The loudness truce

- [Narrator] I'd like to start out by talking a little bit about loudness here because loudness is a really important thing when you are playing back music. You want to make sure that everything is at a nice commercial level that's going to be palatable across different devices. And especially nowadays since people are using playlists so often, it's great to have music that is at a nice commercial level so that you don't have giant volume jumps, you don't want your music to be super quiet certainly. And so it's really important to dial in a nice loudness. This is where mastering comes in. So what we have here is a track of mine called Pulling Back and I have two versions. At the top, we have the pre-master version, this is my mix here. And then at the bottom, this is a version that was mastered by Dave Kochoos, a killer mastering engineer out of New York City. I highly recommend him. I often do mastering myself, but personally for my own tracks, I really do love to have another set of ears on them, especially since I'm doing so much. So if I hit play here, you'll see on the meters over here on the left and we're in Pro Tools, but it doesn't really matter if you're a Pro Tools user, you can see that the meters are doing some different things. So the mastered version is quite hot and it has a nice, solid peak that's sort of staying in place. The pre-mastered version has a lot of headroom. So we have a lot of room before we hit digital zero. This is the amount of space we have for loudness in a digital audio file. Now, if you have been doing this for a little while, you may remember the loudness wars. That's a phrase that was coined especially during the CD era, because record labels wanted their CDs to be louder than everyone else's so things got pushed and pushed and pushed because if they listened to one CD, they wanted their CD that came after it to really pack a punch. Now, this is still something that is part of what we do and we have to keep this in mind, but things have been largely toned down in part because of the streaming age. I'm going to open up a plugin that I love called the streamliner and what this shows us are the different loudness specs for various streaming services. Now, we don't have to take this as gospel. These things are changing quite a bit here and there, especially at most things like that, it's jumping around a good amount, but we do have loudness targets for these various streaming services. Now it's not important really to remember all of these all the time, you don't have to be comparing and overthinking things, but I just want to use it as a means for showing you how all of these different streaming services deal with loudness because essentially what they do is they normalize loudness across different tracks. Now on some of them, you can turn that off like I use title a lot and in title, you can turn off loudness optimization so you really hear the difference in mastering, especially if you listen to something like from the seventies up against a pop track from the current days. These things will jump around quite a bit, but what most of the time streaming services are doing is measuring the cumulative loudness that we have and we measure that in LUFS these days, L-U-F-S, and they measure that for the entire track, the duration, the cumulative loudness and then the track either gets turned up or down based on what the service needs to do to match. Now minus 16, minus 14, these are very low loudness levels just in terms of regular listening and in terms of the way that we treat digital audio. What's worked for me and what I understand to be a bit of a standard these days is shooting for around minus eight or nine LUFS. That is going to put you in a good place where your music isn't going to be turned down too much versus other things because if you're really crushing the loudness, it's just going to turn your track down a lot and to get up to certain levels of loudness, you're having to compress quite a bit. And so what's going to happen is your track is actually going to sound smaller and quieter than less compressed audio because it has to be turned down so much in order to match the loudness. So let's take a look at where we are in terms of LUFS for the pre-master, I have it here. And why don't we listen a little bit, here we go. (upbeat music) You can see that without any limiting and that is maximizing, that's going to push things up more toward digital zero to a better competitive loudness compared to our peers, you can see that we're already around minus 14 and that's fine. That's a great place to start, but we can see that minus 14 is not that loud. Now let's jump over to the mastered version. I'm just going to move the plugin here and I'll actually let you hear the mastered version compared to that, making sure I reset my reading here cause remember this number is shifting because it's a cumulative loudness measurement that is changing over time. All of the new information for the track is being sort of factored in here and that's why it's dancing around. So you want something that's sitting in a good range. This track wound up a little bit louder than a lot of the stuff I do partially because it's a really very heavy saturated sound with a lot of push to it and there's some sort of heavy midrange elements and things like that. It also just sounds good. This is also something that I want DJs to play so I kept that in mind a little bit. So it's a little bit louder than some of the other stuff that I've been working on, but I think it sounds really good and it works really well on streaming services. So watch your volume here cause we're going to have a little bit of a jump in volume. (upbeat music) So we're a little bit past eight here. We're at minus seven and remember we're going up towards zero. So zero is like technically full loudness if you will. Minus 7.6 is a pretty good place to stay. It's a little hot. You want to make sure that you know what you're doing if you're doing something like that so that you don't wind up with something that sounds compressed. One thing that a great mastering engineer can do is keep things dynamic and punchy, but also still loud. This isn't going over the top with the loudness, but at the same time, it's going to be nice and competitive sort of wherever the track winds up living. And we can see sort of what all of these different services are going to have to do to normalize this audio. And the fact of the matter is that most releases these days are going to be turned down when they hit streaming services. We just want to kind of hit a sweet spot where we're still getting high quality audio that sounds good in playlists and on shuffle and on our different devices that have different loudness levels in general. And so using this as kind of a baseline, this minus eight, minus nine area, again, depending on the type of music, this is pretty heavy, pretty constant driving electronic stuff. If you're doing opera or jazz or acoustic music, you're going to want to be a little bit more conservative about loudness just cause it's going to sound better. That's the most important thing, but also we don't need to push things as hard as we used to in order to make them listenable for our audience.