Making your tracks louder doesn’t mean that it’s better, it just means its blaring through the speakers. This took awhile for me to grasp as most mixes on beats alone are hitting around -2db these days. We have been living in an era of running mixes straight into the limiter and then turning it up even higher. Some how this became the norm. Some blame beat battles as contestants tried to pass off lackluster production by turning the 808 up as high as possible hoping that the crowd would think that they had the better beat. Then those contestants would send those same exact beats off to artists and then they assumed that the beat was better because it was louder. Whatever it was we are in the middle of a loudness war and to be honest, I’m over it.
Back in the day radio stations would receive records with vastly different mixes. One record would have subtle bass and the next record would have guitars blaring through the speakers. Listeners who would listen to these stations constantly had to adjust the dials on their radios because one record would be massive with brightness and the next would be a lot less loud. To fix this radio stations invested in state of the art compressors so that every mix would relatively have the same dynamics. That’s why you can hear a Ron Isley record from the 90’s and next hear a SiR record from 2019 right after and the loudness would be relatively close. Once DSP’s such as Apple Music, Spotify, and Pandora (later Tidal) got into the mix (pun intended) things got a bit complicated. An artist would upload a track at -9 db which allows both loudness and dynamics to shine through into these DSP’s thinking their tracks would stand out. All the listeners would have to do is turn the music up just a bit and enjoy it as though they were in the studio themselves. For some reason, DSP’s started dropping loudness levels of these songs down to -18 db. Now that artist’s song is even quieter. Bear in mind the average music listener isn’t thinking, “oh, it must the compressor Spotify is using. Let me just turn my music up and enjoy.” The average listener is thinking the song, “ Oh wow, this song is lackluster. Next!” As both a producer and listener, its annoying on both ends.
So what should you do with your mixes? Based on the advice I was given from engineers the best thing to do is to clip your mixes somewhere between -6db and -4db. I know, extremely high but given the circumstance what’s your other option if you are making music to compete. So the next time you bounce out a track, try gain staging or leveling at a very low volume and then turning up the limiter on the master to leave more than enough head room.
I guess this was more of a PSA than me just complaining.
