mastering volume

B

bubbazeek

Guest
yea i know mastering is not all about the volume. i just belive i have good enough mixes but they are just too low. when i try to raise the volume up to the average industry song with a limiter it starts to sound distorted and the quality gets worse. i might be doing things backwards or i might be using the wrong plug ins. i do want decent results but i dont have the money for a mastering engineer. all i need is the volume to go up without distorting. i listened to peoples recomendations on here and quit recording at hot levels. yea the overal quality is better but when it comes time to get it louder my results from using limiters and compressors and whatever to get my volume louder is so terrible it just makes me wanna sacrafice the hassle of doing this and record hot because even a hot recoding sound better than what i am doing. to make this shorter i just wanna learn some tips on how to make your volume louder without distorting or squashing everything. when i get the money i will just get all my mixes remastered.
 
the best advice i can offer is to make sure you are keeping good headroom, and make sure you allow your limiter a reasonable amount of attack time (depending on the dynamics of your track). headroom plus proper attack will keep your transients intact. to my understanding, intense attack times and lacking headroom yield the "square wave" effect, which may be the distortion you are hearing.

have you considered replacing this limiter with a compressor?
 
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i changed my order from compression before eq and it sounded a lil betterbut i will also take what u just told me under consideration about attack timing and headroom. thanks
 
I'm going to venture a guess that you probably won't get your tracks to industry "standard" without using industry-standard tools and engineers. But as long as you get in the ballpark, you'll be fine as far as sales go.
 
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