Post
by dented42ford » Tue May 17, 2016 11:57 am
Your track has two major issues:
Too Much Low End: You seem to love the bass. There is nothing wrong with that, but you have to be very careful when working with bass-heavy material. The issue is that low frequency information requires more energy for "equivalent" volume than high frequency information. This has the counter-intuitive effect of making tracks with an inordinate amount of low frequencies seem quieter for the same overall volume level and dynamic range than a track with more information in the midrange and highs. This is because the human ear is much more sensitive to midrange information than low end information - and the excess of lows before the limiter makes the midrange seem recessed by comparison, when volume matched to a track with similar energy quantity.
The solution is to either create really sparse tracks with a lot of separation - this is the "Hip Hop Trick" - or to manipulate psycho-acoustic tricks to make the bass "appear" bigger than it is - this is the "good mastering trick", and is essentially what the "Bass Enhancer" plugins, such as Waves, do.
Too Much Dynamic Range Before Limiter: This is a more insidious problem, but is largely related to the first one. You don't seem to have used much dynamic range compression before the limiters, letting the limiters do the heavy lifting on "making the track loud". This is not the best way to go about things!
Generally, the best way to increase perceived volume without "sucking all the life out" is to use many different stages of relatively minor compression throughout the mix. (This is especially important for midrange instruments in a bass-heavy mix.) In other words, instead of trying to get the whole track louder by limiting the hell out of each track and then the master, try multiple stages of less extreme compression (~2-5db MAX) instead.
IMHO, the best way to do this is to "buss" similar sounds together. You compress each individual sound just enough to barely hear it working. Then you compress each buss - collection of instruments sent to a "sub-master" track - so that you can barely hear it there. Then you do the same on the master track. Then you add the limiter, which should have a lot less to limit at this point!
Another advantage of this technique is that it lets you do some neat side-chaining tricks - and no, I don't mean "side-chaining" in the "house-pumping" manner. Basically, it lets you use certain elements to control the emphasis of other elements by frequency range - so you could, say, subtly emphasize certain elements without any obvious pumping effects by side-chaining clashing sounds to them. The most obvious application is to emphasize vocals - this is what side-chains were invented for in the first place, way back when - but once you get your head around the technique, it has numerous creative applications!
A word of warning about using this sort of multi-stage dynamics treatment (otherwise known as good mixing acumen, but I digress): The lower the frequency content, the less effective compression becomes! Low-freq content is, by definition, at a lower "wavelength" than higher frequency content. Due to the first thing I mentioned - the frequency masking effect of extreme lows - the more you compress the lows, the more they "disappear" in the mix. It is best to try to keep the lows as dynamic as possible, to retain maximum punch in the area it is most effective. Go nuts on the highs, and be a bit careful in the mids, but be very conservative in the lows. This is, of course, just a rule of thumb, but it is a very helpful one!
