The Loudness Wars... Turning It Down

[g6120]

I've been at audio production (mixing and mastering) for a few years now.

And I have made a lot of mistakes. I'm still learning by trial and error.

I used to believe that using compression and boosting bass and making

a finished recording loud sounded better. As I revisit older videos I find this is not

the case. They do not sound better just because they are louder.

And too much bass masks all the other strings on the guitar.

I ALWAYS keep the original raw recording archived so I can always go back and start over.

I did this with my Psychedelic Furs cover and I'll share the before and after.

 

Here is the before from when I thought bass boost and making it LOUD was the answer:

 

[YOUTUBE]eT39lXKSi5w[/YOUTUBE]

 

And here is the remaster using no gain turning bass down:

 

 

[YOUTUBE]gZdV8RixoLQ[/YOUTUBE]

 

[recordingtrack1]

You are absolutely correct about loudness, at least in the recording and pre-mix stages. A good rule of thumb is 12db below unity gain, even though many home recordists just can't handle signals that "low" At that point you should only be concerned with quality of performance and signal to noise ratio. It's a hard concept for musicians to grasp. Just turn the headphone signal up louder. Obviously you get this. By doing so, it gives plenty of headroom for whatever you do with your recording in the final mix stage.

 

Once you head into final mix, I don't see a thing wrong with pushing the level all the way to unity, even acoustic guitar songs. However, it's ALWAYS better to let somebody who is not directly connected to your recording do the final mix. It's too easy for you (the artist) to fool yourself into thinking you need to boost the mids or add some crazy phase effect or something else, that really may not be the best choice for a particular song.

 

I like to watch Dave Pensado on Pensado's place on youtube. He is a grammy award winning studio artist who is just excellent at explaining stuff like loudness wars and mixing in the box and other concepts. You should check him out as he truly knows s#!+ from shinola.

 

BTW, I like you recordings. They sound very good.