Production Advice

Dynamic Range Day is March 20th, 2010

Join us in a day of protest against the CD “Loudness Wars” – more info below

• Show your support – check out the Facebook Event
  and RSVP to say you’ll “attend”
• It’s easy to take part – just SHOUT (type in all caps)
  ALL DAY, EVERYWHERE !
• And when people ask, tell them why you’re shouting
• Add a Dynamic Range Day Banner to your website or blog
• Use the Twitter hashtag #DYNAMICRANGEDAY

Read the full story here: Dynamic Range Day – The Idea

Latest News

• 05/03/10 Over 1200 guests confirmed to the Facebook already – and climbing
• 25/02/10 Dynamic Range Day Banners available for download
• 25/02/10 TurnMeUp.org adds a Dynamic Range Day banner to their front page

Check back soon for more updates

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There’s quite a buzz at the moment about Derek Siver’s talk at TED, Leadership lessons from a dancing guy. If you haven’t already seen it, check out the video above – it’s fantastic !

Despite the great response he got to his idea of the “First Follower”, he immediately decided that he wanted to “give it away” – as he wrote in his post First follower idea is all yours. He wants people to take the idea, and run with it.

And people are – in clever, interesting ways.

For example, Andrew Dubber has come up with what he calls The other way of following first by choosing to give away ideas of his own – one a day, every day throughout March. I advise you to keep an eye on these ideas, I’m pretty sure many of them will be very, very good.

And already, Andrew has his First Follower – well, sort of, anyway. Andrew Wicklander has commited to choosing and implementing one of Andrew’s ideas, within 30 days, as he explains in his post Dance Party.

So, by now you’re probably thinking that I’m going to jump on this bandwagon, too ?

Well… no.

At least, only in the sense that I’m jumping on in yet another, slightly different way.

Because yesterday I had what I think is a really, really good idea.

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Yes, you read that right.

This post will tell you how to get your music really loud. Regardless of the fact that I’ve been interviewed on Radio 4 arguing passionately against the Loudness Wars, even though I’ve always said that the best way to get your song to stand out on the radio is to avoid pushing the level too hard, and despite having written 19 posts on my mastering blog about how bad Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” sounds because it’s unnecessarily loud…

Today I’ll tell you how to make your music loud.

Why ? As a response to this article on MusicRader.com

How to make your music loud

(Subtitled – “Win the loudness war with our step-by-step and audio guide”)

Now immediately I should say – I love MusicRadar. It’s a great site – I highly recommend it. Masses of news, posts, discussion and information for anyone interested in music and music technology. They were one of the first places to pick up and post about how bad Death Magnetic sounded, and link back to my blog. As a result, Wired magazine and the Guardian found the story and started writing about it, and the rest, as they say, is history. The bad press generated by Death Magnetic has done a fantastic job of raising awareness about this issue, and I for one am very happy about that.

So, MusicRadar rocks.

But that post is useless.

Sorry, but there it is. My reasons for saying so though, may not be what you’re expecting.

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Or, the importance of critical listening

Do you trust your hearing ?

Should you ?

There were several factors that led to me putting my foot in my mouth last week – or, my keyboard, perhaps that should be – in a post where I incorrectly announced that Spotify’s “Volume Normalisation” feature makes everything sound terrible (It doesn’t)

This post describes my mistakes, and contains some words of caution for anyone trying to decide if one thing sounds better than another. First I’ll tell you the factors that lead to my wrong conclusions, then I’ll explain how they tripped me up.

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( 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.
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