hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well
in this tutorial we're going to be talking about five simple ways to get louder mixes now when i
say louder we're not talking about in terms of necessarily a LUFS integrated reading or any
other numerical value and i think this is where a lot of you are getting confused about actual
loudness and perceived loudness not just loudness in terms of lufs or another numerical value
so we're going to be talking about some different ways to elevate that perceived loudness for your
mix for your master so that you can get the sound and the loudness to compete with a lot of
these other songs that you all are listening to so let's go and dive in all right so the first way to
easily increase your loudness of your mix and your perceived loudness more importantly
is to utilize a bus compressor there's a lot of people out here who are you know smacking a
bus compressor on the stereo bus getting a lot of compression and they're just squashing their mix
killing their dynamics and that's just not the best way to do it so i'm going to show you
why i utilize a very low ratio here on the native bus compressor 2 and then i'm also doing a dry wet
mix so we're processing it essentially in parallel and so we can maintain a lot more of our dynamics
and again just increase that perceived loudness so let's play it back with this disabled and
then i'll engage it just to note this is the first plugin on my stereo bus chain here so we get this
nice pleasant lift we're not changing any of the essential dynamics of our mix which is the goal
utilizing a bus compressor or really any mastering processing stereo bus processing
we want to leave all that intact the second way to get louder mixes actual loudness perceived
loudness is to focus on your mid-range and do some boosting some compression here in the mids
we talk so much about low end about the high end and how to get these to sound their best
but the mid-range is really where perceived loudness lies and a lot of people are just not
focusing on the mid-range we're going to compress some of the mids and control them but then we're
going to subtly lift them as well in level so we're going to get a higher perceived loudness
of those mids and of our mix overall so let me show you how this works here we're going to set
a couple of bands the first one will do around 500 so let's just dial this
in at about 580 and let's solo that so you can just hear what's going on in our mix
so quite a bit of information there uh especially in the vocal
the low mids and then we're gonna set another one let's put this one at maybe
1500 and we'll just kind of split these in half here let's listen to that band as well
a lot of the weight and the impact of our vocal is in this range
so again we're just going to compress them pretty subtly so let's keep an
eye on what's going on down here and i'll adjust the range maybe the other ratio a little bit
we're getting a few db of compression there and now we're just gonna boost
the output of both of those bands so let's do maybe i don't know two and a half to three db
on each of these just to add it back and let's see what happens here maybe we'll add even more
another thing to note is by focusing on the mids and getting our loudness there you know this is
going to translate on pretty much any speaker so even phones small speakers and actually
those speakers are going to be a lot more focused in this area in terms of the frequencies they
reproduce so it's a smart idea to utilize this mid-range to increase our perceived loudness
the third way to get louder mixes louder masters elevate your perceived loudness
is to utilize saturation and excitement so a lot of you have questions about what saturation is
the easiest way to think about it is it's a subtle distortion so it's not going to be as obvious as
exaggerated it will add harmonics and a thickness and a weight to whatever sounds you apply it to
the hook vocal i'm utilizing the empirical labs mike e comp specifically the preamp section and
this has some nice preamp saturation some analog characteristics that are introduced once again
increasing perceived loudness so if we set it to clean i'll turn this on so you can hear it
if you're finding these things that sound really subtle just remember that these are
being applied across our entire mix so each of these little increases and little boosts and
perceived loudness equal a big difference in this same chain i'm actually adding
a bit more saturation with this plug-in the greg wells voice centric from waves it once again
does some cool things in terms of analog modeling and just adding a bit of heat to our vocal
just to get your wheels turning you can be very creative with how you're combining different
saturations from different plugins with our beat i'm just going to go ahead and solo that
i have impusher on this and i utilized this magic control this is an exciter that will be applied to
the entire signal going to give us a subtle lift but we can also utilize this focus control which
is going to do just that focus the dynamics of the mix so let's take a listen to what this does
so it might seem subtle but it's actually adding a lot of weight a lot of presence to
our entire beat mix the fourth way to get louder mixes higher perceived loudness is to utilize
multiband limiting so this is something that i've been taking advantage of more recently many of you
are just kind of smacking that maximizer on there pulling the threshold down really low not taking
into account individual bands per se it's just processing the entire mix as a whole if you have
say a particularly low end heavy mix like i have here you know that's going to play in directly to
how that maximizer is reacting and it's usually at the detriment of the rest of your mix and
you're not going to really be able to push and you know enhance and bring up the rest of those bands
across the mix we lose some of that perceived loudness in the mids and other areas because
that limiter is working so hard on the low end so with the multi-band limiter we can set different
bands here and then we can set priorities across these bands so that the maximizer knows
okay work hard on this don't you know try to kind of rein in on this as much so i'll show you how
this works let's just set our crossover points up here let's do something like maybe 120 for the low
you know going down into our subwoofer then we'll maybe do something like 750 and then let's do 2000
and 4000 i think that'll give us some different bands to work with but i'm going to go down to the
low end i'm going to set the value higher which means it's going to be lower priority in terms
of where this threshold is going to hit so let's play that back and i'll show you what that does
when i pull that threshold up you could see that the maximizer limiter it's not
even attenuating right there because i set that higher and it's going to work
on attenuating some of these other bands so let's adjust those accordingly as well
so now that we've set that up you can see that we're going to get the most attenuation
here in this low mid band you know removing some of the mud and then also you know this
2k to 4k band we're going to get some removal of some of that harshness now not only can we push
the rest of our our maximization harder across our mix but we can also now bring up the gain in say
this band here you know this 1k 2k area that we've been focused on so let's go down there
and we'll boost that gain up maybe a db and then let's say that we're going to boost the gain up
on this low mid just because we are going to get some more attenuation so we'll do that and
then the high end maybe like a half db here and we'll pull the threshold down a little bit lower
all right you with me the fifth and last way to achieve louder mixes higher perceived
loudness is to carefully select references to compete with for level in this case i was focused
on you know matching the loudness across some songs that were on this album so i loaded those in
they already had the loudness where i needed them to be however if you're trying to compete
with another song that you're hearing on spotify or something like that you know i would recommend
buying the lossless version so the flac version or the wav version even better and then loading that
into this reference tab of ozone this is very very useful to load up different references
and i can very easily cue this reference while i'm listening to my session
and directly compare them so let's just take a listen to how that works
you don't have to be looking at an lufs meter or get any kind of numerical measurement to hear the
potential differences in what you're referencing here in the ozone advanced reference tab so very
very useful you can cue different parts of the song you know compare choruses to chorus verse
to verse very quick and easy way to make sure that you're competing and getting the actual loudness
all right y'all those are five easy ways to get louder mixes to increase perceived loudness and
just enhance the dynamics of what you already have in your mix in your master make sure to retain
you know what the engineers work so hard for in terms of the impact the punch uh the low end the
presence and just give us more of a lift in terms of the mid-range you know some of the things that
we're not focusing on in terms of using your ears to actually get an idea of loudness rather
than looking at meters and measuring just purely based on numerical values so i hope
this gets your wheels turning in terms of kind of pulling your head out of the meters
and really listening and picking up on these subtleties that across your entire session all
these add up in a big big way so i hope this is helpful if you learn anything in the video please
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