How do you make your songs as loud as possible?

[soultensionbenjamin]

i feel like as a musician iv progressed, but i find my music to be on the soft side is there a technique to make my music louder.

[MatthewMosierMusic]

Do you mean striclty volume-wise? If so, what I do is take the mastered song and run it into audacity. There's a compressor, a normalizer, and an amplifiation plugin that will maximize the volume to just before it begins to clip at 0dB.

[Navron]

Boosting the final gain of your song is mostly all done in the mastering process, and they should all be done on your final master track.

- EQ (Very, very light EQ adjustments. No more than +/- 2dB)
- Saturation
- Stereo Expansion
- Compression
- Limiting
- Maximizing

That's my own personal mastering chain. If other DAWs work like Cubase, your effects are applied in order, so in other words, most of my gain is brought up in compression, where just a teeny bit extra is brought from the limiter and maximizer.

Too much final limiter and you'll hear a very noticeable pumping effect.

Too much final maximizer will make your overall song sound loud, but lose important parts that are supposed to be louder (ex. kick drum.)

[VINXIS]

TURN ALL THE SWITCHES TO THE MAX!!!!!!!!!!! No really, just turn the master volume high and main EQ proportion higher

[Captain Ironhelm]

^ what Navybrony and Matthew said.

[Legion]

an amplifiation plugin that will maximize the volume to just before it begins to clip at 0dB.

Also, Edison has a 'normalize' function that does the same thing.

Also, shouldn't this be in the Technique section?

[bartekko]

Pictured: Waveforms of the following songs, in order:
The Crystal Method-Weapons Of Mass Distortion
Faithless - Insomnia
David Guetta - Just A Little More Love
Eminem-Almost Famous
Offspring-Have You Ever
Exploding Plastix - Kissed By A Kisser
Bartekko, Nirvana, Deadmau5, LMFAO - Slip Like Teen Anthem
LMFAO - Party Rock Anthem


Many songs here (especially the david guetta ones) are "brickwalled", which means that the mastering engineer used so much compression/limiting that the song is basically a one big brick. there is zero dynamic range, and the song is loud as hell. It is acceptable in dance music, but when there is so much limiting, the song starts to get distorted in the ugliest possible way: digital clipping.

To understand, acquire Insomnia by Faithless (monster mix preferably), put a limiter with high gain on the master track, and listen to it, comparing to the unlimited version. You should be clearly able to hear the difference, not only in volume, but also notice a lot of distortion.

And you do not want that.

So stop comparing your music to commercial stuff, and just make it sound good. Only thing you should need, is a little teeny bit of limiting, so your track doesn't clip

[Versilaryan]

Don't worry about mastering. Learn to use compressors and EQ in the mixing stage, and and your song will be loud with minimal mastering. Especially EQ. Use it to cut out everything you don't need in a sound, and especially the basses in things that don't need any lows.

[Navron]

My first few songs I had to squeeze a ton out of whatever I could in the mastering stage, just to get it to an acceptable volume, and they were still much quieter than your typical commercial track.

Now, after learning more about mixing, cutting EQ vs boosting it, and panning different instruments left and right, I actually have to lower most mastering plugins, because they end up making my songs too loud.

EQ and panning. Learn everything about them.

[Lavender_Harmony]

Learning to bring your track up to 0dB is important, but what you need to focus on right now is thickening out your sound. EQ, learning about how to utilize all space in the frequency spectrum while leaving dynamics intact, placing everything within the stereo field and moving them around dynamically.

Don't go into the loudness war without first knowing how to do this stuff.

[the4thImpulse]

Learning to bring your track up to 0dB is important, but what you need to focus on right now is thickening out your sound. EQ, learning about how to utilize all space in the frequency spectrum while leaving dynamics intact, placing everything within the stereo field and moving them around dynamically.

Don't go into the loudness war without first knowing how to do this stuff.

This exactly.

Learning how to master your tracks, which a big part of is rasing the volume to a commercial level, is useless if your track sucks. Many producers give their work away to be mastered as to have a 'second set of ears' judge the track and make small changes in the EQ so it sounds best. Improper mastering or blatently rasing the volume with limiters and compressors will only ruin the dynamics of the song. I hear a lot of brony electronic work suffer from bad (terrible) compression, their tracks are loud but the kick gets softened, the low end doesn't have the punch it should and the mids are often a little exaggerated.

I think I may be ranting now, I hope it helps.

[Navron]

For my final master track, I usually never set a threshold below -15, a ratio no higher than 2.5, a short attack, and long release time. Make-up gain I'll raise up to no more than 4.5dB. If my song still needs more gain to it, I'll fix up that last bit with a limiter no higher than 2.5, and a maximizer no higher than 20% optimization (any higher and I start to lose the kick).

[natsukashi]

How to mix properly

[Spirit]

Brickwall compressor
dbGlitch
Limiter
Trust me, im a professional mastering engineer