFi/consumer gear. They call it "revealing" and i wager a guess, it apparently helps people - people with more typical hearing - avoid producing excessive sibilance in their mix, which can sound quite offensive, so it's in a way a useful crutch, but not one without drawbacks. I think if you did use something like that, you'd just come up with a worse outcome as opposed to a better one. Look i'm equipped with all sorts of "random" junk as well, i'm not about to judge you on that. We just have to face that we're hearing things differently from most people, and most people don't really hear those things that are painful to us. I too am sensitive to sharp narrow top end resonances in the speakers and headphones. There are so many headphones no matter the price bracket i listen to them for 10 BLOODY SECONDS and i tear them off angrily. A recent trip to HiFi expo was quite "revealing" as well. :( My speakers are ELAC BS52 bookshelf speakers. These have spectacularly smooth top end, good top end extension as well. Smooth crossover region too, so apart from having no sub-bass, they're kind of remarkably good. I test drove dozens of speakers before these, but i've had these for 15 years now and i'm happy. As far as studio monitor speakers go, they often tend to sound pretty harsh, with exception of those by Adam audio which i have been impressed with every time i hear them, all of them. Yours have an alu tweeter; this tweeter construction is prone to breakup and it depends on a lot of things, they can be made well, but if i heard sharp resonances in the frequencies we have trouble with, i wouldn't be surprised. The tweeter is placed in a shallow little horn, which is better than nothing, it's an attempt to shape the beam, but there has been no attempt at corner treatment to suppress diffraction, which will tend to make the top end more wavy, potentially adding to the unfortunate character of the tweeter. Is that, visually, a faithful description of your speakers? As far as headphones, the ever popular ATH-M50 cause me this sort of grief, as do the 30€ Superlux studio headphones (681 was it?) and their rebrands such as Presonus Studio HD7. I have dozens of headphones (none of them being much more than $100, so nothing crazy expensive and lots of super cheap stuff) and listened to hundreds more. Currently i'm using self-tuned in-ears, several pairs, which started their life as various pairs of Chinese 1DDs IEMs, such as KZ EDX and TRN MT1, might end up manufacturing my own for friends and stuff. Unfortunately although some of these Chinese things are good out of the box, you buy another pair several months later same model and it's completely different and really annoying sounding, so i can't just recommend you go out and buy them. But i'll be damned if the horn driver family they use in most of these isn't an impressive foundation to work with, the amount of linear excursion is nuts, lots of shaping potential as well, you can use aggressive acoustic impedance and they stay efficient enough. And i also start seeing how they shape the response with acoustic impedances and vents and how i can do my own. I've learned speaker design in the past, experimented, it's fairly easy to design good adequate sounding speakers, but i didn't consider trying to design headphones before, it's kind of a black art and probably will stay such even in the face of success. I have had a brief listen to ATH-M40 not too long ago and i must say i don't hate them. I'll probably get them eventually. I merely disregarded them for a time because the M50 burned me. Ultimately i think people will ideally choose a listening device that suits their hearing and preferences; and i think it's kind of a mistake to mix for your listening peculiarities, but it looks like you figured it out how to avoid that. My hearing used to extend well into ultrasonic into the early 20s. Right now i don't think it does at the age of 40, but i have been able to preserve most of my hearing as opposed to most of my peers. 20 years ago i got myself some concert earplugs from the drummer department and ever since i generally don't leave home without a pair. I walk out of the club, and through 2 metal doors and 2 flights of stairs into the basement, i tell a friend what track i'm hearing and he's like "i'm hearing nothing, absolute silence" and i'm like "i can hear it clear, just go check" and he comes back and i'm right. So that's mhm i would think if it was 20db less loud than that, i likely wouldn't be able to hear it or just about; but it means my hearing is at least 10 times more sensitive, conservatively, and the friend isn't known for bad hearing, musician too. Most people, including most of your audience in particular if you make dance music, are probably kind of deaf, with top end hearing being more affected. I checked out your mixtape here on the Tubes though and i don't find that it really needs any more top end, though a good bit extra wouldn't hurt at all. It gives me a slightly oversweetened impression though, upper midrange to presence. Since boosted presence is kind of a headphone design meme, this might come back to bite you yet. But i'm not anyhow certain in my conclusions, just something for consideration, i understand that it may be done for artistic effect, and i think it helps it sound a little extra nostalgic, and may indeed be a good idea? I don't know, i'm kind of a dumbdumb. If anything maybe i'd scoop the mid harder to give a louder feeling mix, or just don't in order to keep a more nostalgic feel. Think "Loudness compensation button". Look at the Equal Loudness Contour previously known as Fletcher Munson Curves to get some sense of what you might or might not want. Anyway sounds good, pleasant, would listen to again. The artist who is the topic of this video, no, won't listen to again. Among numerous complaints that i could have is that this production just sounds muddy in midbass, and yours happily avoids that. As to your approach - "should sound good on mediocre headphones"... well... every pair of mediocre headphones has their own unique flaw, and you aren't exactly using dozens of them. I have a pair that i absolutely love (Yoga CD-68, slightly modified... indeed actually a whole pile since they're only 20€) where there is a super sharp, super narrow cancellation near 7KHz. I can't hear any sort of problem when listening to music, but i can hear it in the sweep. I tried EQing it out but you shouldn't try to cancel out sharp disturbances like that, since they are temperature dependent and not ideally matched between the ears, you need to solve them acoustically if you want them solved. And i don't really have a solution, i could try harder but why, they sound good. Anyway if i mixed something on these, knowing the flaw, i couldn't really trust them.
@@SianaGearz i do like the concept of having a bucket of dozens of consumer headphones and earbuds to test my mix on, and have tried this method with up to 5 pairs, but that just exponentially increases the time it takes to "finish" a track. So, I've compromised and settled on a workflow where I can efficiently A/B compare between my good speakers and one pair of popular consumer grade headphones that I know lots of average listeners use. The only thing I feel like I'm missing is a sub. btw, please dont respond with another essay... lmao. I enjoy the conversation but I dont want you to feel like you have to write a book for me.
I agree on the whole but I'd like to add 2 points : 1. The overall level obviously doesn't really matter within the context of an album, but it might in the context of a playlist featuring other artists...which might be where Sophie has her worries? and 2. I'd like to suggest in terms of her mixes that the sub bass on was toned back a little, which may (or may not!) increase the perceived loudness of those upper mid frequencies? Feel free to disagree obviously :)
Hiya, Sophie here and next to what you and Dan have said about the midrange, I agree I definitely have the tendency to hype the sub frequency and is something I'm tryna coax my way out of in certain situations, thanks for the observations!
Many CD mixes are tbh too loud, which sometimes makes it annoying or even impossible to lower the volume to a comfortable level, especially when that volume control isn't exponential, but linear... which is really annoying too.
Brilliant advice. Some of the most exquisite albums of all time are delicate and quiet - like Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" or Paul Simon's "Graceland" - dynamics all in tact - and the actual songs automatically make the listener reach for the volume knob on their stereo. In the end, you want your listener wanting to turn their own playback system's volume knob up, as opposed to them wanting to turn it down, right?
These are two of my absolute go-to examples of "perfect recordings"! Two more brilliant, dynamic masters are Steely Dan AJA and Toto IV. Quiet by Loudness War standards but enormous sounding if listeners learn to use a volume knob😊
If you want loud, control dynamic range and audition sounds/mix busses/master loud. Hard to guess what falls apart when pushed at the end. Do we all want -5lufs masters? Different question.
The freedom being an artists that doesn't have to worry about competing on commercial platforms is absolutely the best part about being unsuccessful. The small amount of people that listen to my music gets to hear it, good or bad, exactly how I wanted it to sound and not influenced by any other factors. And in todays music business the financial difference between myself and a lot of commercial artists is basically nil🤣
Well the volume knob is kind of unreachable if you are for example using airpods in the gym while working out. I would like though all songs to be proprely normalized by algorithm to an equal loudness level but I haven't found a good one. The Spotify has this option but it doesn't work well, it still makes some songs significantly louder than others though it helps a little bit.
The problem is convenience at this point. If you're listening on Spotify, I'd argue most people want to set their volume once and then don't have to worry about it again. Then again - loudness correction on these platforms should deliver exactly that if I'm not mistaken? So if it sounds quieter doesn't that mean the loudness correction is not doing its job?
wanting to make the song as loud as possible aside, isn't part of the "goal" for the listener to not have to constantly change the volume from song to song? or at the very least, not have our own song being much louder or quieter than the rest? (sure this is inevitable, if one goes from EDM to 50s jazz, but generally speaking) i'm not saying that we should mix songs any differently, just to accommodate for this, but i definitely thought that this is in part what a mastering engineer would do? to try to make it so that the our records can stand side by side to similar songs, mainly in terms of loudness
Good advice to master as loud as you can (without sacrificing sound quality for the sole purpose of increasing loudness). However, PSA if anyone’s takeaway is to master to the loudness specifications of the platform, that’s a horrible idea. These standards have changed before and could easily change again and then all of a sudden your song is way quieter than everyone else’s…
This is true. However my guess is that loudness targets are more likely to go down than up, to match broadcast levels, as we increasingly use the same devices for everything. So the risk is perhaps that you'll sacrifice quality for loudness that later becomes irrelevant.
So glad to hear that you're still avoiding Spoti. 👍 If more people sensibly boycotted them, then perhaps they'd be fairer to the musicians that they currently pay so badly.
The problem is not in Spotify as much as in the middle man, the labels that keep some of the money and distribute the rest. There are videos on youtube about it.
I have a plugin for this, it contains all encoders from YT, Tidal, Spotify. You can even listen how it's going to sound on that platform. And my ears say it's spot on. In these violent times (thx waves), I'm not going to say a brand or type, but in email I would point you to the right direction. I had the same issue, my work didn't sound like it suppose to be. I have two mixes on my page, One that is done with the plugin, the other without the plugin. The one without and sounds different, even more metallic I should say.
Hi Dan! I'm a huge fan of your channel and the outreach you're doing with it, and I obviously agree with all the talk you've made so far regarding loudness. But I think one more thing needs to be said about all of this. It is true that in most playback systems there is a volume control that the listener can adjust independently, but nowadays (and we cannot fail to take this into consideration) music is listened to more and more through smartphones. Fewer and fewer people have / or would buy a home listening system. People who care and love music, at best, use earphones or headphones (which is even more true if we think of the new generations). And it is precisely here that the need arises once again to have slightly louder masters (within the limits of reasonableness and of course the musical genre to which it belongs). Why? Because even with the volume of the smartphone set to maximum, using any earphones, a master can be unsatisfactory in terms of listening volume. It goes without saying that a classical music master becomes meaningless once it is brought to high loudness values. What about a mastering of hip hop music for example? Mastered at -14 LUFS it just doesn't satisfy you with your smartphone volume maxed out. Had it been mastered around -9 LUFS but probably yes. Moreover, more and more platforms allow you to disable the audio normalization function, and those who do it will undoubtedly notice the differences in volumes between songs, and for some they simply will not be able to turn up the volume to the level deemed subjectively satisfactory. Everything you say would be indisputable if we lived in a world where normalization was inevitable everywhere (like on youtube), and even more so if LUFS were a more precise unit of measurement (we all know that two songs with the same measured value of LUFS int. can sound very different depending on their EQ curve). But even now the record labels ask the engineers for louder masters, and if we listen to the masters of the most representative modern songs of certain musical genres (Kendrick Lamar, Sevdaliza, Drake, etc. come to mind) it is easy to see that the loudness war it has changed, but not finished. At the end of the day, from my personal point of view, the only thing that matters is the awareness of one's choices. The rest is boring :) Peace
Every smart phone I've ever owned has been capable of driving 80 ohm headphones to levels that would be unsafe for long periods. Even with material at -14 LUFS. Either you're trying to drive unsuitably high impedance cans or you're trying to damage your hearing, IMO.
@@DanWorrall no dan. In the first place because many say the same thing (remember that the perception of loudness is subjective?) and we are not aliens. We're probably just young people who want to turn up the volume. Take for example your song "Big Dipper" (a song I really like Dan): listened to with an iphone x, with standard apple earphones (wired) at full volume, I still want to turn up the volume, and I'm forced to listen to it exclusively on my monitors. Secondly, high listening levels can become a problem depending on the exposure time as you yourself said. You can neither assume that someone is constantly listening at the same level inflicting pain on themselves, nor that someone who pays for a subscription (e.g. on spotify) would never, ever think of wanting to open the settings only to find that they can turn normalization off.
I believe the vast majority of users leave normalisation on, and that the feature exists due to user complaints about inconsistent levels! Personally I don't want to optimise my masters for crappy earbuds in noisy environments, if that's to the detriment of quality on most other systems. But you're free to disagree and do things differently. My suggestion would be to get some better headphones! And also, take care of your ears, you only get one pair.
to be fair it is quite annoying to have your song be quiter then other work, As a frequent user of spotify usually the levels are pretty balanced but going from a particularly loud sounding song to a quiter one can be quite annoying especially when trying to use it as background music and you want to turn it on and not bother with it anymore.
I'll add that while loudness tends to exist in the mids, energy exists in the subs. The sub content I can see in those is far more than I'd go with, as it just steals energy available to the rest of the song. That'll have an effect on your loudness, as well as being unplayable in clubs and sound not as good on systems with good sub outputs.
@@DanWorrall Totally based on the analyser in the video, absolutely no further research done, I also don't know what style and genre the music is. This is just something that jumped out at me, and is very much just a generalization of the stuff I do. I don't think I could even hear that 30hz properly with my ears, and I think my various listening devices could properly produce it even less. Which is more or less what I mean. Sub amplifies the waveforms disproportionally for it's discernable presence. I know LUFS is weighted to help with that but its still loudness content that is taken from the amount available to more discernable parts of a track.
@@joruffin I definitely have a tendency to amplify the sub in my mixes, (probably disproportionately so) and I think in a handful of songs that may be another reason my album comes out quieter, in addition to the mid scoop. Still I'm mostly happy with my album mixes on my listening devices but I get that translation is important. I just love my 50hz
I just tweaked the default theme a bit. There's a colour tweaker script, and a more advanced theme editor script available somewhere... I fiddled with it aimlessly for five minutes, and it's not changed since.
@@DanWorrall I tried to fiddle with those a bit I just couldn't find a way to make it look good, I'll try it out again tho cuz Ive never been a fan of the Reaper grey, still love the simplicity of the default style though
I definitely try to be careful with my limiting and clipping, there's a lotta compression on stuff in the mix anyway so I definitely like to keep that in mind. - Sophie
I'd love to hear more about what influences the loudness of a mix and whether it makes sense to turn the whole mix down before limiting for these streaming platforms.
If you turn the mix down by 6dB, but then drive the limiter 6dB harder, you've just got back to the same place. No difference. However if I'm mastering a mix that's already really loud I do usually start by turning it down to my usual mixing levels, and I make EQ / compression decisions with my usual monitor gain settings. That's to help me achieve consistent results however, no other reason.
@@DanWorrall I meant whether you should change how hard you drive the limiter, since effectively limiting loud and exporting to these platforms makes a brickwall well below 0db.
I find it useful to mix _to the loudness specifications_ of the platforms, taking into consideration the limitations of lossy audio compression too. Spotify, TH-cam etc all specify -14dB LUFS-I - so that is your maximum _loudness._ As it will likely be compressed at some point, your absolute True Peak is -1dB, if you go over this, this can mess with compression codecs. So to catch any overshoot I set my brickwall limiter to -2dB TP and aim to get my mix to -14dB LUFS integrated, or just below. This means the streaming platform will not turn my mix down, but is as loud as possible (as Spotify apparently doesn't turn your song _up!)_ In doing all this, I have found my mixes naturally have a bit more dynamic range, as the gap between -14dB "average loudness" (LUFS-I) and -2dB True Peak can be quite a lot on a dynamic track. They usually end up with LRA (Loudness Range) between 7-10dB, with certain peaks at -1.9dB TP. I know I'm mixing between peak levels and integrated loudness values in this description, but you have to juggle these in your head somewhat when mixing and mastering. *TL:DR* - Don't drive the limiter too hard unless you are looking for that effect for creative reasons. Limiting hard introduces harmonic overtones as you are essentially distorting the waveform. Perhaps this is desirable to you, there's no right or wrong answer. Personally, I set the brickwall limiter at -2dB TP, and use compression, EQ and volume control to get the loudness down to -14dB LUFS-I (the spec of most platforms). Hope this makes sense!
@@RoganGunnthis -14 thing is simply ridiculous for some music genres. You just don't get the aggression needed when keeping that as a reference. In metal I still see -7 masters sounding good and from well seasoned and expert producers.
Would have been interesting to see if the "normalise volume" function in Tidal was on or off. Does Spottify have a function like that too? I have it always ON toeven out the overall volume of my 2000+ songs playlist, and I even kick out too loud songs. Too much Loudness is so annoying ....
It was on, I did say so. When I was a subscriber Spotify gave me a choice of loudness targets. Can't remember if you could turn it off entirely, probably yes. But I switched to Tidal quite a while ago so they might have changed the options anyway.
@@DanWorrall : FYI, could access my old open.spotify acc. Is does have an option to normalise volume and there's even an EQ now. Cheers and thanks for your fantastic content!
I'm gonna say it, you're just wrong here about the "People don't listen to music louder or quieter than they want" thing. The primary way I and many other people consume music is as a background track for another activity, like driving, and in that context, adjusting the volume on a track-by-track basis is simply Not A Thing. I can spare the attention to adjust it once, when I put the playlist on the first time; if a track is too quiet after that it's just gonna stay too quiet for a while until I can spare the attention again, and if a track is too loud, then the whole playlist just gets shut off or the track skipped to immediately cut the distraction out.
Could it be, that the problem for most folks here - me including - might not be about volume but about a 'tight' mix? My songs always feel to quiet compared to other tracks of the same genre and as far as I know my numbers also check out, -14 Lufs etc. But so do all the other tracks. What is the difference? Is it really just a bit more information in the mids? A flatter curve?
My experience is that Spotify can actually sound louder if the audio was -12 LUFS than -9 LUFS. Same goes for TH-cam. Louder into Spotify doesn't mean louder out always.
Thanks so much for helping, always great to hear your perspective on things, especially great to hear so on my own music! The comment section is full of interesting observations as always too!!
Your album sounds great. Scooping the mid range has eliminated that harshness and allowed a lot of the other musical elements to cut through. In fact I think it's one of the better mixes I've ever heard in terms of clarity, I can hear everything without my ears trying to 'close up'.
Great production for sure, it sounds good to me
Your sound has that 90s smooth vibe. I really like it.
Clicked that ♥on Tidal.
Awesome job, Jake & Sophie!
@@OrdinaryOneOfficial and Jake? Are you sure you listened to "I'm Still Here" and not my previous album?
As my bandmate once pointed out: every listener has a volume knob, but none have a "sound better" knob.
Funny thing about the volume knob is that it is a “sound better” knob. You want it to be calibrated properly.
@@worstproducerever119 It is not. You can use almost any single knob throughout the song development from the player's fingers to the final output volume knob to make it sound like crap, but none of those work alone to make the song sound good. They all have to work in harmony to make it happen.
So, the volume knob is rather "sound worse" knob.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh so very poignant and thought provoking. He must have been the drummer.
And then you put on a Noisia song and it just smashes clearly and loudly.
@@drrodopszin Noisia isn't really music though. It's discordant, satanic masturbation.
I'm not saying that Dan is the only person we should listen to when it comes to loudness. But we should probably pay some heed to the person who won the loudness war.
@@jasoncruizer Did you just ask him, whether he knows has ears?
@@jasoncruizer yeah and his song made my ears bleed, i perceived it be really freaking loud
@@jasoncruizer No we weren't aware of that..🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
@@jasoncruizer 100% agreed. If you go to for -14 even -10 LUFSi for edm it will sound weak AF. Really depends. So never always go for -12 or some "recommended" number. Use your Ears! BRO! xD
@@1famekouby IKR XDDDD
One of the hardest things to learn is having some confidence in your own mixing and production decisions. We tend to be our own worst critics, and it's easy to notice differences between your mix and other mixes and decide that your mix must be deficient in some way. But it might also be that it's just different, and maybe that's okay. What's the point if everything sounds the same, anyway?
I do realize I don't have that confidence myself and I have identified at least one big reason why that is. And it has nothing to do with my confidence on my skills even though the result is exactly the same. It is that I cannot trust any other people to be able to say if the song is good or not, so I cannot get any affirmation. I haven't got any other kind of trust issues whatsoever and I have no idea what causes this, so I don't have any solutions to it either. I only know that those trust issues are in my head and not their fault, but knowing that doesn't really help solving them, if just a little mitigating them.
I took a listen to a few songs on the album (on spotify) and my first thoughts weren't "This sounds good, but it should be louder" it was "Damn this is a vibe and it sounds smooth". Personally, I think the songs are perfect where they are. One of my favorite songs and examples that loudness means nothing is 'Autumn' by Caligula's Horse and the beginning of the song is incredibly quiet, but it absolutely serves a purpose being that quiet. It's supposed to be delicate and contrast the triumphantly loud ending.
Thanks so much!! Glad you enjoyed the songs :) I'll check out 'Autumn'!
It's amazing how 3:52 of you talking can erase over a decade's worth of mix anxiety. I've wasted so much time worrying about loudness, but the simple truth is what you said; the listener will take care of it.
This was the right video to click on, thank you so much
"Hi and welcome back" always great to hear!
Dan-thank you-your videos are a wealth of information and I've learned so much about loudness, phasing, and EQing principles that are muddied up by the thousands of other videos on the subject. One of the more common issues I experience when trying to achieve a decently loud mix is the meter peaking while the overall volume seams relatively quiet. For years I would try to make very careful EQ moves, then compress / multiband sidechain the hell out of each individual track, then compress/limit again on the master to get close to the same loudness as a reference, but to the detriment of the overall quality of the mix. The mix would be loud, but lacking in depth and compressing/limiting would bring out all sorts of nasty sibilance and other unpleasant frequencies that totally "ruin the vibe" as the kids say.
Although I remember your advice that it's more important to make the mix sound good rather than loud it's still a bad habit to do this I'm trying to unlearn, call it cognitive dissonance but I myself find it annoying when listening to a playlist with tracks that vary widely in volume, even when I turn that silly "normalization" thing on. Anyway, what I learned is to get out of MIDI and render to audio to better see phase relationships on the grid, and most critically (to me), to examine the transients/peaks of each individual sound relative to the rest of the signal and to try to process the transients/compress to gain as much headroom as possible while still maintaining the character of the source. I'm not saying this is the case for the mix you are going over in this video, this is just my experience trying to make silly boom-boom untz-untz dance music.
TL;DR... first principles... more headroom = more room for pushing the levels with a limiter / clipper, use subtle compression or transient shaping to make the signal have *slightly* less dynamics while maintaining it's character. If you compress and limit too much your mix will be loud, but sound flat and maybe even a bit obnoxious to listen to.
It's amazing. Dan, being absent for some time, returns for a video on a (for me) trivial topic and still manage it to drop one or two things that switch on the light bulb. Not that I wouldn't have known these things before but Dan brings back forgotten things so effortlessly to my awareness that it has something of an old wise man on the top of a stormy mountain. "Noone listens to music any louder than they want to", for instance. Screaming loud masters, do you listen?
pro songs all sound vastly different, i found this to be more noticeable when i started mixing songs and using reference tracks, some pro songs seem to have very little low end i was kind of shocked as i didnt really notice before. I stopped listening so critically using reference tracks against my mixes and just use them for and overall feel.
Dan! Congratulations! Out of all of my favorite channels, you are the very first one whom I am sending a bit of my hard-earned cash towards with a membership. I had to plan this out, because now that the ball is rolling downhill, I need to make sure I don't start sponsoring 30 channels, but eventually I plan to upgrade... Keep the great work coming, please. I know it's few and far between, but when you get into a subject or product, it's very much worth it.
I have a rather important question (and possibly a video request): Not long ago, Mr. I-won't-even-try-to-spell-it-because-I-just-learned-how-to-pronounce-it at White Sea Studios... Yeetzuh (I'm from Alabama, I have to mock the culture to keep from crying) shoved a comment in sideways about Plugin Doctor. He said that he was under the impression that it's not nearly as accurate and telling as we all think it is. That made me immediately think of what you'd have to say about it, and I wondered if that knock has been brought to your attention. I respect Yahtzee almost as much as you, so I can't really take that statement with a grain of salt. Care to retort? Thanks for all you do!
Thanks for the support! I think Plugin Doctor is useful, and as far as I'm aware it does the tests properly. But I often see people use it in error, most often: trying to use the 'linear analysis' to measure non linear plugins. There is indeed a video on the subject coming soon (ish).
I love how you talk about something many many producers forget and its so important: an artistic and esthetic (like phiosophical discipline) point of view.
Good to “have you back”. It had been quiet from you for a while, and I was worried if you were getting off the TH-cam train.
Every single person who ever mixes, records, performs or loves music should take this to heart.
I think when people say "louder" the sometimes mean "clearer." When you hear a song in a supermarket and it sounds super-clear, it's not loud; the speakers they use in markets have crossovers that cut most of the sub bass signal out. A good test is to put a shelf filter on your mix that lowers everything below 60-80hz by like 10db. If your mix gets quieter, then the bass is the major driving force. If the mix stays at about the same level, then you're balanced. If you hear bass notes at the supermarket, it's probably harmonics added for presence.
This is also what I was thinking.
I'm a mastering engineer, and I have the most difficult time explaining the extent to which low frequency information (especially sub-sonic stuff) eats up overall apparent volume. . .
@@toddpipes9679so, in some cases you end up lowering say 80 hz and lower quite a bit in order to bring about headroom to bring all else up ?
very well put, couldn't agree more. this has always been my argument - we're all humans who can figure out how a volume knob works so we can each listen at the level that suits us. the loudness wars were stupid and unnecessary to begin with and over-compression and limiting has ruined many otherwise great productions. it really is time to move on from this silliness. just make it sound good
IMHO, and not advocating for LOUD IS BETTER, but I'm not sure about "Their volume knob for your album is where they want it to be..." because nowadays we listen to so much more music than before, song after song, in an endless stream of songs... and we don't change the volume for each song... so are we in a "volume knob"-less listening experience, where apparent loudness matters? Maybe it has always been like this I'm thinking radio, public spaces, other common listening situations... for the majority of people.... is anything that is not an 'album focused' listening a "volume knob"-less experience?....
Yeah, you try and explain that to a client. At the end of the day if your track isn’t as loud as everyone else’s then that is perceived to be a big problem. I’m not talking the loudness wars of the 90s, but more keeping it relative to everything else on Spotify. No amount of “well just turn up the volume knob” will cut it with a fee-paying client. Get the mix sorted and constantly compare to reference tracks already on Spotify/iTunes/Amazon etc.
If you're at -14 LUFS integrated or higher, you're as loud as everything else on Spotify.
You can read my mind, I was just thinking that and what do you know, here is dan worall explaining this to me
Once I dug deeper into this topic and realized the Streaming services and TH-cam would simply set the loudness of whatever you feed it to their preset standard, but recommended -1db of headroom I stopped caring immedeately. Now the limiter simply gets set to where I feel it adds without negatively impacting the sound, which for me and my mixes appear to be where it shaves 0-2db-ish of the louder transients with a -1 on the output. Thank you Dan.
While I agree with the core message of the video, I don't agree that loudness will "take care of itself". Yes, streaming services are going to normalise your mix to -14 LUFS, but there's different ways to get that result, and they sound different, so you ought to have a say in how to get there.
Due to the limiting, the mix shown has lost a lot of transient information, which plays an important role in loudness perception (I think that's backed up by research but take it with a grain of salt). If the inevitable normalisation is kept in mind while mixing/mastering, then you could hit that number while maintaining dynamic range, so you get a louder sounding mix.
I think 'I Won't Freeze' is a good example of this: the percussion at the end of the track doesn't slice through as much as I would like - there's just not enough volume difference between each hit and the background levels, and it gets somewhat lost in the mix. Contrast to the percussion in a track like 'Screening', by Mr. Bill. While obviously a different style, it meters about the same -14 LUFS, and still sounds smooth (to my ears), but with more dynamic range.
I also disagree with Dan's point that nobody listens quieter than they want to. If I'm listening while washing the dishes for example, I'm not going to stop and adjust the volume - I would either need to clean my hands, or get grease on my gear, so I just won't bother. Same goes for when I'm wearing gloves, or working in the garden, or riding a motorbike, and so on. I set the volume to the level that sounds good for most tracks, which is pretty consistent thanks to normalisation, so when a quiet track comes along, I simply enjoy it a little bit less.
It's small, but it might be the difference between checking out their other releases or not. This is probably even more true for the listeners who skip tracks in the first 10 seconds if they don't immediately love it. The loudness wars happened for a reason: it sounds good. There's something to be learned from that.
And yeah, the end user's devices do have volume controls, but that's not a perfect solution. An extreme example is that you could export at -80dBFS, and it will get turned way up by the platform or the user, but since you're going to be approaching the noise floor of a 16 bit file it's going to be a pretty poor sounding result. Also, adding gain isn't always going to be as clean and linear as in the 64 bit float signal path of a DAW.
So I do think loudness matters, and you should try master to the specs appropriate for the medium. Just like you need to be considerate about low end causing the needle to skip on vinyl, you should be deliberate about how normalisation will affect your track for streaming.
But none of this is relevant if it compromises the sound that you want - which is of course Dan's point. Nobody is mastering orchestral recordings like this, and that's fine, it suits the genre. Sometimes you want a super low & clean sub bass, which just doesn't translate to a phone or laptop, but who cares? All choices are a compromise.
For the record though, I liked the album (particularly the vocal production and low end), and it was plently loud enough for me. Favourite tracks were BREAK & Closing Statement.
There is no statistical correlation between loudness and commercial success. The loudness wars happened for two reasons: insecurity and ignorance. And a lack of industry standards. Three reasons.
God that last tidbit really hits home. Cheers Dan!
I'm glad those streaming services/TH-cam low key put an end to loudness wars. Makes mastering for bedroom musicians so much easier in terms of dynamics, EQ and limiting.
When I make music on BandLab and post it to Spotify it is so much quieter than other songs. Other amauter artists using the same program as me seem to have no problem but for some reason it happens to my songs. Do you know how I can fix that?
You really are the BEST, Dan. Thanks for this reminder about Loudness.
Honestly this is the most relevant, necessary music production-related 4 minutes on TH-cam
The thing is that if you master at -14lufs it will be too quiet next to classic tracks, even with the normalization turned on...Not so long ago I remixed one EP I did and uploaded it to Spotify, the target level I aimed I believe was -11 lufs, Loudness Penalty at -3, the thing was that one day I was listening to Spotify randomly and I thought "Hey let's see how my track compares to this" and it was incredibly frustrating to notice my track sounded quieter and I had to turn the volume up even with the normalization turned on...In my opinion people who listen to playlists won't take the bother to be changing the volume all the time...The solution for me it to choose a classic album or song you like how it sounds and try to match that loudness because if you grew up in the 90's, early 2000's your music will sound quieter than anything mastered for CD and if you make a style you would like to fit in with those classic songs you cannot be so much quieter...I"m not talking about super squashing the thing but make it loud enough so you can be in the ballpark with this other classic tracks, if not your track will sound smaller, weaker and boring next to those classics and it's super depressing...On top of that if you listen to music with a USB stick in the car you will need to make it loud if you don't want to be super quiet next to all those classics in the road...
PS: To add to the bad news, as far as I tested it TH-cam Music doesn't normalize and I don't know if it allows you to turn it on so the loudness wars will continue in TH-cam Music and if you master so low you will not be competitive on this platform which may end up being the biggest one someday...
wow -11 seems crazy loud. that’s what is best to aim for, i have no idea lol. what genre we talkin bout ?
@@chinmeysway Classic Rock is usually at -9 or -8
sometimes i’m in the red yet lufs loudness isn’t hitting even -14, which i figure isn’t loud enough for streaming (assuming bringing level up might sound bad?). vid is still vague on sensible non loud levels, if normalization is -14...
‘Unless they’ve been shouted at by their mum.’
a number of years ago i recorded an EP with my band, and i insisted that the mix engineer had the mix too loud and showed imaged of it clipping and it was audible, i was so upset. The worst thing was, my bandmates agreed to keep it loud and ignored the clipping, "as it was quieter that my other CDs" and "i don't want to have to change the volume for each CD"
Some people had already figured out your last point by the 70s, Dan. I can remember quite a few albums that featured the printed exhortation to "PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD!!!"
This video is so much better and clearer BECAUSE there is no audio and we only get to focus on the visual feedback
We made at work (speaker manufacturer) raw comparison between streaming platforms and turners out that Spotify is really lacking loudness, but even more important the quality changes into "shit" when we get the loudness matching. Don't know what they're doing there, but if you want to have 'that musical moment' try something else than previously mentioned platform... For casual listening and background noise, it's ok!
No, welcome back to you! And I would make the music even 5dB quieter if it were to be nominated for allowance in my music collection. My question to you would be: why didn't you use more of the dynamic range? It would have looked so much better without the limited peaks... Thanks for the video!
@@mal2ksc Thanks, and yes you're right, it just instantly reveals whats's going on. After I wrote the comment I realized the volume adjustment was done by spotify, so the peaks could have been touching the ceiling in the original track. Spotify used to add some compression as well, I don't know if they still do, but it was enough for me to not give that a chance at all. And Dan has taken the responsibility of teaching the world how to be aware of and enjoy dynamics.
The mixes weren't overly dynamic to start with, I only clipped and limited by a total of 3-5db per song (if I'm remembering correctly). I'm not a big fan of the way limiting sounds being pushed hard on a master. The reason the sings probably look more limited is just cuz there's a lot going on in the songs. I think the transients still get throhgh when I listen back to the songs.
I do agree with your points. But I understand way people think this is a problem. Many people listens to songs in a playlist, in a random order and may not adjust the volume song to song. And many tests has shown that humans think something sounds better if the volume is slightly higher. I know headphone, speaker, room and much more also influence the sound. But for some music some songs might sound less interesting between other songs on a playlist, and if people adjusted the volume they might love the song more. And I know that if you take this thought patton to its extreme we end up at the loudness wars. I feel like it is a problem with no solution.
The solution: just stop worrying about it! If your mix is a couple of dBs quieter in a playlist, that's not going to stop someone loving it, and if they love it they'll crank it up!
@@DanWorrall I will try.
@@DanWorrall I think this position takes for granted the listeners patience, particularly when dealing with unknown music consumed somewhat passively. The idea that if your music is ''good enough'' (whatever that actually means) it will ''grab them'' or something doesn't hold up in the real world, especially with certain long form styles of composition or structure. It assumes all forms of music behave equally and it also assumes that the listener is perfectly happy being an active mix engineer throughout their evening commute, while they make their dinner, do their homework or talk to their friends...turning up good songs, remembering to turn it back down for the next one, I know for myself I have on multiple occasions been immensely frustrated by a very aggressive follow up track when I've returned to what I was doing and the song I'd ''cranked'' finished playing.
The amount of music consumption that is consumed in the ''background'' and to be perfectly honest, validly so, means the problem people are asking advice about is still a relevant one that is frequently waved away. When I'm asked this question sincerely I tend to focus more on education around perceived loudness, which admittedly you did touch on in this video, rather than dismiss their worries with the same ubiquitous sentence they probably heard the very first day they saw any video on production.
It's all well and good to say someone is gonna crank your song if they love it enough, it doesn't help the matter for a smaller artist trying to establish themselves in an industry increasingly centered around algorithmically curated playlists which are often meant to be played in the background and if not, are meant to be consumed en masse with a million more options for those lacking the patience to be level matching as they go.
Overall I do think the issue is negligible at the end of the day, if there was an area of improvement for someone's career this likely wouldn't be the highest priority to work on in 99% of cases if the goal was more engagement with their music however I do get frustrated by peoples quite reasonable concerns being acknowledged but overall waved away. It falls into the same logical fallacies as the effective altruist movement.
@@fiachnaodonnell7895 this is all beside the point really. The fundamental reason you want your mix to play louder is because louder usually seems better. But if you have to make your mix sound worse to achieve that loudness, what have you gained?
@Dan Worrall Surely you can acknowledge that a reasonable compromise can exist and therefore this will not be beside the point? Any artist has experienced compromise in the vision to achieve something deemed more worthwhile to the vision. Given human hearings immense fallibility yet very high sensitivity to level difference, I think it is yet again...Still relevant.
I'm not trying to be smart, but why is this news to people these days still? The more you clip the more distortion so it will be louder but actually sound worse. Maybe not worse in the very short run but listen to it long enough and your ears will get annoyed. We have people moving to vinyl to restore something organic that they feel is missing. What is missing are all those waveforms that have been clipped because someone wants it to be mastered "louder". It's not louder it's more distorted. The listener not the engineer determines the final loudness.
So we have people, embracing a format (vinyl) with more distortion to somehow cover up or make up for everything that is being clipped. This is backwards on so many levels.
The problem with wave clipping distortion is that most people are not even really aware of it. Their ears over time just get annoyed and they stop listening. Sorry if I am just repeating the obvious. If so, move along nothing to see hear.
Hearing louder music does fool us into thinking it sounds better, so when a track appears in a playlist and it's comparitively quiter, that impression is lost. Your point does stand though, but in isolation or in an album setting. Both of which aren't very common.
i think it's definitely a genre thing. some genres are designed to be very loud, while others need to be quieter. i tired out the clip to zero approach on baphpometrix's channel and i found it helped my mixing decisions, however I'm not trying too achieve the insane loudness of -6--7 lufs that that method was designed for. it helped uncover flaws in my mix that i wouldn't of otherwise heard until the final master phase which is very helpful in that regard.
I think it's more useful to say "some genres have less dynamic range," since loudness isn't a useful creative decision since it can be undone so easily by the volume control.
My dark Industrial electronic album has around -15 LUFS of integrated loudness, I don't care it sounds "quiet" at first because, as you said, once you turn up the volume knob you can feel those transients and good dynamic range that could have been lost if I decided to make it loud just for the sake of it. Thanks for still advocating at stopping this loudness war nonsense.
@@mal2ksc hopefully Spotify decreases the default loudness standard in the future as low as Apple has it now so that stops being a problem, I have in my spotify settings in the volume normalization set to "quiet" so the loudness parameter goes down to -18 LUFS and then there is no more volume changes, only more or less dynamic range songs
Yeah, Dan you address the issue of loudness in your secret to maximum loudness 1&2... Which has nailed the whole issue of loudness war.
The voice of reason, and just good plain sense. Lacking elsewhere, I know I can always find a healthy spoonful here, and it all feels better once again.
"The fact that it might make it seem quieter in a direct musical comparison to a completely different mix shouldn't really be a consideration. So What?" The answer is a lot of musicians seeking to be discovered don't want to sound quiet next to other songs on the radio, or in a playlist or in multiple other obvious contexts. That isn't unreasonable.
It's just insecurity. With most pop music you're unlikely to get more than a dB or so of difference after normalising. Not enough to stop someone loving it.
I first noticed this element of good sounding mixes in Shellac. I'm not sure if he mixes them himself, but in any case, he is an experienced studio engineer and I like to believe he knows what he's doing and I expect that is reflected in the final masters of their music. They sound awesome to me.
And to the point, Shellac, in any format, sounds quieter than a lot of the other music I've listened to. I often use a simple mp3 player because, despite the name, it will attempt to play back any format it has within it... and comparably, Shellac needs to be turned up. Same when I listen on a streaming service. It's clearly not a bug, but a feature.
Steve wants it that way.
But since he is busy wearing two masks over another while he is alone in his studio during skype interviews and telling the cringiest bullshit why analog and xformers must be better in his pov I am out even if I once liked his music very much ;)
When a punkrocker tells me my music must be recorded on an expensive snobby tape it tells me that this has nothing to do with punk anymore. His argument that tapes last longer because of the different digital formats is so flawed that I even can´t laugh about it. What I know is that I can buy a bunch of old PCs with an old logic or cubase version on it plus a backup HD which will play my old projects for decades for free with no degradation or expensive servicing including obsolete parts. This is not true at all for your heavy 24 track analog tape machine for sure.
You mean the band Shellac? So Steve Albini, who also produced/mixed In Utero by Nirvana, and a couple of PJ Harvey's records? (Amongst many many other albums too). He's great! I really like his sparse and honest production style. I've seen Shellac live, and they were fantastic.
You're absolutely right, his mixes need to be turned up when you listen to them, but they sound great once they are! (He even put suggested tone control settings in the liner notes to In Utero!)
This is also true of Pantera's back catalogue. Listened to at low volume the guitars can sound a bit thin and buzzy. Crank it, through decent speakers, and it suddenly makes sense. It was mean to be listed to LOUD, and the power and brutality of the mix comes across.
IIRC Steve avoids compression (especially with his own band) which is why the balance between the band members sounds more like a live band than a pop record, and why it sounds best at live volumes. Shellac is like audiophile art rock for that reason - or it would be if audiophiles listened to them!
@@timpanic believe it or not some analog formats will last much longer in a dry room than any other digital support can without the propper expensive mantainment (perpetual backups). We're talking decades here, not months.
@@miquelmarti6537 Not convinced. I have three Tape machines and I offer digital conversion to my clients. 90% of the tapes I get are a sticky mess. Half of the tape sticks at the head after playing them once and you can see through the tape because its so worn out. Beside the myth of no degradation ( maybe at a dry room at NASA with expensive employees) you have to have a perfectly mantained and alligned machine to play that format correct. Beside of the normal degradation you have when you don´t spool the tape from time to time caused by self magnetization, a normal RAID system is much cheaper and have no degradation. So what are you talking about? I have a lot of tapes from the 90ties...all have degradation and all have kind of speed problems at the end of the tape. Maybe better than people would think but worse than I prefer the resolution. After I convert them I better avoid working from the tape. Beside that I have digital files from the 90ties...all intact and no degradation. Expensive mantainment? I just have to copy them on a fresh raid system and I am done for the next 30 years. The point was that your modern setup won't play your songs with all the vsti and plugins anymore but how I said it's much easier to have an old machine with win xp and your old daw than to mantain your expensive heavy tape machine over the years when you were too lazy to bounce your single tracks down to wavs! Ever mantained a studer machine and replaced heads? Ever saw tape jitter on an oscilloscope? After that you will laugh about any digital jitter! Alone that video where steve is cutting tape at the wrong position just to copy a part somewhere else is middleagestyle with offering no plus on any art at all. Sorry I am a big analog lover and love my tape machines just for the beauty but I don´t need them to write and mix a good song and I would be ashamed if I had to ;) its more a state of mind thing not a thing of pure Materialism.
Thanks for making this Dan!
Dan you're a literal god among us. Thank you for your knowledge!
Probably a bigger issue for most is, why does no one listen to my music on Spotify? One "loudness issue track" vs the other 80-90 million tracks there.
You just set me free, thank you man 😭👍🏼
Thanks Dan.
On Soundcloud (which, as far as I know, doesn't have loudness normalization like Spotify/Tidal) this *problem* is more exaggerated, and causes me [irrational] anxiety on a regular basis... I have only realized in recent months that the main reason my mixes sound too quiet isn't because I'm not pushing the integrated lufs high enough, its because I've always subconsciously mixed my tracks quiet in the upper-mid range.
My ears like this less-harsh or "smoother" sound, but I'm learning the average listener usually (and myself, sometimes) hears this upper-mid range loudness difference as muffled/clear instead of smooth/harsh like me. This video has helped me confirm my recent thoughts, and relax my anxiety a bit.
What headphones have you got?
Because i just avoid any and all headphones, no matter how many people recommend them, and they do tend to get recommended for production/monitoring use, which have pretty angry anomalies up around 8-10k; and which have nothing at all going on above 12k, which is another unfortunate trait.
Of course speakers aren't quite immune from these issues either, but that's... more avoidable.
@@SianaGearz While mixing, I swap back and forth between my Paradigm bookshelf speakers and a pair of Skullcandy Hesh ANC (with the noise cancelling turned off). I think its important to make the mix sound good on speakers and average consumer-tier headphones, both. I know they are not professional grade monitoring headphones, but that's kind of the point.
I assume that you are thinking my choices of monitors are leading to me mixing the upper-mids quiet, but I think that my ears are just overly sensitive to those frequencies.
@@superactivitylad To preface i wasn't thinking quite along these lines. After all a lot of highly recommended monitoring devices have a very harsh and unpleasant top end, more so than random HiFi/consumer gear. They call it "revealing" and i wager a guess, it apparently helps people - people with more typical hearing - avoid producing excessive sibilance in their mix, which can sound quite offensive, so it's in a way a useful crutch, but not one without drawbacks. I think if you did use something like that, you'd just come up with a worse outcome as opposed to a better one.
Look i'm equipped with all sorts of "random" junk as well, i'm not about to judge you on that. We just have to face that we're hearing things differently from most people, and most people don't really hear those things that are painful to us. I too am sensitive to sharp narrow top end resonances in the speakers and headphones. There are so many headphones no matter the price bracket i listen to them for 10 BLOODY SECONDS and i tear them off angrily. A recent trip to HiFi expo was quite "revealing" as well. :(
My speakers are ELAC BS52 bookshelf speakers. These have spectacularly smooth top end, good top end extension as well. Smooth crossover region too, so apart from having no sub-bass, they're kind of remarkably good. I test drove dozens of speakers before these, but i've had these for 15 years now and i'm happy.
As far as studio monitor speakers go, they often tend to sound pretty harsh, with exception of those by Adam audio which i have been impressed with every time i hear them, all of them.
Yours have an alu tweeter; this tweeter construction is prone to breakup and it depends on a lot of things, they can be made well, but if i heard sharp resonances in the frequencies we have trouble with, i wouldn't be surprised. The tweeter is placed in a shallow little horn, which is better than nothing, it's an attempt to shape the beam, but there has been no attempt at corner treatment to suppress diffraction, which will tend to make the top end more wavy, potentially adding to the unfortunate character of the tweeter. Is that, visually, a faithful description of your speakers?
As far as headphones, the ever popular ATH-M50 cause me this sort of grief, as do the 30€ Superlux studio headphones (681 was it?) and their rebrands such as Presonus Studio HD7. I have dozens of headphones (none of them being much more than $100, so nothing crazy expensive and lots of super cheap stuff) and listened to hundreds more. Currently i'm using self-tuned in-ears, several pairs, which started their life as various pairs of Chinese 1DDs IEMs, such as KZ EDX and TRN MT1, might end up manufacturing my own for friends and stuff. Unfortunately although some of these Chinese things are good out of the box, you buy another pair several months later same model and it's completely different and really annoying sounding, so i can't just recommend you go out and buy them. But i'll be damned if the horn driver family they use in most of these isn't an impressive foundation to work with, the amount of linear excursion is nuts, lots of shaping potential as well, you can use aggressive acoustic impedance and they stay efficient enough. And i also start seeing how they shape the response with acoustic impedances and vents and how i can do my own. I've learned speaker design in the past, experimented, it's fairly easy to design good adequate sounding speakers, but i didn't consider trying to design headphones before, it's kind of a black art and probably will stay such even in the face of success.
I have had a brief listen to ATH-M40 not too long ago and i must say i don't hate them. I'll probably get them eventually. I merely disregarded them for a time because the M50 burned me.
Ultimately i think people will ideally choose a listening device that suits their hearing and preferences; and i think it's kind of a mistake to mix for your listening peculiarities, but it looks like you figured it out how to avoid that.
My hearing used to extend well into ultrasonic into the early 20s. Right now i don't think it does at the age of 40, but i have been able to preserve most of my hearing as opposed to most of my peers. 20 years ago i got myself some concert earplugs from the drummer department and ever since i generally don't leave home without a pair. I walk out of the club, and through 2 metal doors and 2 flights of stairs into the basement, i tell a friend what track i'm hearing and he's like "i'm hearing nothing, absolute silence" and i'm like "i can hear it clear, just go check" and he comes back and i'm right. So that's mhm i would think if it was 20db less loud than that, i likely wouldn't be able to hear it or just about; but it means my hearing is at least 10 times more sensitive, conservatively, and the friend isn't known for bad hearing, musician too. Most people, including most of your audience in particular if you make dance music, are probably kind of deaf, with top end hearing being more affected.
I checked out your mixtape here on the Tubes though and i don't find that it really needs any more top end, though a good bit extra wouldn't hurt at all. It gives me a slightly oversweetened impression though, upper midrange to presence. Since boosted presence is kind of a headphone design meme, this might come back to bite you yet. But i'm not anyhow certain in my conclusions, just something for consideration, i understand that it may be done for artistic effect, and i think it helps it sound a little extra nostalgic, and may indeed be a good idea? I don't know, i'm kind of a dumbdumb. If anything maybe i'd scoop the mid harder to give a louder feeling mix, or just don't in order to keep a more nostalgic feel. Think "Loudness compensation button". Look at the Equal Loudness Contour previously known as Fletcher Munson Curves to get some sense of what you might or might not want. Anyway sounds good, pleasant, would listen to again.
The artist who is the topic of this video, no, won't listen to again. Among numerous complaints that i could have is that this production just sounds muddy in midbass, and yours happily avoids that.
As to your approach - "should sound good on mediocre headphones"... well... every pair of mediocre headphones has their own unique flaw, and you aren't exactly using dozens of them. I have a pair that i absolutely love (Yoga CD-68, slightly modified... indeed actually a whole pile since they're only 20€) where there is a super sharp, super narrow cancellation near 7KHz. I can't hear any sort of problem when listening to music, but i can hear it in the sweep. I tried EQing it out but you shouldn't try to cancel out sharp disturbances like that, since they are temperature dependent and not ideally matched between the ears, you need to solve them acoustically if you want them solved. And i don't really have a solution, i could try harder but why, they sound good. Anyway if i mixed something on these, knowing the flaw, i couldn't really trust them.
@@SianaGearz i do like the concept of having a bucket of dozens of consumer headphones and earbuds to test my mix on, and have tried this method with up to 5 pairs, but that just exponentially increases the time it takes to "finish" a track. So, I've compromised and settled on a workflow where I can efficiently A/B compare between my good speakers and one pair of popular consumer grade headphones that I know lots of average listeners use. The only thing I feel like I'm missing is a sub.
btw, please dont respond with another essay... lmao. I enjoy the conversation but I dont want you to feel like you have to write a book for me.
@@superactivitylad Oh i type really fast :D If i put effort into it i could have probably edited it down but i didn't, sorry :D
I agree on the whole but I'd like to add 2 points : 1. The overall level obviously doesn't really matter within the context of an album, but it might in the context of a playlist featuring other artists...which might be where Sophie has her worries? and 2. I'd like to suggest in terms of her mixes that the sub bass on was toned back a little, which may (or may not!) increase the perceived loudness of those upper mid frequencies? Feel free to disagree obviously :)
Ah, I see you'v already answered the first point. As you were!
Hiya, Sophie here and next to what you and Dan have said about the midrange, I agree I definitely have the tendency to hype the sub frequency and is something I'm tryna coax my way out of in certain situations, thanks for the observations!
Superb, cheers Dan.
As a producer, you have no idea how satisfying it is to hear you say that about loudness. Musicality has absolutely no correlation to loudness
Many CD mixes are tbh too loud, which sometimes makes it annoying or even impossible to lower the volume to a comfortable level, especially when that volume control isn't exponential, but linear... which is really annoying too.
What an excellent message! Hats off!
As always, just try to sound better. Stop worrying about some number anywhere. Nice to see you again Dan.
Golden words. Thank you!
Brilliant advice.
Some of the most exquisite albums of all time are delicate and quiet - like Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" or Paul Simon's "Graceland" - dynamics all in tact - and the actual songs automatically make the listener reach for the volume knob on their stereo. In the end, you want your listener wanting to turn their own playback system's volume knob up, as opposed to them wanting to turn it down, right?
These are two of my absolute go-to examples of "perfect recordings"! Two more brilliant, dynamic masters are Steely Dan AJA and Toto IV. Quiet by Loudness War standards but enormous sounding if listeners learn to use a volume knob😊
If you want loud, control dynamic range and audition sounds/mix busses/master loud. Hard to guess what falls apart when pushed at the end. Do we all want -5lufs masters? Different question.
Agree 100%.
Funny enough the only I mix crazy loud are demos, only place where loudness war still makes sense probably
Because loudness isn’t about limiting. It’s about good compression. Harmonic content. Good eq curve. Production decisions and arrangement.
The freedom being an artists that doesn't have to worry about competing on commercial platforms is absolutely the best part about being unsuccessful. The small amount of people that listen to my music gets to hear it, good or bad, exactly how I wanted it to sound and not influenced by any other factors.
And in todays music business the financial difference between myself and a lot of commercial artists is basically nil🤣
yeah. how do you share it, any online stuff say bandcamp m, or only physical?
I needed this. Thanks Dan.
The Attenborough of audio returns, Ten hut Maestro, check Whytsey latest shout on your talents a video of his 1 or 2 ago...
Oh how I wish this advice applied to film and TV mixing…
My life is cemented at -24lufs!
no good name the goat
Love u xx
Every audio engineer must hear
this. 💯💯💯
Well the volume knob is kind of unreachable if you are for example using airpods in the gym while working out. I would like though all songs to be proprely normalized by algorithm to an equal loudness level but I haven't found a good one. The Spotify has this option but it doesn't work well, it still makes some songs significantly louder than others though it helps a little bit.
Wise words.😀
The problem is convenience at this point. If you're listening on Spotify, I'd argue most people want to set their volume once and then don't have to worry about it again. Then again - loudness correction on these platforms should deliver exactly that if I'm not mistaken? So if it sounds quieter doesn't that mean the loudness correction is not doing its job?
Kind of, yes. Human hearing is complicated, and measuring loudness is difficult. R.128 is the best we've got at the moment, but it's not perfect.
It works if you don't switch genres/decades. As soon as you switch, -14 LUFS can sound pretty diferent
Lovely said.
wanting to make the song as loud as possible aside, isn't part of the "goal" for the listener to not have to constantly change the volume from song to song? or at the very least, not have our own song being much louder or quieter than the rest? (sure this is inevitable, if one goes from EDM to 50s jazz, but generally speaking)
i'm not saying that we should mix songs any differently, just to accommodate for this, but i definitely thought that this is in part what a mastering engineer would do? to try to make it so that the our records can stand side by side to similar songs, mainly in terms of loudness
Good advice to master as loud as you can (without sacrificing sound quality for the sole purpose of increasing loudness). However, PSA if anyone’s takeaway is to master to the loudness specifications of the platform, that’s a horrible idea. These standards have changed before and could easily change again and then all of a sudden your song is way quieter than everyone else’s…
This is true. However my guess is that loudness targets are more likely to go down than up, to match broadcast levels, as we increasingly use the same devices for everything. So the risk is perhaps that you'll sacrifice quality for loudness that later becomes irrelevant.
So glad to hear that you're still avoiding Spoti. 👍
If more people sensibly boycotted them, then perhaps they'd be fairer to the musicians that they currently pay so badly.
Never used Spotify or any other music service.
The problem is not in Spotify as much as in the middle man, the labels that keep some of the money and distribute the rest. There are videos on youtube about it.
its plenty loud on Spotify- sounds smooth and fits in well with music from Eli Ingram.
I have a plugin for this, it contains all encoders from YT, Tidal, Spotify. You can even listen how it's going to sound on that platform. And my ears say it's spot on. In these violent times (thx waves), I'm not going to say a brand or type, but in email I would point you to the right direction. I had the same issue, my work didn't sound like it suppose to be. I have two mixes on my page, One that is done with the plugin, the other without the plugin. The one without and sounds different, even more metallic I should say.
that's perfect
Usually it's a massive amount of midrange and sub that is eating up LUFS
Hi Dan!
I'm a huge fan of your channel and the outreach you're doing with it, and I obviously agree with all the talk you've made so far regarding loudness.
But I think one more thing needs to be said about all of this.
It is true that in most playback systems there is a volume control that the listener can adjust independently, but nowadays (and we cannot fail to take this into consideration) music is listened to more and more through smartphones.
Fewer and fewer people have / or would buy a home listening system.
People who care and love music, at best, use earphones or headphones (which is even more true if we think of the new generations).
And it is precisely here that the need arises once again to have slightly louder masters (within the limits of reasonableness and of course the musical genre to which it belongs).
Why?
Because even with the volume of the smartphone set to maximum, using any earphones, a master can be unsatisfactory in terms of listening volume.
It goes without saying that a classical music master becomes meaningless once it is brought to high loudness values.
What about a mastering of hip hop music for example? Mastered at -14 LUFS it just doesn't satisfy you with your smartphone volume maxed out. Had it been mastered around -9 LUFS but probably yes.
Moreover, more and more platforms allow you to disable the audio normalization function, and those who do it will undoubtedly notice the differences in volumes between songs, and for some they simply will not be able to turn up the volume to the level deemed subjectively satisfactory.
Everything you say would be indisputable if we lived in a world where normalization was inevitable everywhere (like on youtube), and even more so if LUFS were a more precise unit of measurement (we all know that two songs with the same measured value of LUFS int. can sound very different depending on their EQ curve).
But even now the record labels ask the engineers for louder masters, and if we listen to the masters of the most representative modern songs of certain musical genres (Kendrick Lamar, Sevdaliza, Drake, etc. come to mind) it is easy to see that the loudness war it has changed, but not finished.
At the end of the day, from my personal point of view, the only thing that matters is the awareness of one's choices.
The rest is boring :)
Peace
Every smart phone I've ever owned has been capable of driving 80 ohm headphones to levels that would be unsafe for long periods. Even with material at -14 LUFS. Either you're trying to drive unsuitably high impedance cans or you're trying to damage your hearing, IMO.
@@DanWorrall no dan.
In the first place because many say the same thing (remember that the perception of loudness is subjective?) and we are not aliens.
We're probably just young people who want to turn up the volume.
Take for example your song "Big Dipper" (a song I really like Dan): listened to with an iphone x, with standard apple earphones (wired) at full volume, I still want to turn up the volume, and I'm forced to listen to it exclusively on my monitors.
Secondly, high listening levels can become a problem depending on the exposure time as you yourself said.
You can neither assume that someone is constantly listening at the same level inflicting pain on themselves, nor that someone who pays for a subscription (e.g. on spotify) would never, ever think of wanting to open the settings only to find that they can turn normalization off.
I believe the vast majority of users leave normalisation on, and that the feature exists due to user complaints about inconsistent levels!
Personally I don't want to optimise my masters for crappy earbuds in noisy environments, if that's to the detriment of quality on most other systems. But you're free to disagree and do things differently.
My suggestion would be to get some better headphones! And also, take care of your ears, you only get one pair.
Thank you!
Thank you. Seriously. Thank you.
Hey Dan could you test some new plugins plz? Softube Bus Processor e.g.
to be fair it is quite annoying to have your song be quiter then other work, As a frequent user of spotify usually the levels are pretty balanced but going from a particularly loud sounding song to a quiter one can be quite annoying especially when trying to use it as background music and you want to turn it on and not bother with it anymore.
I'll add that while loudness tends to exist in the mids, energy exists in the subs. The sub content I can see in those is far more than I'd go with, as it just steals energy available to the rest of the song. That'll have an effect on your loudness, as well as being unplayable in clubs and sound not as good on systems with good sub outputs.
Did you listen to it, or is that just based on the analyser?
@@DanWorrall Totally based on the analyser in the video, absolutely no further research done, I also don't know what style and genre the music is. This is just something that jumped out at me, and is very much just a generalization of the stuff I do. I don't think I could even hear that 30hz properly with my ears, and I think my various listening devices could properly produce it even less. Which is more or less what I mean. Sub amplifies the waveforms disproportionally for it's discernable presence. I know LUFS is weighted to help with that but its still loudness content that is taken from the amount available to more discernable parts of a track.
@@joruffin I definitely have a tendency to amplify the sub in my mixes, (probably disproportionately so) and I think in a handful of songs that may be another reason my album comes out quieter, in addition to the mid scoop. Still I'm mostly happy with my album mixes on my listening devices but I get that translation is important. I just love my 50hz
Great as always, Dan :)
what Reaper theme is this, I've always liked the flat version of the Reaper 6 theme but having a darker theme looks bice
I just tweaked the default theme a bit. There's a colour tweaker script, and a more advanced theme editor script available somewhere... I fiddled with it aimlessly for five minutes, and it's not changed since.
@@DanWorrall I tried to fiddle with those a bit I just couldn't find a way to make it look good, I'll try it out again tho cuz Ive never been a fan of the Reaper grey, still love the simplicity of the default style though
damn... truth hurts
also overly limiting and clipping your individual tracks and mix bus can defeat the purpose of having a percussive element at the first place.
I definitely try to be careful with my limiting and clipping, there's a lotta compression on stuff in the mix anyway so I definitely like to keep that in mind.
- Sophie
Thank you!!!
amazing
Well said 👏👏
Dan the man is bakk
I'd love to hear more about what influences the loudness of a mix and whether it makes sense to turn the whole mix down before limiting for these streaming platforms.
If you turn the mix down by 6dB, but then drive the limiter 6dB harder, you've just got back to the same place. No difference. However if I'm mastering a mix that's already really loud I do usually start by turning it down to my usual mixing levels, and I make EQ / compression decisions with my usual monitor gain settings. That's to help me achieve consistent results however, no other reason.
@@DanWorrall I meant whether you should change how hard you drive the limiter, since effectively limiting loud and exporting to these platforms makes a brickwall well below 0db.
Make it as loud as you can without hearing the limiting at all (judging that without the loudness boost) and you should be fine.
I find it useful to mix _to the loudness specifications_ of the platforms, taking into consideration the limitations of lossy audio compression too. Spotify, TH-cam etc all specify -14dB LUFS-I - so that is your maximum _loudness._ As it will likely be compressed at some point, your absolute True Peak is -1dB, if you go over this, this can mess with compression codecs. So to catch any overshoot I set my brickwall limiter to -2dB TP and aim to get my mix to -14dB LUFS integrated, or just below. This means the streaming platform will not turn my mix down, but is as loud as possible (as Spotify apparently doesn't turn your song _up!)_
In doing all this, I have found my mixes naturally have a bit more dynamic range, as the gap between -14dB "average loudness" (LUFS-I) and -2dB True Peak can be quite a lot on a dynamic track. They usually end up with LRA (Loudness Range) between 7-10dB, with certain peaks at -1.9dB TP. I know I'm mixing between peak levels and integrated loudness values in this description, but you have to juggle these in your head somewhat when mixing and mastering.
*TL:DR* - Don't drive the limiter too hard unless you are looking for that effect for creative reasons. Limiting hard introduces harmonic overtones as you are essentially distorting the waveform. Perhaps this is desirable to you, there's no right or wrong answer. Personally, I set the brickwall limiter at -2dB TP, and use compression, EQ and volume control to get the loudness down to -14dB LUFS-I (the spec of most platforms). Hope this makes sense!
@@RoganGunnthis -14 thing is simply ridiculous for some music genres. You just don't get the aggression needed when keeping that as a reference. In metal I still see -7 masters sounding good and from well seasoned and expert producers.
🔥
Would have been interesting to see if the "normalise volume" function in Tidal was on or off. Does Spottify have a function like that too? I have it always ON toeven out the overall volume of my 2000+ songs playlist, and I even kick out too loud songs. Too much Loudness is so annoying ....
It was on, I did say so. When I was a subscriber Spotify gave me a choice of loudness targets. Can't remember if you could turn it off entirely, probably yes. But I switched to Tidal quite a while ago so they might have changed the options anyway.
@@DanWorrall : FYI, could access my old open.spotify acc. Is does have an option to normalise volume and there's even an EQ now. Cheers and thanks for your fantastic content!
Solid advise
I'm gonna say it, you're just wrong here about the "People don't listen to music louder or quieter than they want" thing.
The primary way I and many other people consume music is as a background track for another activity, like driving, and in that context, adjusting the volume on a track-by-track basis is simply Not A Thing. I can spare the attention to adjust it once, when I put the playlist on the first time; if a track is too quiet after that it's just gonna stay too quiet for a while until I can spare the attention again, and if a track is too loud, then the whole playlist just gets shut off or the track skipped to immediately cut the distraction out.
Could it be, that the problem for most folks here - me including - might not be about volume but about a 'tight' mix? My songs always feel to quiet compared to other tracks of the same genre and as far as I know my numbers also check out, -14 Lufs etc. But so do all the other tracks. What is the difference? Is it really just a bit more information in the mids? A flatter curve?
Amen!
My experience is that Spotify can actually sound louder if the audio was -12 LUFS than -9 LUFS. Same goes for TH-cam. Louder into Spotify doesn't mean louder out always.
Also, with cheap speakers, headphones or cellphone speakers those "harsh" frequencies really can be a problem. My 2 cents.
hm, i see the LIKe button but where did that LOVE button go?