I love how clearly you stated this info. I wish I had known this stuff 6 years ago. I had to learn the hard way that mastering your track to sound loud is more important than how loud it actually is. There was a trend on YT a few years ago where so many content creators were pushing the lie that you don't want Spotify to turn down your master and that really tripped me up for a while. You explanation is awesome and I would love to see it updated with what using a clipper in you mastering chain does becuase it would fit perfectly.
It tripped me up as well, I am just now after many years coming to this info. The internet is a tricky place, but as shown on the Izotope website, professionals often master upwards of -5LUFS (post malone track). It comes down to, what works for your track? In my case, my alt-rock/shoegaze I want that "wall of sound", so I will be mastering louder after learning about this stuff.
Fantastic video technically but also your dry delivery and sense of humour had me ROFL. Your smooth vocal tones and calm delivery had me thinking there wouldn't be any humour involved. Bahahaha!! Gold!
Hi, Jon. I've been following you for years! Great to have you stop by. Everybody go subscribe to The Reaper Blog on UA-cam. The REAPER Blog - UA-cam m.ua-cam.com/users/thereaperblog And The Reaper Blog Reaoer.blog
Great video - thanks. I was a complete idiot and uploaded my great sounding/bloody LOUD (peaks at -0.31db; just loud power-pop for 90% of the track) master to the streamers and, lo and behold, it ends up sounding quieter than its peers. I love the mix which was done by a pro but he did a quick master that I though would do the job as I'm not planning on doing any physical media. I knew nothing about LUFS and I've always had a bit of an infantile attitude to techs telling me to turn it down so here I am. I've had a fiddle in Reaper to bring the LUFs-i to -11 but it's just quieter, which I suppose is the point. Still, I feel like the streamers are being a bit tyrannical but, hey, there are much worse tyrants in this world. Thanks again.
Hi Barry.. Once again you've nailed it. I'm using Ozone 11 for mastering ( which is great ) but after reaching the point of final levels the info available is both conflicting and not that clear? I've tried various LUFS meters and finally settle on the Waves one which even has its own limiter.. making it easy to set peak values. I then use the maximiser in Ozone to achieve the values I want. I'd already sussed the need for compression to control peaks at each track but your insight on levels is a true revelation and makes perfect sense. Thanks for yet another perfect lesson. Ronnie.
There are a lot of ways to look at it. Here's one -- as a general guideline, your mix should hit about the same LUFS level as well-mixed songs of the same genre/tempo/energy level. Another guideline is that peaks remain below 0dBFS. That's basically talking about a relationship between true peak and LUFS. So, yes to your question. If you get your mix to your LUFS target and you have true peaks in the red, I'd revisit the mix, see where the peaks are coming from and deal with them at the source by one of the several ways to deal with peaks -- limiting, clipping, compression, saturation, volume automation, transient designing . . .
Sure! LUFS is average loudness, Dynamic Range (DR) is the relation between Short-term Loudness and Peak (PSR). That's why you actually should get a DR/PSR Meter instead of focusing on LUFS.
I dragged a track from a CD into Reaper (70's british glam rock), -5.3 RMS, +0.3 peak. I'm scratching my head. Master level is way up into the red, yet it sits at 0.0, mostly. How did they get those levels on vinyl?
Really good explanation, thanks. The -14 LUFS nominal standard has been mystifying to me, both from the standpoint of it seeming WAY TOO QUIET in general and from the standpoint of the stuff that I have remastered sometimes getting as high as -6 and still requiring a boost in my reference loud listening volume in my car. I now see how this has more to do with being more attentive to dynamic range in the tracking stage, inflating and giving your stems a shave at every bus grouping during the initial mix, and being cognizant of spectral balance's relationship to loudness ie Fletcher-Munson.
Small amounts of compression in stages worked for me, but I've also tried two limiters not right next to each other with different ceiling settings to try and achieve a clean -14 LUFS (-1db).
@@NLNPNL That's true, but the internet digital age can't have anything that loud anymore. People have 18 inch subwoofers, with preamps, amps and tube-amps and they like to dial in their own loudness. Loud mixes are for people with $5.99 Panasonic headphones. Just give us something near -12 LUFS or less. I don't want to reach for my volume for every producer.
@@NLNPNL You'll find they are hitting around -6 to -8 short term. Higher for integrated. -8 integrated is pretty loud for the average pop song, bordering on to loud in most cases.
@@gctechs well, he's one of my favorite authors, and the first line of the song is, "The Stanislaw Lem's mine." It's referring to a book that was in my bookshelf.
-5 LUFs I? That's pretty loud, but not out of the question for your genre. If you're sending to a mastering engineer, ask them. They might be just fine with it, or they might want you to take some compression off your final mixing stage.
@@NLNPNL for the kind of music i do, i feel -14 is quite loud enough. even too loud in some cases. last one i did a few days ago ended up @ -14.35 LUFS-I, and even then i thought i was pushing it.
Its simple. 1. download popular songs with lots of streams in the genre you're working in. 2. Check those song's short term and overall levels. 3. Mix/master your new song to the similar levels. Your song is going to get played with other similar songs in the same genre and you want your new song to fit in. NEVER use a feature in a daw that claims it renders to a specific LUFS. Do that yourself with limiters so you can control what's going on, use a good algorithm for limiting that fits with the song, etc. In reality short term lufs is far more important than integrated. Also if you can't get as loud as other similar songs without the song sounding terrible your low end needs work in the mix, it probably doesn't mean you need to tighten the dynamics, it means you probably have to much low end or didn't clean up the low end properly.
i think why the music is so heavily compressed these days is that it can be easily listened to in a noisy environment. people do not really listen to music these days. they listen to music while they do other things. in my days, we would get stoned, sit down and listen to the whole Dark Side of the Moon or House of the Holy albums religiously. lol : )
@@NLNPNL even within single songs like "Watcher of the Skies" or "Shadow of the Hierophant", the dynamic range of slow crescendos is quite important. i quite like that. : )
The issue is its so easy these days the gear is good enough to reproduce what you hear. Prior to the 70's it wasn't that easy and reproducing what you would hear if you were in the room with the musicians would have been the goal. After the late 70's the goal started to move towards a hyper-real sound where creating emotion is more important than reproducing what happened in the room with the musicians. You'll see the same pattern in just about any other style of art as the tools evolve.
The graphic representation of the compression below 0dbfs would be more like his head smashing down, not his entire body. That's more like you just lowered the entire mix.
There is no free lunch with compression. Sucking the life out of, say a guitar, in three mild steps (channel, stem, mix) is actually worse than doing it in one shot because with each step you have an increasingly dishonest perspective on that instrument. Your guitar gets smaller, and smaller, and… hey what the hell happened to my guitar?? Mixing properly, this does not happen. Compressors are a sound effect, NOT a mix tool. That should be the mixer’s mantra. I urge mixers to revisit the method you describe and improve it to one where the range is constrained by fader moves entirely. The unlimited availability of plug-ins has led to lazy mixing that can be heard immediately. With ‘compressor mixing’ everything is just crammed carelessly into the box rather than placed exactly where we want it. When we admire recordings by, for example, George Massenburg or Bill Szymczyk, we are admiring their mixing choices, not their use of compressors.
I agree that control of dynamics can sometimes be achieved better through fader moves. I often automate volume on vocals (as an example) before compression. But fader moves won't control transients. Compressors are, of course, an effect, AND a mix tool.
@@NLNPNL Sorry I’m a bit of a hardass, but fader moves don’t all get done with the actual fader. I go thru my tracks one at a time writing automation with a trackball or pencil. The visual representation of the waveform together with the ability to scrub lets me work ultra-close and does in fact get every single last transient, and it does it way more musically than any compressor can. I use comps and limiters only for a sound effect, never to mix. Never. I stand by what I said literally.
Completely disagree with you. If you want a guitar to sound more alive in almost every case that means putting a compressor on it and removing some of the sound with an eq. In general a compressor doesn't make it get smaller, it gets bigger. It only gets smaller when that compression goes too far or if the settings on the compressor are entirely inappropriate. Modern music hasn't been about an accurate representation of what the musicians are doing in the room since the 1970's. That idea no longer makes sense on most genre's except some jazz or classical. Modern mixing is about creating emotional responses and not about accurately reproducing what the musicians did in the room. Its about enhancing what they did. Compressors are absolutely a sound effect and a mixing tool. Someone like Massenburg, which you reference, even designed his own compression algorithms such as the DCR2.
@@dodgingrain3695 I am a professional guitarist as well as a successful music producer. One of the many settings on a compressor that is entirely inappropriate, as you state, is the decision to use one in the first place. You, personally, may not have experience with that but it’s a bit naive to dismiss another’s broader body of work and wider experience. If that’s your habit, we can just agree to disagree. The only reason I post at all on UA-cam is to teach. I am also here to learn but - add compressor, make it louder, repeat on next instrument - is nothing new to me. Has it never occurred to you how unmusical an approach that might be? I hope you will one day discover the possibilities of new tricks in your mixing. Listeners do not want to hear a guitar that is jammed into a box by the ham-handed use of a compressor for the convenience of the mix engineer. Honestly, take my word for that. As an effect, guitars and pretty much any instrument can make great use of a compressor. But if its use is to make a louder mix, you’re just chasing your tail.
You've touched a bit on the "mastering an album" subject, but there's something I'm not quite sure about. What if you want your songs to flow naturally with one another, and you *do* have a song that's quieter, and you want to keep it that way? One of my tracks is an intro to the next one, in a separate track, and it is indeed much quieter, by design, and it flows into the next one. If my intro is bumped up to -14LUFS and the next song is bumped DOWN to -14LUFS, there might be a jarring jump in volume at the point you go from one to the other..... how would you solve that?
This is one reason not to mix to a LUFs target. Also, Spotify says they do their normalizing on an album basis and not so much by song, if I remember correctly. But that doesn't even make sense. Lots of folks don't have 'albums' but just release singles. In terms of mastering, get your main songs to where you want them. Check your LUFs and your peaks, and if you're in the ballpark, you're fine. Don't worry about the LUFs of the intro piece. Make the volume compared to the main track a volume that makes you like the transition.
Alright! Thanks for a great answer, and so quickly! The main thing I take from all that is: Make it sound right, don't make your songs too quiet if you don't want your peaks limited, and especially.... don't buy into the -14 frenzy everyone's so hung up on!
@@Vermoot outside the Spotify app, low levels will cause you problems.. Inside the app you'll be fine, as long as your dynamic range is under control 😁
![How to Generate Auto Caption [ Perfect 👍 ] Mobile edits](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_Uw02MB8GeA/mqdefault.jpg)
I love how clearly you stated this info. I wish I had known this stuff 6 years ago. I had to learn the hard way that mastering your track to sound loud is more important than how loud it actually is. There was a trend on YT a few years ago where so many content creators were pushing the lie that you don't want Spotify to turn down your master and that really tripped me up for a while. You explanation is awesome and I would love to see it updated with what using a clipper in you mastering chain does becuase it would fit perfectly.
Thanks for the compliments. If I do a video on mastering, it'll be more of a 'how-to', and I promise I'll talk about using a clipper :-)
It tripped me up as well, I am just now after many years coming to this info. The internet is a tricky place, but as shown on the Izotope website, professionals often master upwards of -5LUFS (post malone track). It comes down to, what works for your track? In my case, my alt-rock/shoegaze I want that "wall of sound", so I will be mastering louder after learning about this stuff.
Fantastic video technically but also your dry delivery and sense of humour had me ROFL.
Your smooth vocal tones and calm delivery had me thinking there wouldn't be any humour involved. Bahahaha!!
Gold!
@@danielhughes5250 thanks! Gotta keep it fun 😊
This is great. I might have to start linking people to this instead of multiple episodes of The Mastering Show podcast.
Hi, Jon. I've been following you for years! Great to have you stop by.
Everybody go subscribe to The Reaper Blog on UA-cam.
The REAPER Blog - UA-cam m.ua-cam.com/users/thereaperblog
And The Reaper Blog
Reaoer.blog
you're awesome man, i could never wrap my head around this concept. little jokes in there definitely make it memorable. good stuff
Thanks!
Hey, this was a GREAT video. I love the visual references and the mild jokes are great. Thanks again for making this !!!
Great video - thanks. I was a complete idiot and uploaded my great sounding/bloody LOUD (peaks at -0.31db; just loud power-pop for 90% of the track) master to the streamers and, lo and behold, it ends up sounding quieter than its peers. I love the mix which was done by a pro but he did a quick master that I though would do the job as I'm not planning on doing any physical media. I knew nothing about LUFS and I've always had a bit of an infantile attitude to techs telling me to turn it down so here I am. I've had a fiddle in Reaper to bring the LUFs-i to -11 but it's just quieter, which I suppose is the point. Still, I feel like the streamers are being a bit tyrannical but, hey, there are much worse tyrants in this world. Thanks again.
Tame dem peaks! Then rule the world.
Hi Barry.. Once again you've nailed it. I'm using Ozone 11 for mastering ( which is great ) but after reaching the point of final levels the info available is both conflicting and not that clear? I've tried various LUFS meters and finally settle on the Waves one which even has its own limiter.. making it easy to set peak values.
I then use the maximiser in Ozone to achieve the values I want. I'd already sussed the need for compression to control peaks at each track but your insight on levels is a true revelation and makes perfect sense.
Thanks for yet another perfect lesson.
Ronnie.
Thanks!
Great help
Should we be aiming for any type of relationship between the true peak and lufs
There are a lot of ways to look at it. Here's one -- as a general guideline, your mix should hit about the same LUFS level as well-mixed songs of the same genre/tempo/energy level. Another guideline is that peaks remain below 0dBFS. That's basically talking about a relationship between true peak and LUFS. So, yes to your question.
If you get your mix to your LUFS target and you have true peaks in the red, I'd revisit the mix, see where the peaks are coming from and deal with them at the source by one of the several ways to deal with peaks -- limiting, clipping, compression, saturation, volume automation, transient designing . . .
Sure! LUFS is average loudness, Dynamic Range (DR) is the relation between Short-term Loudness and Peak (PSR). That's why you actually should get a DR/PSR Meter instead of focusing on LUFS.
I dragged a track from a CD into Reaper (70's british glam rock), -5.3 RMS, +0.3 peak. I'm scratching my head. Master level is way up into the red, yet it sits at 0.0, mostly. How did they get those levels on vinyl?
@@brianmac8260 in guessing the vinyl was mastered separately, but I'll bet it was also pretty dang hot.
"So remember, his crotch is average" You made my day! 😂😂😂 Utter genius!! Everything is just well explained. Excellent content!
Thanks a bunch!
Really good explanation, thanks. The -14 LUFS nominal standard has been mystifying to me, both from the standpoint of it seeming WAY TOO QUIET in general and from the standpoint of the stuff that I have remastered sometimes getting as high as -6 and still requiring a boost in my reference loud listening volume in my car. I now see how this has more to do with being more attentive to dynamic range in the tracking stage, inflating and giving your stems a shave at every bus grouping during the initial mix, and being cognizant of spectral balance's relationship to loudness ie Fletcher-Munson.
Thanks for the compliment!
Small amounts of compression in stages worked for me, but I've also tried two limiters not right next to each other with different ceiling settings to try and achieve a clean -14 LUFS (-1db).
What kind of music?
@@NLNPNL Pop, Top40, Rhythmic, Hip Hop, R&B, Trap and more.
@@Xylume take a look at your favorite pro mixes in those genres. I think you'll find many of them hitting somewhere around -8 LUFs.
@@NLNPNL That's true, but the internet digital age can't have anything that loud anymore. People have 18 inch subwoofers, with preamps, amps and tube-amps and they like to dial in their own loudness. Loud mixes are for people with $5.99 Panasonic headphones. Just give us something near -12 LUFS or less. I don't want to reach for my volume for every producer.
@@NLNPNL You'll find they are hitting around -6 to -8 short term. Higher for integrated. -8 integrated is pretty loud for the average pop song, bordering on to loud in most cases.
"Average" funny! I wonder why the default on the LUFS render button is -24. Is there some sort of standard that uses that?
-24 is a common standard for TV, from what I read.
yeah, broadcasting.
Why one of the songs in called "Stanislaw Lem" ?
@@gctechs well, he's one of my favorite authors, and the first line of the song is, "The Stanislaw Lem's mine." It's referring to a book that was in my bookshelf.
I’ll NEVER forget that explanation on dynamic range😂
I apologize 😂
my tech house track is - 5 before mastering it sound super clean att a true peak 0 db is that too loud???
-5 LUFs I? That's pretty loud, but not out of the question for your genre. If you're sending to a mastering engineer, ask them. They might be just fine with it, or they might want you to take some compression off your final mixing stage.
thank u most helpful . most of the top ten hits hover around -8 lufs
Truth!
yeah, but how many of those hits can qualify as music? lol
@@moontan91 they all qualify as music to somebody. What's your point of view about LUFs-I?
@@NLNPNL for the kind of music i do, i feel -14 is quite loud enough.
even too loud in some cases.
last one i did a few days ago ended up @ -14.35 LUFS-I, and even then i thought i was pushing it.
Muy bien explicado, muchas gracias
Thank you!
Its simple. 1. download popular songs with lots of streams in the genre you're working in. 2. Check those song's short term and overall levels. 3. Mix/master your new song to the similar levels. Your song is going to get played with other similar songs in the same genre and you want your new song to fit in. NEVER use a feature in a daw that claims it renders to a specific LUFS. Do that yourself with limiters so you can control what's going on, use a good algorithm for limiting that fits with the song, etc. In reality short term lufs is far more important than integrated. Also if you can't get as loud as other similar songs without the song sounding terrible your low end needs work in the mix, it probably doesn't mean you need to tighten the dynamics, it means you probably have to much low end or didn't clean up the low end properly.
Subscribed, thank you so much ;)
Great video!
Thanks!
Excellent video 🤟
Thanks!
yes...
Great video btw, liked and subbed
Thanks for the sub!
Yup, nailed it with.."in between the chair and the monitors!!?
🙂
i think why the music is so heavily compressed these days is that it can be easily listened to in a noisy environment.
people do not really listen to music these days.
they listen to music while they do other things.
in my days, we would get stoned, sit down and listen to the whole Dark Side of the Moon or House of the Holy albums religiously. lol : )
Yeah. Dark Side of the Moon is often listened to as a whole. In that case, LUFs is not particularly important.
@@NLNPNL even within single songs like "Watcher of the Skies" or "Shadow of the Hierophant", the dynamic range of slow crescendos is quite important.
i quite like that. : )
The issue is its so easy these days the gear is good enough to reproduce what you hear. Prior to the 70's it wasn't that easy and reproducing what you would hear if you were in the room with the musicians would have been the goal. After the late 70's the goal started to move towards a hyper-real sound where creating emotion is more important than reproducing what happened in the room with the musicians. You'll see the same pattern in just about any other style of art as the tools evolve.
🤣 This guy is hilarious!
Who, me? 😂
The graphic representation of the compression below 0dbfs would be more like his head smashing down, not his entire body. That's more like you just lowered the entire mix.
That's partially accurate, depending on how the compressor was set. But my graphics ability is limited 😂
LOL, I was just teasing you. Dry humor. hahaha@@NLNPNL
There is no free lunch with compression. Sucking the life out of, say a guitar, in three mild steps (channel, stem, mix) is actually worse than doing it in one shot because with each step you have an increasingly dishonest perspective on that instrument. Your guitar gets smaller, and smaller, and… hey what the hell happened to my guitar?? Mixing properly, this does not happen.
Compressors are a sound effect, NOT a mix tool. That should be the mixer’s mantra.
I urge mixers to revisit the method you describe and improve it to one where the range is constrained by fader moves entirely. The unlimited availability of plug-ins has led to lazy mixing that can be heard immediately. With ‘compressor mixing’ everything is just crammed carelessly into the box rather than placed exactly where we want it. When we admire recordings by, for example, George Massenburg or Bill Szymczyk, we are admiring their mixing choices, not their use of compressors.
I agree that control of dynamics can sometimes be achieved better through fader moves. I often automate volume on vocals (as an example) before compression. But fader moves won't control transients. Compressors are, of course, an effect, AND a mix tool.
@@NLNPNL Sorry I’m a bit of a hardass, but fader moves don’t all get done with the actual fader. I go thru my tracks one at a time writing automation with a trackball or pencil. The visual representation of the waveform together with the ability to scrub lets me work ultra-close and does in fact get every single last transient, and it does it way more musically than any compressor can. I use comps and limiters only for a sound effect, never to mix. Never. I stand by what I said literally.
Completely disagree with you. If you want a guitar to sound more alive in almost every case that means putting a compressor on it and removing some of the sound with an eq. In general a compressor doesn't make it get smaller, it gets bigger. It only gets smaller when that compression goes too far or if the settings on the compressor are entirely inappropriate. Modern music hasn't been about an accurate representation of what the musicians are doing in the room since the 1970's. That idea no longer makes sense on most genre's except some jazz or classical. Modern mixing is about creating emotional responses and not about accurately reproducing what the musicians did in the room. Its about enhancing what they did. Compressors are absolutely a sound effect and a mixing tool. Someone like Massenburg, which you reference, even designed his own compression algorithms such as the DCR2.
@@dodgingrain3695 I am a professional guitarist as well as a successful music producer. One of the many settings on a compressor that is entirely inappropriate, as you state, is the decision to use one in the first place. You, personally, may not have experience with that but it’s a bit naive to dismiss another’s broader body of work and wider experience. If that’s your habit, we can just agree to disagree.
The only reason I post at all on UA-cam is to teach. I am also here to learn but - add compressor, make it louder, repeat on next instrument - is nothing new to me. Has it never occurred to you how unmusical an approach that might be? I hope you will one day discover the possibilities of new tricks in your mixing. Listeners do not want to hear a guitar that is jammed into a box by the ham-handed use of a compressor for the convenience of the mix engineer. Honestly, take my word for that.
As an effect, guitars and pretty much any instrument can make great use of a compressor. But if its use is to make a louder mix, you’re just chasing your tail.
You've touched a bit on the "mastering an album" subject, but there's something I'm not quite sure about.
What if you want your songs to flow naturally with one another, and you *do* have a song that's quieter, and you want to keep it that way? One of my tracks is an intro to the next one, in a separate track, and it is indeed much quieter, by design, and it flows into the next one.
If my intro is bumped up to -14LUFS and the next song is bumped DOWN to -14LUFS, there might be a jarring jump in volume at the point you go from one to the other..... how would you solve that?
This is one reason not to mix to a LUFs target.
Also, Spotify says they do their normalizing on an album basis and not so much by song, if I remember correctly. But that doesn't even make sense.
Lots of folks don't have 'albums' but just release singles.
In terms of mastering, get your main songs to where you want them. Check your LUFs and your peaks, and if you're in the ballpark, you're fine.
Don't worry about the LUFs of the intro piece. Make the volume compared to the main track a volume that makes you like the transition.
Alright! Thanks for a great answer, and so quickly! The main thing I take from all that is: Make it sound right, don't make your songs too quiet if you don't want your peaks limited, and especially.... don't buy into the -14 frenzy everyone's so hung up on!
@@Vermoot outside the Spotify app, low levels will cause you problems.. Inside the app you'll be fine, as long as your dynamic range is under control 😁
u funny
Dude, I just subscribed to your channel. Cool videos.
youtube.com/@deareeMusic?si=1gSIGIYRgTL2eGPy
top jokes man)
😂