How do you deal with the loudness war in

DIY recording?

Everybody... Everybody who's ever seen a microphone up close will have heard of the loudness war.

But what it is?

How do you deal with it when you're doing DIY recording of your music?

Let me demonstrate, and tell you how we managed not to kill each other deciding how loud we should go. But first, the basics. Feel free to skip ahead if you know that stuff already.

What is loudness anyway?We do rock music. In rock, loud is good, right?

Well, yes. But loudness is a different thing. Think of sound, and music, as a wave in your pool. There are peaks and troughs. When they get too high, the peaks spill over the side.

If you like big waves...If you like big waves, you're going to want them reaching the top at the peaks, and have real deep troughs in between. That’s what loud music is like.

Adding loudness would be like adding water to the pool. The waves get smaller because they keep spilling over, but overall the water is deeper.

In sound engineering terms...In sound engineering terms, dynamic range is like the size of the waves. The more dynamic range, the bigger the waves. Adding loudness reduces dynamic range.

Listen, look & measure: How to tell if a song has loudness?Let's talk about the ears first: a song with more loudness will sound more imposing, more powerful, but you'll start noticing that you can't hear much apart from one or two loud instruments - typically drums and vocals. Everything else just sounds like so much white noise. Sometimes the mix is so loud that you even get signal clip - a short cracking sound, usually on snare beats.

spot it visuallyLoad a track in a tool like Audacity and look at the waveform. If it looks like a saw, that's a lot of dynamic range (remember the big wave analogy?). If it looks like a hairy sausage, that's a lot of loudness. Check out the screenshots I took of a snippet from our song "Rockt Härter" to see what I mean.

A saw A sausage

The scientific approach: measuringI use the DR plugin for the foobar player to measure dynamic range. There is some discussion whether that is the best measure for loudness, but this one has a great bonus: a big database of albums rated by their dynamic range. Values of 1-7 are bad, 8-13 is OK, 14 and over is great.

“OK”

Our DIY loudness warWe've been recording our next album for over two years now, and decided to get outside help with mixing and mastering. Sometimes it pays to hire someone. Originally, we had the same pro do both for us, but then decided we like another mastering specialist even better. As of now (March 2016), we're finalizing our mixes to send over to him, budget permitting.

Our first demo - with a DR of 12. Click to listen.

Why did we switch to a separate mastering tech?Well, just a matter of taste maybe. But there was also the matter of song volume levels. Our drummer Mikey especially argued that they'd need to be consistent within the album as well as up to contemporary rock mixes. So we had Conn Mastering give us some demos of a track we'd already finalized, Rockt Härter.

The first version back from the mix with a DR rating of 12 - click to listen

Two versions of loudnessThe results sounded very different from what we'd gotten from our mixer (SonicInk who, by the way, does great work. We highly recommend him). Two versions, one with added bass, fixed some sound issues we'd had.

A mastered version with a DR rating of 7 - compare the difference in the beginning especially - click to listen

Hairy Sausage RockBut as an arranger, I was not happy.

I'm used to hearing all the different instruments, and with DR levels of 6 and 7, it was all but impossible.

The version with the most loudness (DR of 6) was a mastered version with extra bass

Approaching hairy sausage land - click to listen

Some loudness, some punchWe had some vivid discussions about which way to go. Neither of us was going to work for years on something that wasn't going to be perfect. Luckily, our mastering tech Michael Conn brought some much-needed perspective into our deliberations. At his suggestion, we had him master the track at a DR level of 9.

We settled on this version with a DR of 9 - some loudness, but still some punch and clarity - click to listen

Coming up next...So that's what you're gonna get on our upcoming album "Don't bring the kids". Stick around for updates and, possibly, hospitalization reports from our next debate about loudness.

Thanks for listening,

Michael Erle

Connect with usStereo Monument - a rock/pop band based in Munich, Germany

Web: www.stereo-monument.de

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Twitter: @stereomonument

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Email: info@stereo-monument.de