How to Make Your Mixes Louder in REAPER

[Music] hi i'm kenny joya welcome to another one of my tutorials in this video i'm going to show you how to make your mixes louder and reaper i want to preface this video by saying that the loudness wars are over so please don't take anything we're going to do in this tutorial as an endorsement of making your mix louder than it needs to be dynamic mixes are great so don't do anything to your mix that you don't think sounds good it's no longer necessary to squash your mix to compete with other recordings but with that said if you do want to make your mix sound louder or perceived to sound louder on most streaming platforms we're going to go through a few options i have a project right here that i want to be a bit louder and to see how loud it is we're going to add a meter plug-in to the master track so let's go to the view menu and choose the master track then go to the track effects as we can see i already have an eq on the master track let's add this meter plugin afterwards double click let's type in to the filter loud then we could choose this plugin right here called loudness meter peak double click it and that opens up this plugin which is after the eq and it looks like this and down here we can see the different types of metering we have true peak metering we have lofts momentary lofts short term the loudness range and lofts integrated which is the meter we're going to be using in this video it's going to show the perceived loudness of our track or mix let's play the track [Music] notice the luff's integrated setting is minus 16.7 and if we compare that to this chart the numbers in this section tell us how loud we can go with our left setting before that streaming service will lower the volume of our mix which makes creating louder mixes pointless as they're not going to play back that loud anyway so with spotify we can go as high as -14 apple music would only go to -16 and amazon will be between nine and minus thirteen and youtube will be between minus thirteen and minus fifteen so let's say we're making this mix for spotify which is minus fourteen with our mix at minus 16.7 we can go about 2.7 left higher if we want so let's close this and hide the master track one way to make our mix sound louder is to add more compression to the individual tracks in our project and in addition to that we can add some compression to groups of our tracks like these drums so let's make a new track let's put this track above the drums let's name it drums and let's hit this button to make it a folder track so all these drum tracks are in this folder and let's hit this button so these tracks are not so now we can compress all the drums as a group from this track let's sew it now we're just hearing the drums let's add a compressor to this folder track type comp let's use this 1175 compressor to compress the drums and it looks like this and it's going to compress all the drums as a group let's slow down the attack and go a bit quicker with the release then adjust the threshold and the gain to taste before [Music] and after the compressor is definitely making it sound louder so let's close this let's go back to the master track go to the effects and let's reset this meter and notice the difference [Music] now it's at 15.2 so it's 1.5 lofts higher or louder but if you remember our target is minus 14 waves so let's try a few other things what we could also do is compress the whole mix by compressing the master track so let's add a compressor let's choose the same one put it before the meter slow down the attack butts leave the release [Music] before and after [Music] let's also put a limiter on the master track just to contain those peaks type limit and i'm going to choose the event horizon limiter let's put it before the meter but after the compressor let's bring down the threshold 1.5 db [Music] and let's see how it looks with our luff's meter [Music] now it's exactly minus 14 wolves which if you remember was exactly our target let's try a little more limiting let's see what happens [Music] and let's check it on the meter [Music] now is a 12.6 bluffs which is 1.4 lufs higher than we need for spotify and 3.4 higher than we need for apple music but more importantly our mix is starting to sound squished it's too compressed and i'm hearing artifacts from the limiter and like i said earlier there's really no benefit to making our mix this loud and it's going to be brought down in volume when it's playing back on these streaming services so it's still going to be quieter but now it'll be squished or distorted so let's put this back how we had it before [Music] so now it's back to minus 14 wafts which is perfect for our target with spotify so that's pretty much it that's how to make your mixes louder and weaver hope you learned something hope you can use it and i'll see you next time thanks bingo boys let's go you

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 13,501

Rating: 4.968442 out of 5

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Id: aGy91FBNm5g

Length: 10min 35sec (635 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021