Jun 5, 2009
How to avoid over-compressing your mix
( Or, how to NOT smash it to hell ! )
This is “guest post” from my Mastering Blog – I think it’s just as useful and important a tool for mixing engineers, if not more, so I’m posting it here, too.
Loudness has always been an important topic in mixing, and especially mastering – never more so than today.
Knowing how loud is too loud has always been difficult. I’ve written before about how we hear loudness, and different software solutions for measuring loudness - but now, everything has been made far easier.
Recently a new tool has been released, purpose-designed for measuring the loudness of music. You can now see at a glance how loud your mix is, make informed decisions about compression and limiting, and choose to make your recordings punchy, loud and competitive.
And best of all – it’s free.
This tool is the TT Dynamic Range Meter, released by the Pleasurize Music Foundation. It comes in two flavours – the one in the animation on the right is the real-time version, available for both Mac and PC now, in AU, RTAS and VST versions.
There is also a second, off-line version, which generates an overall DR dynamic range measurement for a complete WAV file, but we’ll come back to that in a minute.
UPDATE – The plugin and offline tools are still free, but downloads are currently only available to “Active Members” – meaning, people who have contributed a small amount to the Foundation. For individuals this is not a great deal, and the TT Meter alone is well worth the price of admission, in my opinion.
FURTHER UPDATE – STOP PRESS ! The TT Loudness Meter plugin is currently available for free again direct from the Brainworx website – grab it while it’s still there !
The plugin shows peak and RMS level metering for the left and right channels, but also a measurement of the dynamic range – the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the music – in the centre, labelled “DR“.
Broadly speaking, the idea is to keep the dynamic range as wide as possible – up to a point, at least.
Both loudness and dynamic range are measured in Decibels (dB) and as a rule of thumb, anything with an overall dynamic range of 14dB or more (“DR14″) will sound great, dynamically – and in this case, the central DR meters of the plugin will stay green. Louder material will sometimes have less range than this – any less than 10dB will start to sound very aggressive and crushed, and the DR meters start to fade from green to orange to red to represent this.
So, to ensure you aren’t over-compressing your mix - keep the meters green for most of the time.
It’s that simple ! Not all of the time, but a track where they are always red is almost certainly pushed too hard.
One of the cleverest things about the DR meter is that it works independently of the overall level of the music. So, something very loud, crushed and distorted, like, say – oh, I don’t know – Metallica’s “Death Magnetic”, for example – will be in the red, almost all the time - even if you turn it down.
This means you can objectively compare how squashed different recordings are, regardless of the overall level. Which in turn makes it a great mixing tool – if you over-compress everything in your mix, the meters will show you’re in the red, even if the overall level isn’t that high, yet.
Try it yourself – fire it up and watch how the meters react to your favourite recordings. Remember though they may have been pushed to a higher level in the mastering. Try comparing older CDs from the late eighties and earlier 90s – usually the overall level will be lower, and compared to releases from the last few years they will be more dynamic, ie. the dynamic range DR values will be larger.
It’s important to note though that the realtime DR meter only gives the loudness at an instant. And, it’s quite permissible (and necessary) to push into the red at some points. To get an overall measurement of a tracks loudness, you should use the off-line version. Currently this is only available in a PC version, but it works very well on my Intel Mac using CrossOver Mac.
I strongly recommend the Pleasurize Music Foundation website – there is lots of good information and they have ambitious plans, including getting all music labels to agree to a standard minimum DR14 measurement on all albums, as measured by the offline metering tool.
If they succeed, this would mean standardisation of levels across CDs in the same way there is in the cinema, and an end to the “Loudness War” madness. I’m cautious about their chances for success, but it’s an interesting idea, and one I wish them every success with – and making the fantastic Dynamic Range Meter plugin freely available is a great step forward and a very clever move, in my opinion.
So, head over on and sign up, download it, and start spreading the word !
.gif "Dynamic Range Foundation - Active Member")
This plugin is really useful, I’ll be making of use of it while mixing all of my songs from now on.
One little thing though, even without any compressors at all on any instruments, quite a few of my songs have an average dynamic range of about 11. If 14 is the sweet spot, is it worth using dynamic range expanders to push it up to 14dB, or should I just leave it as it is? Right now, I’m thinking of just leaving it.
Good question !
First, remember that the meter shows the range at an instant, whereas the recommendation of DR14 is over a whole track. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that even though your mix is often at DR11, overall it will be lower.
But even if the overall value is 11, I wouldn’t try to expand it just for the sake of it. Many fantastic-sounding recordings have DRs between 12 and 10 – this is one reason I’m a little sceptical about the Pleasurize Music Foundation’s goals – I think DR14 is unnecessarily large.
On the other hand, I don’t think there’s any harm in setting ambitious targets, and I’d rather have a ballpark figure that has more dynamic range rather than less !
I used the offline program to find out the overall DR of the mix, and it’s about DR8, but that’s because there are points in the song where the DR is 2 to 4dB because there’s about about a minute toward the end of the song where it’s just a low pulsating noise, which I think throughs off the overall DR a lot.
For the majority of the song, it fluctuates between 6dB and 16dB, during the heaviest loudest section of the song it stays pretty solid at 11dB, and the last minute of the song hovers at about 2 to 4dB DR.
It’s probably easier to just link to the song than it is to describe it in great detail.
http://soundcloud.com/amoetodi/the-whisper-of-distant-earthquakes/
Hey Ian ! Again, one cool post ! I’m using this tool now.
In the TT DR manual (which is good to read) they recommend using a good brickwall limiter, adding that some of them “don’t deliver what they promise”. Would recommend one of these *good* limiter to use (I’m on Windows/Cubase, so VST one would be great).
Thanks.
@jclemay
@Toad – I agree, the end section is skewing the overall reading. This highlights a limitation of measuring things like loudness in an automated way, and why you can’t beat a real mastering engineer
If anything your track may be a little too dynamic at the moment, in my opinion…!
@jc – I’m not the best person to ask about this – I almost exclusively use the brickwall limiter in the TC System 6000, which is only available as a plugin if you have their PowerCore card. Having said that, I’ve used the Waves L1 & L2 with some success. Search over on the Sound On Sound forum, this gets discussed fairly regularly there. I think people like the Ozone stuff, for example.
Fwiw I don’t like using limiters for more than a dB or two of gain reduction, usually.
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Is this usefull for getting tracks to play at a consistent volume. I was also looking at the new waves dorrough meters?
Hi Bill,
I haven’t tried the Waves meters, but yes, the TT meter would be useful – tracks with a similar RMS level and a similar dynamic range will generally sound the same level – provided they have consistent EQs.
Another tool you could look into is Audioleak – although it doesn’t give you real-time feedback, it includes the A-weighted loudness figures, which attempt to take different EQ curves into account.
In my experience almost any RMS-type meter is a big help, but you also need to “learn” it’s characteristics, and know when to take it’s readings with a pinch of salt, too.
Here’s some more info in a post from my mastering blog – How Loud Is Too Loud ?.
Ian
While I absolutely support the cause of ending the Loudness War, I’m a bit worried by some of the comments here..
Question 1 should be “does the mix sound as good as I can make it?”
All of this business of fretting about whether the DR is close enough to 14dB seems counter-productive to me. I just hope people don’t forget to keep using the most valuable mixing tool of all.. their ears.
Aside from that, thanks for the article!
the loudness war has been going on for a long time, and yes its getting worse. we can thank the 90s for this problem. heres my take and its simple. mainstream rock in the 90s wasnt exactly detailed or intricate. the more you compress power chords, the better they sound…crank up everything else and you have a mess that covers up the simplicity. are we getting louder to compensate for lack of musicianship? and then selling it for $15.99? seems so. load a grunge track from 1996 and look at those waves…pretty much says it all. I really like pro tools because its pure and clean, you have to work hard to trash your tracks…loudness is a mastering phase chop, not a tracking chop.
Brainworx links to v1.0… here’s v1.4a http://zshare.net/download/68657716dc95b15a
It should also be noted that even the Pleasurize Music Foundation recommends different DR values for different styles of music. Those can be found at their website, even if you dont decide to sign in. Because obviously Techno needs a lower DR than Jazz. Another interesting website is the DR-Database, where users can submit the DR value they found using the offline DR-meter. A bit like Discogs with DR values (http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/index.php?sort=dr&order=desc)
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Great stuff man…can i send you some of my masters to preview and adjudicate? producers need a forum like this to share and explore new ideas esp. on mastering. Thumbs Up!!
I have downloaded the TT Dynamic range meterto test tonight then let you know what i think