I prefer dynamics and mastering that preserves the dynamics then all this over compressed just loud for the sake of being loud any day. The newer version of Tracy Chapman's track sounds bad in comparison to the orig album version in my opin. I cant stand loudness war mastering. I am glad you mention you try and preserve the dynamics, most do not. I notice that many times when it says re-mastered that really just means they destroyed the track by just making the whole thing loud by slamming it into a limiter and did not actually improve the track sound quality, so on that I usually prefer the original I know when I re-master a song because I feel it could be made slightly better then my goal is to make it sound better not worse. But it seems that too many still think just loud is better forgetting about having a nice open dynamic sound. Great video as always.
I listened to a lot of metal from the mid nineties on so I gradually noticed productions getting tighter and more rigid (through editing and recording to a click, using samples for drums, pitch correcting vocals etc). At first I liked it: a lot of music benefited from the machine like sound. But from 2000 on bands in that genre sounded more and more alike, and also more and more boring... It's a cliche but editing and to a lesser extent recording to a click destroys the "feeling", and the feeling is what makes most music sounds interesting to my ear. I understand that some genres should sound very tight and editing, for instance electronic dance... But then again I loved that Roisin Murphy's track "Overpowered" has that intentionally badly looped drum track... But maybe because it's refreshing. I'm rambling now. Long story short: In the end I like music that's loose, not edited to death and I wonder if in the end deep down all people prefer that. Music tip! Check out "Dawn of Midi's" album "Dysnomia". It's like minimal electro with lots of syncopation but played by a jazz trio, AND NO EDITS!
Agreed, a lot of the personality of a band/artist is in the looseness around the grid and pitch, even in the more extreme genres. Great editing can preserve and enhance this, just as over-editing can make everything sound the same. Thanks for the music tips, will check them out! 👍 /Thomas
Thanks for this! Do you have any guidelines for quiet song sections? That is, how much quieter than the loud sections can they be? I imagine that they can't be too quiet as then the quiet sections won't be audible in noisy environments. Cheers!
Yeah, the quiet parts need to still be audible and also need to be loud enough to not trigger the gating in the LUFS measurement. There are two gates, one at -70 LUFS and one at 10 LU below the current integrated loudness value. This quickly gets quite technical if you want to optimize it and I'm not sure if it's a good idea from a musical standpoint to game the system in this way. I think the main takeaway is that using lots of compression with the intention of making the song "loud" might not translate that well after loudness normalization. /Thomas
Tack :) I'm going to master a song that has a rather high kick and snare, it's not possible to re-mix the song, so I'll try to lower the kick and snare a little without it affecting anything else so much. If I use a limiter now, the kick and snare are affected too much so it's difficult to get the song up in volume. Do you have any tips? Best/Mathias
Maybe try a transient / tonal EQ such as Ozone 11 EQ or Split EQ. Melda's MFreeFXBundle also can be used to do it, but the channel routing is a bit complicated.
Careful with the space monkeys on things like spliteq. Can be quite noticeable. If the kick and snare truly reign supreme over the rest of the mix, a clipper might be a good bet. Shaving a db off on the kick and snare with a clipper-one with Oversampling, and try hard clipping first
little sneaky noises, that we barely hear when they are there ... But when they disappear, for a fraction of a millisecondes it leaves a deep silence ... Do you have fox ears? or bat ears? or dolphin ears? I'll let you choose. Thank you for all these beautiful thoughts that you offer us.
Just listened to both on Spotify, normalized, back to back. I think Luke Combs’ version sounds louder-and I think most people would agree-and it’s because of the mix, not the master. The Luke combs version is mixed in the dense, modern style, where the kick/snare transients cut through everything, and the frequencies are super-sculpted for audibility at any playback level and on any device-as opposed to the more organic large format console feeling of the original mix.
The trick is to place the two songs in a playlist and play them from there. You need the Greatest Hits version for this, as it is louder than -14 LUFS. Each song on Spotify has two loudness normalization values - the song value and the album value. The song value is the individual loudness of that specific song, and the album value is the loudness of the whole album. If you play a song directly from the album, then Spotify will use the album value for normalization. This is to make sure that the relative loudness between the songs within the album is kept intact. Luke Comb's version sounds louder in this scenario, just as you noted. But if you place the songs in a playlist and play them from there, then the individual song values will be used for normalization instead. And this is when you get the effect described in the video. Now this is the kind of knowledge that will truly skyrocket your nerd status! /Thomas
His version of the song is dull. Tracy seems to be the only person who has ever sung this song properly: to honor the Story. Everyone else seems to think it is enough to strum and intone some words. And yes a proper song dynamic will benefit far better than the horrid "modern" crushed thing. Ha! :-)
@BenedictRoffMarsh Yup dull and lifeless like most music today it seems and this is because too much has been lost from it being so slammed in to a limiter for the sake of insanely loud that the song has no life left just a mid rangy dull over compressed sound, so basically a single wall of sound. if you go back and listen to older first run CDs you will see they are a lot lower but clear and very dynamic unlike most music today.
