hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well today's tutorial
i'm going to show you how to achieve loudness and consistent levels that are going to compete
for those of you producers and beat makers out there who are wanting to upload your beats to
your beat store and you want your listeners to come across it and you want your mixes to really
have that loudness that stands out and that is going to sound professional so a
lot of you are struggling with this i've done some videos covering beat mixing in the past
but i just said you know what let's do an updated one let's start from the ground up let's mix this
thing top to bottom we're gonna do it with an approach that if you follow this you're
always gonna end up with a loud beat that will compete and also set you up to be able to deliver
your files in the most optimized way to your customers so here is my beat i've got everything
zeroed out and the first thing that we need to do is just go ahead and set up a few things
on our master bus or our stereo output which in my case i'm going to put ozone and what we want to do
is just go ahead and set a limiter or a maximizer so if you don't have ozone that's okay just get
your limiter plug in and you're gonna set the ceiling to just below zero true peak so i've
got it at minus point one if you wanna be a little safer in terms of how you're delivering this stuff
for the beats it's going to be perfectly fine you know just below zero but just go ahead and put it
there set a transparent setting which i have the transient mode on irc4 and we're just going to
park that right so we're not going to touch that until the very last of the mix and i'll show you
how we can use this to achieve the loudness that we're after but we just want to put this on here
as a safety net you guys hear about engineers mixing into compressors you know like the ssl
bus comp we're utilizing this in a similar way but again it's just going to keep us in check we're
also going to be able to hear how it's affecting things like our drums our 808 so just leave that
there don't worry about it right now second thing is we want to go ahead and put on some metering
okay so we can keep an eye on everything and i'm going to go ahead and just use the
the multimeter in logic so that we can look at all kinds of different things like lufs
true peak all that all right so in order to match loudness we need a good solid reference if you're
coming across another producer on your beat store platform that you really respect maybe just buy a
lease from them just so that you can study the frequency response you really have a loudness
to target that's perfectly fine or if you have another beat that you've mixed in the past that's
at the level that you want to kind of aim for to keep consistency that works too that's the case
here i've got a beat that is already at commercial levels so let's just pull up the multimeter and
let's play this back and see where we are in terms of lufs integrated or a long-term measurement
okay so again i've already mixed this i know this is going to be a competitive level beat and we're
getting a reading of you know minus 10 minus 9 somewhere in there that's going to be plenty loud
for an instrumental to really stand out for your audience so let's just say that that's our target
i'm going to go ahead and just set that down here on our multimeter so we have something to go for
and now we can start mixing and i want to talk about a really important thing here
and that is that a lot of you are kind of relying on the maximizer or the limiter or you're
expecting there to be some kind of secret sauce plug-in that's going to give you the loudness you
want but the loudness comes in the mix so the approach here is very important and also the
order in which we're kind of approaching the mix is very important in getting a loud beat
we're going to start with the kick and the bass or the 808 and the drums because these are going to
be the loudest elements in you know 99 of you guys production out there unless you're working on a
jazz acapella you know or you know something with very light percussion the kick and the bass line
are to be the loudest elements so what we want to do is we want to go ahead and kind of get the most
out of these that we can right here in the mixing stage and then we're not going to have to have so
much guesswork when we get down to our limiter or our maximizer which we'll talk about later
let's bring up the kick and the 808 now where do you bring these up what's kind of a good level
i don't want you guys to focus on the numeric value what i'm going to shoot for
is since we're aiming for a total lufs integrated measurement of minus 10 minus nine the kick should
be slightly below that because with everything you know obviously it's going to make the lufs
level a little bit louder than that so let's aim for you know maybe minus 12 minus 11 on the kick
i'm getting a little bit of headroom true peak here and then we're at like minus 12
so that's a good starting point in most cases your kick is going to be hitting
right around zero true peak just trust me on this for commercial mixes so we're going to
want to go ahead and put that pretty close but giving us a little bit of room to work
let's go ahead and jump to the 808 blend that in
so already just with those two elements we're already at about minus 12
lufs getting right up around zero all good we don't have any distortion very key to
listen for are there any unwanted artifacts or sounds just from putting those up at that level
if there is then you're gonna have some tweaks to do in terms of your eq
maybe you need to sidechain those which is what i've done here but just keep an ear out
for any problems with those two initially bringing in the snare and the clap here
no definite levels for any of this stuff i'm just
trying to give you an idea for the kick in the 808 but clap and snare
it's all feel it's all about trying to get it in the pocket you know get a nice groove going
so just to show you we've just leveled our drums and we're already at -11 very clear very
clean sound to that but that's where we're going to be achieving most of our loudness
and a lot of you are jumping ahead and you're already mixing in a lot of your instrumentation
and that's going to make it harder for you so that's why i recommend
doing what we did here in the approach of starting with the loudest elements
start with the drums so there's a lot of questions about how to level the instrumentation you know
kind of where to put things and again it's it's based off of feel so i would go back to you know
the reference start listening very scientifically and in a very analytical way of how the balance is
in terms of where the instruments are sitting but also when we're talking about instrumentation you
need to consider that vocals are going to be put on this at some point and even in a lot of cases
they're going to be utilizing the 2-track so we don't want to put the instrumentation too hot
because then you're just not going to leave any room for the artist to come in and do their vocals
a guitar or something like this this is a perfect example of how you can get carried
away with your beat mix you know if i bring that up what it's going to do is
take away a lot of the energy from the drums a lot of the dynamic elements because this
does have a lot of low mids a lot of mid frequencies and it's also going to create problems
when we come to the vocals because we don't have infinite space in a mix so we're thinking about
where we're going to fit all this stuff so if i brought this up you know pretty loud
you notice that i mean even just bring it up for example purposes but
the bass and the drums lost the impact because we're pushing our limiter
which that's the other reason why we put this on and we parked it because we can hear
how the limiter is going to react to a lot of these different elements which there's going to be
a limiter or a maximizer put on your mix or your master at some point so you might as well be aware
of how these different elements are going to interact with that and be able to control it
same thing with pads pads can eat up a lot of headroom when we get down to the master
bus and just eat up a lot of space in the mix so i want these to be pretty subtle
okay so we've got our balance down here and i want you to notice that we achieved loudness by mixing
right we didn't do anything on our master right now i've got an imager which if you
want to take a look at what i had here this is not changing the loudness or the level
and then we haven't done anything on the maximizer except just park our safety net
so this is why this is important is because now that we've gotten the loudness we're not
going to have to do a whole lot of heavy lifting and there's not going to be a lot of surprises
when we introduce this maximizer to really pump out as much loudness for your beats as possible
so this is specifically for your two track or you know what you're going to tag
and this is going to play on your beat store what we want to do is just maximize that so i'm going
to bring this down to our target let's just say that was -9 or -10 we'll keep an eye on the lufs
and let's bring it down until we get to that point
okay so we achieved our target there we're not hearing any distortion our mix didn't change at
all just got a little bit louder you can see we've got some subtle attenuation on the limiter and
that's all we want we want that limiter to remain transparent if you're hearing anything unpleasant
or if your mix just starts sounding squashed and over compressed then you're mixing too hot right
now after we've done this and we have the levels how we want for the quote mastered version
the one that people are going to hear in your beat store all we would do
is just bounce this down as you know wave or an mp3 whichever one you're going to post
bounce it out exactly the way we have it here now when you do your multi-tracks
it's as simple as just bringing the master fader back and turning off that limiter so we're just
going to bring the the master down until we've got a decent amount of headroom let's just say 6 db
something there so we bring all that down and then we would just go up here and go to export
all tracks as audio files and we could bounce our multi-tracks make sure normalize is off you
do not want to bounce with normalize on and then just bounce out those multis so that whenever your
customer downloads it they're going to have the stems with plenty of headroom but the one they're
hearing on the website that's really going to compete loudness wise will be that one that
we leveled this way and had the the brick wall maximizer just to bring us up all right y'all so
i hope you picked up some things on quickly mixing this beat here and how to achieve loudness in the
mixing process which is you know taking this approach of mixing the loudest elements first
and then building all of our supporting elements around it and then also not relying on our stereo
bus processing our limiter or our maximizer to get the real perceived loudness and dynamics and punch
out of your instrumentals because it's going to you know leave a lot more clarity it's also going
to give you a lot more flexibility when we get to balancing the stems when your customer pulls
in those stems they're going to have it you know sounding the exact same way they're just going to
have headroom to work with versus if you relied on a lot of compression stereo buss processing
that relationship and those files once they're pulled into another session there
could be a lot more guesswork involved this maximization is going to happen at some point
you might as well know how all these elements in your mix are going to work together
at that stage if you learn anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing if
you have any questions about mixing beats or getting loudness for your instrumentals please
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you want me to cover i want to hear about it thanks for watching we'll talk to you soon