Mastering the loudness of a track

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Impostor
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Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Impostor »

The loudness of my self-made tracks is always much less than any commercial one. The issue in my case seems to be that certain transients have a disproportionally large amplitude for just a single or even half a period.

Now, I always thought this could be solved by applying a compressor to the master track, but no matter how I tweak its settings, sufficient damping of said amplitudes always resulted in a noticeable change in sound. That's most likely due to lack of skill and knowledge on my part.

So what I did manually instead, is adjusting the amplitude of all offensive single peaks (see attachment) to the desired value, and then amplifying everything. In my experience this did not lead to an audible difference in sound at all: so far so good. Only, a single track can contain dozens of such peaks and it is rather time consuming work to adjust them all manually.

Then I figured out that "hard-limiting" seems to be the process which does this automatically: if look-ahead and release times are set around 10 ms, there seem to be no audible consequences. (I do this hard-limiting in a wave editor with the master track, not with a dynamic plugin in a DAW).

Any thoughts on using hard-limiting vs using a compressor for said pupose?

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sunrat »

Impostor wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 11:07 am

Any thoughts on using hard-limiting vs using a compressor for said pupose?

That's what limiters are for. Just set the threshold to only squash the peaks.
A limiter is basically just a compressor with a high compression ratio.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Impostor »

sunrat wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 11:25 am
Impostor wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 11:07 am

Any thoughts on using hard-limiting vs using a compressor for said pupose?

That's what limiters are for. Just set the threshold to only squash the peaks.
A limiter is basically just a compressor with a high compression ratio.

Is it then correct of me to assume that the purpose of using a compressor is to have an audible effect, whereas a limiter should -not- have an audible effect?

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sysrqer »

A better approach to this is solving it at the source. Put limiters on individual instruments, the simpler the source the less weirdness will happen in the limiter. Trying to do this on the master can completely kill the track.

There is a strategy called Clip to Zero (CTZ) which which has been popularised by Baphomet on youtube. This involves having a clipper on a channel and the threshold at 0db, then pushing the signal before the clipper until it clips by a desirable amount to get rid of crazy peaks. Then you put a clipper at every stage of summing/bus so by the time it gets to the master it's rarely/barely going over 0db and is already loud so there is hardly any need to do anything to the master. The advantage of this is that clipping often sounds really good, it introduces harmonics which makes it sound a bit more aggressive but also makes the sound perceived as louder, in addition to actually being louder. It's surprising how much you can clip off without it being detrimental to the sound. You can use a limiter instead of a clipper, or mix it up depending on the source channel.

Either way, limit or clip the individual channels that are causing the large peaks, it will sound much more transparent this way vs trying to do it on the master.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sunrat »

sysrqer wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:11 pm

Either way, limit or clip the individual channels that are causing the large peaks, it will sound much more transparent this way vs trying to do it on the master.

Wise words! :wink:

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sysrqer »

artix_linux_user wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:40 pm

Yeah, the clipper.
It can reduce the gain for 1 maybe 2 db...greater impacts you probably will hear a slight distortion.
At least thats what a producer told me who does much guitar and band recording.I think the clipper is also some kind of distortion for guitars as part of a guitar amp.
64 bit floating point gain resolution still is a nice way to work around.

I'm not sure, my feeling is that there is generally some confusion about the technical vs the sound. If you put percussion through a clipper and only take of a db or so off then you don't really hear distortion. It is technically introducing distortion but it doesn't sound like distortion that most people would imagine when they hear that word. If you push too far then it can result in some obvious unpleasantness though. It's a fine line between exciting the sound and killing it.

I think tube amps produce soft clipping which, I guess, sounds better than hard clipping when you are pushing it enough to actually hear the distortion because it's not brickwalled and creating a squared wave. However, for the purpose mentioned above you would want a hard clipper.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by folderol »

If you target 0dB and maximum loudness there are two pitfalls.

The first is that any kind of format management in a playback system may generate inter-sample peaks that are considerably above 0dB - hence distorted.

The second is that lots of modern systems will attenuate the material till it reaches an acceptable average level. This may result in your track actually sounding quieter than others!
See here:
https://emastered.com/blog/what-are-lufs

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Impostor »

sysrqer wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 1:11 pm

Either way, limit or clip the individual channels that are causing the large peaks, it will sound much more transparent this way vs trying to do it on the master.

That makes sense. I did make certain the limiter didn't have any (obvious) audible effects though.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sysrqer »

folderol wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:06 pm

If you target 0dB and maximum loudness there are two pitfalls.

The first is that any kind of format management in a playback system may generate inter-sample peaks that are considerably above 0dB - hence distorted.

The second is that lots of modern systems will attenuate the material till it reaches an acceptable average level. This may result in your track actually sounding quieter than others!
See here:
https://emastered.com/blog/what-are-lufs

Very true. The method I mentioned you generally wouldn't export it at 0db but the harmonics introduced in clipping can trick the ear into thinking it is louder than it actually is. And you would certainly want to use a limiter during actual mastering that can deal with the inter-sample peaks.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sysrqer »

Impostor wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:35 pm

That makes sense. I did make certain the limiter didn't have any (obvious) audible effects though.

If you're happy with the sound then do it however you like, that's all that matters at the end of the day. Personally, by the time it comes to treating the master I have lost almost all objectivity and I've definitely destroyed tracks without realising it by getting lost in it all.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Impostor »

sysrqer wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:41 pm

Personally, by the time it comes to treating the master I have lost almost all objectivity and I've definitely destroyed tracks without realising it by getting lost in it all.

Also true. In another thread I got the advice to leave a supposedly finished track for a couple of weeks in order to regain some objectivity. Good advice, but one that requires an enormous amount of self-control..

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by sysrqer »

I think that's great advice and it's something I've been practicing recently. I also like putting the export on to my phone/mp3 player and going for a walk, somehow when you are walking around and just listening things jump out more than they do when you're in front of your computer.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Death »

Impostor wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:56 pm

Also true. In another thread I got the advice to leave a supposedly finished track for a couple of weeks in order to regain some objectivity. Good advice, but one that requires an enormous amount of self-control..

sysrqer wrote: Sun Nov 06, 2022 4:01 pm

I think that's great advice and it's something I've been practicing recently. I also like putting the export on to my phone/mp3 player and going for a walk, somehow when you are walking around and just listening things jump out more than they do when you're in front of your computer.

It does work :)

And yeh, that's also a good thing to mention. Listen on the kind of devices the average person will listen on; A phone with budget earphones, for example. Listen to it this way in both noisy and quiet environments. Although cheap earphones don't have the most accurate sound, they will definitely tell you something useful! Another one I hear mentioned a lot, especially by professional engineers, is to listen to it on your car's audio system (assuming you have one). I think the main reason for this is to listen on a system you're used to listening on. That's just as important as the quality of the system; You know what professional mixes sound like on your regular playback systems so if your mix has issues then you should notice them. But also, most people are not listening on the same kind of systems in the same kind of scenarios we are when we're working on music. It's definitely stuff to consider when finalising your mix. You've got to check a variety of devices to get the best picture.

As for the original question in this thread which I think has already been answered but I'll give my take anyway; Limiters in the context of the master bus are best used to catch just the highest peaks. Ideally they should only be working every now and then, doing maybe 2-3db of reduction (likely when the kick & snare hit as they tend to be the points in a song with the highest peaks). They definitely shouldn't be working constantly because they have a horrible sound and will squash the life right out of a mix! Be careful.. It's very easy to over do it with them! So yes, try to use them in a transparent way.

You can also use a compressor on the master bus and when done right it can really gel a mix and enhance/create some lovely movement. But again, be careful not to over do it. I usually only have about 0.5 - 1.5db reduction in the end. However, when I'm dialling in a compressor I usually have quite a lot of reduction happening; Maybe 8db worth. This is because it really helps me to hear the timing of the compressor so I can dial in the attack & release to match the timing & groove of the song. Once it's setup nicely I will then back off and get the reduction down to a more reasonable level.

Finally, another option for reducing peaks is 'soft clipping'. It's compression of sorts but it's not actually turning the volume down, it's just chopping off the top of the waveform instead. So, it doesn't provide any rythmical benefits but it does tame peaks and can give you some nice, subtle distortion. There are soft clipper plugins you can use. Tape emulation plugins also do this and I like to use them a lot.

I'll leave it at that but hopefully I've given you some ideas if you weren't already aware of these things :wink:

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Impostor »

Death wrote: Mon Nov 07, 2022 1:30 am

I'll leave it at that but hopefully I've given you some ideas if you weren't already aware of these things :wink:

Thanks for your input. I was trying to get rid of the peaks in the mastertrack without audible consequences (to be able to amplify the track without clipping) so using a compressor or clipper seems out of the question. Hard-limiting (that's how it's called in Cool Edit) just decreases the amplitude of the highest peaks in a smooth manner to below the desired threshold, in contrast to clipping which just cuts the top off, and compressing which only seems to dampen the signal above a threshold.

Probably the need for this could be prevented by treating the individual channels of the mix with more care, using clippers and compressors there, but it may be a long time before I'm comfortable with using them.

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Re: Mastering the loudness of a track

Post by Death »

Impostor wrote: Mon Nov 07, 2022 7:30 pm

Thanks for your input. I was trying to get rid of the peaks in the mastertrack without audible consequences (to be able to amplify the track without clipping) so using a compressor or clipper seems out of the question. Hard-limiting (that's how it's called in Cool Edit) just decreases the amplitude of the highest peaks in a smooth manner to below the desired threshold, in contrast to clipping which just cuts the top off, and compressing which only seems to dampen the signal above a threshold.

Probably the need for this could be prevented by treating the individual channels of the mix with more care, using clippers and compressors there, but it may be a long time before I'm comfortable with using them.

Well I think it's important to understand the difference between 'soft clipping' and 'hard clipping'. What people generally mean when they say 'clipping' is hard clipping. Hard clipping is how clipping works in digital audio. It cuts the top of the waveform off in a very harsh way when it goes above 0db. Long story short; It sounds like crap, is bad practice and you're right to avoid it!

However, what I was suggesting is soft clipping. Soft clipping is the way clipping works in the analogue world. Soft clipping is not so harsh in the way it clips the waveform. It can actually give you a really nice sound if done in moderation! You don't need analogue gear to do it either; As I said, there are soft clip plugins and tape machine emulation plugins that have soft clip functionality. These plugins allow you to set the threshold at which soft clipping begins so you would set it a lot lower than 0db and benefit from soft clipping whilst not having your songs digitally/hard clipping. I always stick a limiter on the mixbus at the end of the chain whether or not I use soft clipping. I'm not suggesting to use soft clipping in place of a limiter but just something you can use before the limiter to make the limiter's job even easier which will result in a more transparent result.

Today's digital limiters are all 'hard limiters'. Basically, old, analogue limiters were essentially compressors with a really high compression ratio. This meant the signal could actually go above the set limit. Modern limiters are digital and so have something called 'lookahead' which basically means that they delay the signal to your ears (by milliseconds) so they can analylise the waveform and make adjustments to make sure it absolutely does not go above the limit you've set, whatever it takes.

Something else to understand about limiters (& compressors) is that when they adjust the volume, they distort the waveform. This distortion can be quite audible so don't assume that they're always going to sound transparent. They may even cause things to sound more distorted & less musical than a soft clipper would, for example.

You're totally right though. The best results come from lots of little things combined rather than one big trick. You don't necessarily need to process every single track with compressors & soft clippers etc though. I usually find it best to do compression on buses (Group tracks with multiple tracks running through them); For example, the drum bus which has every single drum sound running through it - I compress them all together.

EQ and compression are your main tools in mixing. Those are the things you really want to focus on getting good with. The rest is all dressing..

Compressors took me a while to get my head around. Essentially they're an automated volume control, turning the volume down when it goes too high and then turning it back up again as the volume drops. However, if you never explore them any further than that you will be missing out on so much! They can do some really cool things and alter the sound in ways you wouldn't have thought of. One of the main uses for them is to make drums more punchy by enhancing the transient, or more fat by reducing the transient. I think the best thing about them is their ability to enhance or even, create movement. You can do this by putting them on a bus. You'll be amazed at the life that suddenly comes out of things when you get it right!

I mentioned something similar in my last post but to learn how to use compressors you should really dig in with the threshold at first so there's lots of reduction happening and you can really hear what's going on while you adjust the controls. Once you've done that you can then back off to a more reasonable level. Here's a video that really helped me to get started with compressors years ago so I'm sure it could help someone else out too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91qs3fux5HY

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