I've been working on some new songs, with my shiny new digital 8-track. I have a dozen or so that are probably 95% finished - I just need to give them a good mix-down - take those 8 tracks and blend them into a single stereo mix, maybe with a little creative editing of the levels of individual tracks, to fix mistakes. So, I've been doing rough mixes to my PC, converting to MP3 and dropping them on my iPod, so I can listen to them at work, where I listen to everything else - a little bit of Boris, a little bit of myself, a little bit of the J Geils Band (their \"I Do\" is playing on the iPod right now), a little of me. I'm getting sick of the songs, which usually means I'm close to done mixing.<\/p>\n
But one thing I've noticed is that, compared to most everything else on my iPod, my songs are all quiet<\/i>. I literally leave my iPod's volume control at the point just above total silence, because I can't take it any louder - sensitive little ears, I guess. And some songs, those from the White Stripes, for one example, are too loud even at that level, which is a drag - more on that later. But my songs require me to crank the volume up to 1\/4 or 1\/3, before they match the loudness level of even tolerable professionally-recorded songs. So that's annoying. And this problem isn't happening because I need to turn the levels of the instruments louder during mix-down; I do all the mixing with the overall level running right up against the point where it'll start to distort the inputs on my sound card. Any louder there and the songs will be full of horrific digital snaps, crackles and pops. So, what's the trick?<\/p>\n
One big trick is to decrease <\/em>the dynamic range of the entire track: make everything louder, except the parts that are already the loudest - those, you reduce a little, and that gives you more room to make everything else louder still...a.k.a. \"compression\". I've tried using various compression tools on my stuff to pump up the 'loudness' (perceived volume, rather than actual volume), but never got exactly the right effect. I've tried my little NanoComp box, I've tried mastering to tape, which provides natural compression, I've tried software compressors, but I've never got it just right<\/i>. So, I did a little Googlin about compressin, to see if there are any tricks I'm missing out on. <\/p>\n Well, I haven't yet learned anything to help me get that in-your-face White Stripes loudness. But I have learned that professional sound engineers<\/a> and musicians<\/a> are bummed out<\/a> over<\/a> compression<\/a>, especially recently<\/a>. I even found a neat little video clip<\/a> that does a great job of illustrating exactly what compression does, and why all those engineers are upset. <\/p>\n So, who do I side with: the engineers, or my lust for loudness?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I've been working on some new songs, with my shiny new digital 8-track. I have a dozen or so that are probably 95% finished - I just need to give them a good mix-down - take those 8 tracks and blend them into a single stereo mix, maybe with a little creative editing of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}