Nov 14, 2012
Loudness meters in mastering – how to balance levels
The first stage of mastering your music should always be to balance the levels.
Until you’ve done that, it’s impossible to make a fair comparison – either with other songs of your own, or your favourite artists.
Before you make decisions about EQ, or compression, or limiting – you must balance the levels, and loudness meters are an important tool to help you do this.
This video shows you how, using three different loudness meters.
I made it a few months ago when I was interviewed by Music Tech Magazine to go on their cover-mount DVD. Now it’s up on their public YouTube channel, so I thought I’d share it here.
If you’re interested in the meters I use in the video, I’ve negotiated a great discount on the Nugen VisLM meter for Production Advice readers – for more information, click here.
Since the video was made I’ve been testing a similar, newer (and more affordable) loudness meter called the MeterPlugs LCast – you can check it out here, and you can see it in action in this video.
And last but by no means least, the awesome Klanghelm VUMT meter is available here.
If you want your music to sound great, you need to balance it against reliable references, and loudness meters are a crucial tool for that purpose. Start now!
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The VU meter can be described (in simplified way) as averaged peak-peak level within 300 ms window. In case of using LU metering there is some filtering done before averanging, discriminating lows and enhacing highs, used to simulate Fletcher-Munson curves. Assuming above there should be differences in measured values in VU’s and LU’s. I.e. there are 2 tracks: regge one, with a lot of lows and punk rock track with excessive high mids and lack of bottom. When one do the level match of these two by ear (i assume judging it mostly by mids according to F-M curves) VU meter will show much higher values for regge track and much lower values for punk rock track. I think LU meters will be free of that because of the filtering done before averanging.
So the question is how in fact one can use the VU meter in such situation? And how in fact the levevel matching by ear should be done? Which sound aspects should be considered?
I follow some of your Mastering video and I came to like some of those mixing technique,now I’m and truck driving and i work alot but i have my laptop with me all the time, with Protools9/Cubase6. Also use Macbookpro desktop as well. Now i use software synth, and I use Hardware synths. and now i trying to compare the hardware compressor@limiter to this software compressor@limiter,gate etc. plug-in, are there any different in try to record and burn to CD?
And one more thing can you get discount on the NUGEN Master Bundle?
Good question ! I personally find the frequency-sensitivity of a VU meter useful. They are only really accurate when presented with a balanced EQ – if something looks loud but doesn’t sound it, it probably has too much bass, for example. So, they take time and experience to read, but in some ways can be more powerful than a straight LU meter.
The topic of level-matching is complicated – one good rule of thumb is to go for consistent vocal levels, for example. But, it’s a crucial aspect of the mastering process and something that I go into a lot of detail about in the Home Mastering Masterclass course.
One of the themes of this site is “it ain’t what you use, it’s the way that you use it”. There are differences between hardware and software processors, but I don’t have a strong preference either way.
Not at the moment, sorry.
Hi,
Very useful – thanks. I will be buying the VU meter. Really great advice on your website.
I need to master an album, some of which was done in a pro studio and some of which in my home studio. Sadly I’ve run out of budget so can’t get a pro to do it, so I’m now looking into what I can do at home. I’m not really intending to apply much EQ or compression, because a) I’m not very good at it and will probably make things worse and b) I’m happy with the mixes. So really I just want to make all songs a similar level.
I read your stuff on the ‘loudness wars’. This is something I’ve been aware of for a while. I agree with your opinions on this. However… not all mp3 players adjust volume automatically. I gave an mp3 to a friend and her complaint was that she liked it but it was much quieter than all the other songs on her iPod. Perhaps I just hadn’t raised the gain enough, but it seems to me I was competing with heavily compressed/limited music, whereas mine is acoustic stuff with dynamic range, so it is always going to sound quieter.