Waves Support & Service: Learning Music Technology

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Tips & Tricks

Tutorial: Maximizing Volumes

After being told over and over not to record too hot when recording digitally and to avoid clipping at all costs (good advice, actually), many students record at levels that are too low, or they fail to bring the final level up to where it should be. As a result, the recording sounds either too low, soft parts in the music get lost, or even unclean due to the noise generated by the system. This problem may also be encountered in a mastering situation. After spending time making your music deliver your message to the world, the final mix is too low to suit your taste, your ears, or your music style.

The most common manner of solving this is to use the Normalize function in your audio editor. While being the most common solution, it is not a preferable one. As shown below, L1 is perfect for bringing up the final level in a way that usually produces much better results than normalizing.

1. This is our original recording Original.WAV. As you can hear, the recording level falls short of being optimal.

2. After listening to the music, we found that the peak (the point of highest volume) is 6.8dB lower than the maximum amplitude possible. We adjusted L1’s threshold to the same value, thus achieving the “same” result as normalizing, but with a far better overall sound due to L1’s superior processing engine. Here it is Normalize.WAV .

Normalize

3. Since we were still not satisfied with the overall volume, we decided to push the volume up some more. Using the normalize function won’t do anything as we already used the maximum possible dynamic range. We can use the gain function in our audio editor, but this will result in clipping, most definitely undesired. L1, being a limiter, can push the volume up without clipping
All we need to do now is adjust the threshold setting to the value of desired gain (a threshold of 9dB results in an overall 9dB gain in volume), 12dB in our case. As you can hear Limiter.WAV, the music sounds unchanged, except for being louder.

A note on limiting: Any decision taken to limit or not to limit is a musical one. Some musical styles apply heavy limiting as part of the musical style’s “sound”, others don’t. Production requirements may suggest limiting is needed, for example preparing your music for broadcast might necessitate limiting in order to compensate for the radio’s smaller dynamic range. In our example we exaggerated in our limiting setting – The student should understand that limiting to produce a 5.2dB attenuation is a bit heavy. Normally we should watch out for a maximum of 4dB attenuation.