A Healthy Waveform?

[Hirosashii]

Here's a picture comparing two waveforms: the top one is a song of mine, and the bottom is a song from Street Fighter 3.



I'm wondering why my waveform is so much skinnier, as if it's "capping out" for lack of better terms. I may have simply missed this bit of knowledge when learning how to make music

Thank you for your time.

[Matthew N.]

Cutting off higher frequencies and lowering volume on some too prominent instruments should definitely help.

[the4thImpulse]

I would say thats you limiting and compression at work. There is nothing wrong with it, it just means your track will be a lot quieter than street fighter song. The process of mastering will bring up the volume, or those peaks, closer to the level of the street fighter one.

[natsukashi]

though with unnatural amounts of gain, there will be distortion. Hawhawhawhawhaw

[Sugarholik]

Normalize your song and voila! That looks like Audacity, so just select your song, use 'Amplify' and make sure that peak is in 0db. Right now the peak is -6ish I think.
There are other ways to go about it. I don't master anything, I make sure that song sounds good before rendering so I don't need to panic about fixing already rendered tune. How I get it normalized is just having a compressor and limiter on master channel and turning the make up gain of compressor up until limiter catches peaks but won't distort anything.