How Loud Should You Master Your Music?

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm gonna be talking all about loudness during mastering specifically where should you set your limiters ceiling for the absolute peak loudness and how much should you push that limiter for the average loudness to make sure that your song isn't too quiet or too loud on these streaming sites such as Spotify tidal YouTube where people are actually going to be listening to your music I know that this is a topic that stresses and worries loads and loads of people it's worried me in the past but today I'm gonna settle a lot of the myths and sort of debunk a few things and I'm not going to be giving you any rules to follow but I will go directly to these sites and show you exactly what they are asking for and then how you can match that so if you're looking for a whole tutorial for mastering I have one linked here is probably one of the most popular on the internet like 20 minutes long it takes you through the whole process but right now let's just look a load nesse so firstly I'm in FL Studio but you can use these tools in almost any da w the first thing is that I'm using a limiter I'm using ozone limiter they all sort of work the same they sound a bit different but they all have similar tools on them for ceilings thresholds character stuff like that I have a free loudness meter which is incredibly important I happen to be using the paid version but the free version is almost identical this is the best free loudness meter on the market I've been using it for years there's a download link in the description there's no catch it's really an excellent tool made by an excellent developer so I'm gonna put some headphones on and we'll get right to work the first thing is that ceiling on the limiter so it should just be called ceiling it might be called sort of max output or something depending on which limiter you use on ozone it's the ceiling here now typically people set it to minus 0.1 or minus 0.3 based on absolutely nothing at all besides their gut and that someone else told them to do it so who should you trust if half the people are saying minus 0.1 then someone says 0.3 minus 1 minus 2 I'm just going to go straight to Spotify and see what they actually ask for so in the Spotify FAQ I'll link this in the description they say exactly how you should upload your music and what they do to it so the first thing to know is that if you upload a WAV file which is what they asked for they're going to transcode it into a different delivery format so they're going to encode it to OGG this AAC depending on where someone's listening what device they're listening on and this encoding process needs to be done as successfully as possible to make sure there's no distortions artifacts or issues with your audio I'm sure you've maybe done it yourself or heard someone uploaded something to Spotify that sounded great you played it back on Spotify and it doesn't sound the way you put it there's distortions this crunch there's something wrong with it and the second thing to take into consideration is that Spotify has loudness normalisation which means if you put a louder track in it will just turn it down a little bit if you put a quieter track in it will turn it up potentially apply limiting to it to get it a little bit louder so with this in mind what they're saying is that if you don't want your track to be turned down now you can push it much louder than this there's nothing wrong with that but if you don't want it to get turned down you should have an integrated L u FS value which is just a loud Ness measurement of minus 14 dB that's overall loudness that's average and a peak loudness of minus 1 dB true peak and if you push your master much louder than -14 overall then maybe keep your peak to minus 2 DB true peak so people online that are telling you just push it to minus 0.3 minus 0.1 these are either people that don't quite know what they're doing for mastering for online streaming or they're employing advanced tactics and techniques so that the distortion that occurs to their track is minimized but for most of us we're not that advanced so it is better to at least start at minus 1 DB that is what they are asking for and this will make sure that yours encodes best and you must engage true Peaks and I'll show you why right now so say I take the ceiling back up to minus 0.3 dB you'd think that it would limit it there and that would be it but let's look at this loudness meter specifically the short-term max which will be in this box here I'm just gonna play the loudest part of my song the true peek max is 1.1 DB above zero so when we upload it to Spotify it's going to clip and there's not really anything we can do about that if I engage true peak and then play the loudest part of my song it's much closer to the actual value the limiter says it will be so the first thing I'm gonna do is take that down to minus one debate this loudness meter gives you all sorts of analysis for the short-term loudness integrated loudness your dynamic range and whatnots don't get too bogged down in this stuff right now but there's presets whether you're mastering for Spotify or other standards or YouTube right now I'm on Spotify so it's got that average at minus 14 already labeled there for you and whenever there's a true peak that's higher than Spotify recommends there's going to be a red line up here and this is gonna be red so let's start with minus one and let's just see what happens on this now press this X to just sort of set all these back to zero so even though it says minus one it's actually a true peak of minus 0.9 compared to this loudness meter and I trust this loudness meter it's an incredibly incredibly accurate tool so what I'm actually going to do is take the ceiling down just a little bit more for this mix - 1.1 DB and see what that says now [Music] so obviously I'd want to check over my whole mix but that says minus one and that's the very loudest part of my song so I'm sure it's fine and a quick word for anyone worried about that I used to worry and think that I'd want to push my ceiling as high as possible so it sound louder and sound better I can guarantee you if your mix doesn't sound good if your master doesn't sound good at minus one point one pushing it up to minus zero point three will not suddenly make it sound good I absolutely promise you that just sort of man to man you do not need to push your ceiling higher in the hope that a listener will be more impressed by your song it's not the way people consume music you know Spotify is gonna bring the loudness so that it matches everything else and they're just gonna set the loudness you know they'll be driving along they'll just turn their volume up in their car they'll rock the volume Jogger on their headphones and that extra 0.7 DB makes no difference but the only difference it will make is to distort your song when it's on Spotify which a listener could pick up on and notice that they don't actually enjoy you don't need to push your ceiling higher to make your song sound better so now it's time for part two of the video how much should I push the limiter how much should I squash my song to make sure the loudness is correct so I'm going to use the Spotify guidelines but I'm also going to use a free tool called the loudness penalty analyzer which is fantastic I'll be back to that in just a minute they say that they'll apply loudness normalisation to your tracks so what this does this doesn't discriminate against us independent artists you know I've released track so many tracks on Spotify that this does not discriminate against us I used to believe it did it was turning my music down it's it's not fair this just creates an absolutely level playing field for all of us and make sure that listeners are not getting damaged hearing from one track being super loud in the next being quiet if your track is quieter than -14 DB integrated L u FS overall that's an average value they're actually going to boost your track and apply their own limiting so what I would say is get it up to that value using your own limiting because I wouldn't trust their limiting to do a better job than you can do but once you pass - 14 L u FS which just loudness units relative to full scale it's just a different way of measuring loudness push it as much as you like the sound off so in my case I often like pushing it a couple of DB or a couple of Lu FS louder because I kind of like the crunch that it gives it the kind of glue but you don't need to if you don't like the sound of that so I'll demonstrate here on my loudest part of my song you can see that the short term Lu FS is that like - 8lu FS integrated - ten so this would be turned down quite a bit on Spotify but over the whole song if you notice at the start of my song it's actually a lot quieter we can never be friends so if I stop there you know the start of my song has a short term value FS - 17 which is below that - 14 so overall I might be closer to the minus 14 than I think so set the limiter to the point where it's you know it's pushing the minus 14 at least and it sounds good to you and then export a file okay and then once you've got that exported file go on to loudness penalty analyzer com drag the file on here it's a free service just drag your file on here and what it will do when you've done that is it will show you how much your song will be turned down this is why it's called loudness penalty so what penalty will your song get on a streaming site so the mix I had will be turned down by - 4 DB on Spotify I then exported a louder version put it into this tool and it says that on Spotify I'll be turned down - 5.3 now these are relative values but you can't guarantee that this is absolutely cracked but it's pretty accurate and what this means is that it gives you something actual you know something tangible something that you can look at and use as an analysis tool so after I exported the two versions one with a threshold here and then one that was louder with a lower threshold what you can do is then just drag them into your da W like this so in this case I've got a loud one and a super loud one this one underneath it's a little bit more crunched and then you can send them to your mixer so I've sent this to track one this to track two and online it said this would be turned down for DB the first one and the louder one would be turned down five point three dB so back in my software that's what done I've turned one down by four DB and I've turned one down by minus five point three and now if I turn off my mastering effects so I turn off that limiter and then whatnots I can listen to them the way they would be on Spotify and the same loudness and see which one I prefer the sound of and they're both actually driving pretty hard there's quite a bit of crunch and distortion in it but this is sort of the take-home message of this video is that once you get up to that loudness you can just export lots of different versions then match their level match their gain and then just see which one you actually prefer the most and then and then just choose that one there's really nothing too much to stress about I suppose there is one more tip that I want to give at the end of this video but be sure to check with Spotify check with YouTube keep checking before you mast or something and see what they're actually asking for because these standards and values they've changed a lot over the last five or six years and they're likely to keep changing and it's nothing to be stressed about you've just got to sort of keep with the times and just stay on top of it a little bit now for those of you that are really obsessed about loudness I would just try to reassure you that you shouldn't try to get this by pushing your limiter louder there are there are many many smarter ways to affect the perceived loudness of mixes a lot of the time you hear a song on Spotify and you just think it sounds so loud and it's because there's some really clever mixing going into it to make it sound loud the loudness really comes from the mixing so there's all sorts of stuff you can do the first one I would recommend looking at is tonal balance so if I open an EQ tonal balance is the distribution of the energies and frequencies in your mix so if you're mixed typically has like kind of look more low-end less high-end it's gonna sound quieter so I play this it's gonna sound a lot quieter than a mix so those are some quite dramatic changes but you can see that by adjusting things in your mix you can make a track feel so the perceived loudness can increase quite a long the second thing to look at is sort of macro dynamics so making a verse slightly quieter than a chorus it's gonna make the chorus feel a lot louder the next thing is looking at your vocals so I've heard a lot of artists doing this is something that I'm a little bit apprehensive of and it's lowering the vocal level a little bit more than might be normal in the aim that people have to turn the track up to hear the vocals and when they turn the track up all the instruments and the drums become louder and then the track is loud so that's something to potentially experiment with but be careful with that one and lastly look at saturation in your mix so adding you know tape saturation tube saturation within the mixing phase or in mastering itself subtle saturation and distortion throughout the whole track can make the track a lot more harmonically rich it can add to the perceived loudness an awful lot adding saturation and distortion across a mix is very common in the industry it's something that a lot of people do even if you're just blending in two or three 5% on certain tracks you will hear the difference it might be a good difference it might be a bad difference try not to stress out about it learn the loudness tools you've got and remember that these loudness normalization rules and such these are put in place to make this equal and fair they're not trying to discriminate against you as an artist so thank you very much for watching I hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you in the next one - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 776,003

Keywords: how loud should you master your music, mastering, loudness, loudness war, how to use a limiter, true peak, what is true peak loudness, how to master your music, youlean loudness meter, ozone limiter, how to master, what loudness is best, lufs, limiter ceiling, limiter threshold, best, loudness penalty, music production, mastering tutorial, 2019, in the mix, In The Mix, mastering loudness

Id: GBqeSbisROU

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019