Hi, curious as to what LUFS level you guys are using when mastering your beats and is there are general level in hip hop to be used in order to keep your tracks dynamics but still be competitive in the loudness war. At the moment I have mine set to -10 but I've heard others suggest in hip hop to go up to -6, whats your thoughts ?
Thanks
It is highly dependent on the underlying material. The louder you make it, the more constantly you will hear that which you don't like - no matter the genre. If you are using really high quality hardware tuned well relative to the music, you can make it louder because you have lower level annoyances that averages into the perception. Of course it is also about the production, because a production can be annoying or very aware of what is pleasing and what is annoying. But generally speaking, the total sum of both of those will determine how much loudness you can add, excluding the creative aspect of that choice, which is also of importance, since dynamics ties to quite a lot of musical and audio dimensions.
Overall it can be healthy not to lock yourself into a particular single LUFS, each type of song within a given genre aims at some certain very specific dynamic qualities as they relate to a number of various musical and audio dimensions. Personally if I would choose some very general LUFS guidance, I would say that in EDM given that you have really good production quality and hardware, you can make it rock up to around -6.2 LUFS in the chorus before it begins to break down. This type of dynamics when well balanced can make a lot of songs quite powerful in a good way - it's loud and you want to turn up the playback volume a lot, right there at the verge between hard and not hard. It can be very full and fill up the dance floor in a way that matches the overall energy level of the audience well. Louder and it begins to sound deep throating and non-emotional, less loud and it begins to lose some of the vital energy it could have.
In hip-hop and other modern genres, you can treat the kick and snare so that you don't have to push the average loudness so high. This will provide a good amount of energy to make it sounding catchy relative to the signature of the genre while also having a good amount of emotion coming through.
If you are making music with software, it's tricky. Try setting the compressor attack to max slow, boost the volume of the individual track to max while you are compressing, then dial in the ratio, threshold and release towards where it sounds the best. Then repeat this chain as many times as required to make it sound natural enough. Then use the output fader of that when mixing. This compensates to some degree for the inaccuracies. Given that you have treated the individual tracks dynamically like this, you can then push it a bit more loud before it breaks down into discomfort.
