Volume and Loudness Across The Different Stages of Music Production
Understanding how loudness works in music is a pretty complex topic that, unfortunately, isn’t quite as simple as turning up a volume knob. We all want our music to sound competitively loud. But, that desire can sometimes adversely impact musical quality during the production process, if applied in the wrong way at the wrong time.
How and where to add volume appropriately during music production is a widely misunderstood topic. If you’re only following your musical intuition during mixing, you can easily be led astray when it comes to loudness.
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So, time for some graphs! These outline a birds-eye view of the music production process, and how the volume of your track should flow through that process over time. If you follow the process and trust your production team to execute, you can be assured of an end result that is both of highest quality and appropriately loud for the playback medium you’re wanting to release in. Ideally we want both of these things happening simultaneously, both loudness and high quality, without sacrificing one for the other.
Note: the line that says “Competitive Volume” is a loose guideline that moves, rather than a target to aim for. Competitive volume will vary, depending on the playback medium you’re talking about (CD, streaming, vinyl, etc), artistic preference, and musical style. As if all of this wasn't complex enough.
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The complexity around loudness is one of the more compelling reasons to consider hiring a professional mastering engineer. We specialize in understanding how all these different technical variables interact, and they do change frequently. So, hiring this job out means that you don’t have to worry about keeping up on all the tech specs, and you can focus on what you should be focusing on as the artist: creating awesome music.
Graph time!
This is what we want to see: we’re adding volume as we go, hitting the final competitive volume level at the end of the mastering process.
Important: this means that when your final mixes are done, don’t worry if it’s too soft and you have to turn it up. We’re not done with the process yet! We’ll add plenty of additional volume and presence in mastering, as we continue on.
When your final mixes are done, your music should sound exactly how you want it to sound in every respect, with the only exception being final volume level.
During the tracking and mixing stages: if it’s sounding soft, simply turn up the volume on your speakers, sometimes by a lot. If it sounds good when you do this, everything’s going well!
After mixing, during the mastering process, we’ll bring all of your tracks up to final competitive volume level. We’ll also ensure your music sounds its best everywhere it’s listened to, and that your album tracks flow together nicely. Here’s another correct example:
Here, the mixing engineer has made their mixes a bit louder, but still under final level, before sending to mastering.
In this case, the mastering engineer might not have to do much in terms of adding volume and presence. But, you’re also not leaving them much room to work.
That means you’re not getting the full added benefit of the very high-end and lovely sounding equipment that your mastering engineer could be using, if they had more room to use it. I wouldn’t leave that additional audio quality on the table, personally.
To put some numbers on it, I usually like to see mixes hitting at around -6 dB in their loudest parts, when they’re delivered into the mastering studio. Lower is not a problem. Higher is not necessarily a problem either, but we don’t want this:
This would be incorrect, and could result in a loss of fidelity that might be audible. Particularly if you’re working with a 16-bit recording, rather than a 24-bit recording.
In this case, the mix engineer has made their mix so loud that the mastering engineer would have to turn it down on their end, in order to avoid nasty sounding digital distortions in the final product. So, we’re turning it down, in order to turn it back up again.
Is this possible to do? Sure! But, the act of turning down the volume pre-mastering can result in a noticeable loss of quality. It might not ruin the track or anything, but that depends in part on how much volume reduction needs to be done. And, if your mixes are so loud that they are digitally clipping, that clipping has now been baked into your music, further eroding audio quality.
It would be a real shame to lose any audio quality at all, given that we’ve already spent a lot of time in writing, tracking and mixing stages making our music sound great! That’s an unnecessary compromise. One of the first rules of the mastering engineer is to “do no harm”: we want your music to sound great when it leaves the studio, not worse than when it came in.
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Why does all of this happen? Well, when we’re talking digital music files, you never pay a penalty for turning something up. Long story short, you’re basically just adding empty bits to the digital file to increase the volume, but without directly modifying any existing audio information.
Turning the volume down, though, is a different story. In order to decrease volume in the digital space, you have to throw out some bits. And, those bits contain important information that we don’t want to lose if we can avoid it! Losing bits like this can also sometimes result in audible, unflattering digital distortion being added to your music.
Solutions for better loudness in your music
When recording on a computer, aim for the middle of your meter, rather than the top. A healthy volume, but not too hot. When I’m recording something like a full amplified band, I’m aiming for the individual tracks to hit at around -10 to -18 dB in my DAW. The master track (i.e. the full stereo mix) should be hitting at around -6 dB in it’s loudest section, after the mixing process is complete.
If you’re recording or mixing and want to hear something louder, turn up the volume on your speakers or headphones first. Don’t adjust the mix itself until after you do this.
Just because your final mixes might sound a bit soft, does not mean your music will sound too soft after the music production process is complete. We’re not done adding volume yet, even at the end of the mix stage, and everything will get louder as we continue through the process into mastering.
