I get this question a lot.
What can I do to make my music sound louder?
Well, there’s lots – in fact most things you do when making music affect loudness somehow.
Loudness is genre dependent and not everything needs to sound loud and thick. I think the ongoing loudness trend (along with the poor sound quality of most streaming services) has made music in general sound increasingly worse. A lot of the music out there would sound better with some more dynamics.
However, loud can be done right. There’s good loud and bad loud. There are genres that are based on that super hyped, yet punchy sound. Good loud isn’t easy to achieve. It’s an art form in itself.
So for the purposes of this post we shall forget any debate. We’ll purely concentrate on how to beef things up.
There are two different processes at play here:
A word about mastering
- Recording/production/mixing stage
- Mastering
It’s always better if you can get your music mastered at a professional mastering studio. But most of us will be doing some type of mastering on our own in any case. Even if it’s only for testing tunes out in the field before the actual mastering.
It’s perfectly normal not to have your tunes quite as loud as commercial releases. Commercial releases are professionally mastered. Professional mastering studios have extremely skilled engineers and use the best equipment, software and listening facilities money can buy. It’s hard if not impossible to match that combination in a DIY situation. Keep that in mind when comparing your music to commercial releases.
Having said that, even a professional mastering studio won’t be able to make a bad mixdown sound really loud and clean. So learn to cover your ground well in the mixdown department. But when it comes to mastering – try to focus on staying safe and not ruining a perfectly good mix. Don’t do anything you’re unsure about.
#1 Use good quality sources and tools
The quality of the samples, instruments and plugins you are using is your mixdowns foundation. This especially goes for the drums. With messy sounds or crappy processing you will never achieve a loud mix. Ever. So make sure you’re covered on that department.
Check this list of my favourite tools. I do a lot of testing of different tools and resources and always keep it up to date with my current favourites.
As far as samples go, get them from a trusted source. I use the Wave Alchemy Complete Drums sample pack a lot. It’s expensive, but I never have to worry about the quality of my drum samples.
#2 Learn Compression
People often seem to think compression is the magic pill for making everything loud.If used wrong it will suck the life out of things and make your mix sound smaller – not larger.
You must spend time experimenting with compression and learning to hear the difference each setting makes. Eventually you will start to understand how to shape the dynamics to your liking.
For loudness, it’s especially beneficial to learn about multiband and parallel compression. Get practicing.
I’ve written a couple of posts about compression that I recommend for you to read:
9 Tips for Working With Compression
#3 Saturation
Saturation is an invaluable tool for achieving loudness. In many cases it can work much better than compression.
A nice trick is to push your individual channels slightly by driving each channel a tiny bit. You could then route these channels into submix buses, which you can use as another stage of saturation. Finally, you can do some further processing in the mix bus (master bus).
Experiment with what type of saturation gives you the best results. Different plugins give different results so make sure to try out everything you can.
With saturation a little goes a long way. Of course this also depends on the genre and style you’re going for. Drum & bass music for example tends to get away with more distortion than many other genres. In any case it’s easy to ruin your mix with too much saturation.
Here is a post about saturation you should read:
My Essential Saturation Plugins
#4 Create room in the mix
It’s not enough to have nice clean soundsto work with. Loudness is all about balance, so you need to think about what kind of elements you have going in your mix and what frequency areas they are occupying.
Where needed, use EQ to craft some space for your sounds.
Guitar, for example, is a tough one as it covers a lot of frequency range and usually overlaps with many other things. In such case you might want to perform some EQ cuts in the guitar where appropriate.
Overlapping is inevitable, but be conscious about the elements in your mix and what frequency areas they occupy. Try to make it so that the entire frequency range is covered in the final mix in a balanced way.
Another way to create room in the mix is by using the stereo image to your advantage. If you have two instruments competing of the same frequency area, placing them to different positions in the stereo image helps.
#5 Watch the bass!
Bass takes up a huge chunk of energy in the mix. If you have it too loud, loudness is the first thing that suffers. Use a spectrum analyzer to make sure you know what’s going on in the low end.
Compare to similar professionally mastered music to get a rough ballpark level of what you should be aiming for.
Remove low bass frequencies where you don’t need them, and watch the loudness of your main bass source.
#6 Use the right limiter
There are big differences with how different limiters behave when you really start pushing them. Some will distort sooner and more apparently than others. Some limiters also tend to work better for certain genres than others. See this page for my favourite limiters.
#7 Do a little bit at each stage
I already touched on this point a little bit in tip #3. But I wanted to elaborate on it.
Loudness is not something you slap on once you are done with everything else. If you want to do it well, you have to weave it into the mix as you are working.
You have to carefully control the dynamics of your mix throughout the processing chain.
First start with good quality source sounds. Then shape those individual tracks towards your goals. Then have them go into a group bus and process that. Then adjust the whole mix in the mix bus. And finally, do the master.
That’s five separate stages of control.
#8 Avoid Over-processing
This is the mistake I see happening by far the most. Too much EQ, too much compression, too much limiting. Processing that isn’t necessary.
If your mix is too complex, it will be hard to control and you’ll easily lose the overview of what’s important. It’s a time-suck as well.
But more than those things, it’s that all processing has side effects.
Any EQ move will also change the phase of the material, for example.
A lot of saturation and compression plugins introduce aliasing (digital noise). If you process with bad plugins and do that in several stages, that aliasing will compound in your mix and create a foggy veil over it.
Do what’s necessary, but nothing more. Learn to think of ways of achieving the desired result by doing the least amount of processing possible.
Final Words
As final words I would like to say: don’t worry about the loudness too much. A lot of people hitting me up seem to be overly concerned about it.
It’s better to spend the bulk of your time concentrating on the musical ideas and finishing tunes. The more time you spend working on music, the better and louder your mixdowns will get.
Tips like these are good pointers. But actually learning to mix loud is something that just takes a lot of time and trial & error. As you gain experience you will develop your musical instincts and situational awareness, and you will be able to make better decisions.
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