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Matching Loudness Levels when Mastering,

Question...

As an experiment I have attempted to to match the apparent loudness of some European Trance tracks with a few Trance tracks I am composing for a film, and cannot get anywhere close to the same loudness levels. I have tried using all the native DP Plug-ins as well as the waves Ultra-maximizer. The European Trance tracks are screaming loud with minimal pumping or artifacts and anything I try in DP begins pumping and becomes degraded long before I get even close to these levels.

I am aware that high end mastering houses have incredible equipment and highly skilled engineers to achieve this, but is there anyone out there that can get me close? (working within DP from my home studio?) Your expert advise would be most appreciated. I am not adverse to picking up some additional gear. (Pre-amps, plug-ins etc...)

Thanks for listening...


Green Stone

One of the first places I would look would be to check if there's some super low frequency content in your mix (use the FFT in the masterworks eq). If there is it could be killing your ability to get any level. Try filtering out everything below about 40 Hz (use your ears to set the exact point).

Also, be aware that if you give a film sound mixer a super hot music mix, he/she's only going to turn it WAAAAY down anyway, so it possibly is a pointless exercise trying to match CD-type mastering levels for your film delivery.

Just make sure that it's eq'ed, compressed and limited enough to sit in the film mix properly (maybe leave the limiting stage till the actual sound mix - if you trust the mixer).

Hi,

in addition to checking the frequencies of your hole mix, check them on your single tracks.
Compare the arrangement of the loud mixes with yours.

Maybe you have to do more compression and eqing on your single tracks to get a louder master.

Give every instrument it‘s own freq-range.
For example: Don‘t put a padsound, leadsynth, vocal, FX-sound and the snaredrum in the same freqrange.

And like Mr C. said.

There is a great difference between a good master, and a loud master

When I first began recording digital audio in DP, maybe 15 years ago or more, I was surprised that I could not get much volume at all. I started using limiters to bring it up, but not long ago I finally realized that I don't need them for that. I'm perfectly capable of slamming my whole system without plugin help. Thinking back, I can trace the evolution of my growing loudness to a conscious exploration of every facet of my system, from input stage to final 2-track output. You'll find that things are just different from the analog days. My goal now is to keep the mix at low levels so that I have plenty of headroom to avoid clipping and distortion.

My conscious effort long ago was to try to set everything for unity gain and see how far I could get. Apparently it worked. If you check every part of your audio chain, I'm sure you'll find places where you've got the gain diminished, possibly because you're accustomed to setting it for listening levels with your current hi-fi system. Could that be the case?

Shooshie

Is it possible you are trying to match wits with professionals who have been doing this full-time for years and years?

Okay, that might not be all that helpful, but that is the start of the problem.

That said, getting a track loud without killing it starts with how it is tracked, and every step from there counts as well. It's a game of inches. Many years of experience helps.

Many thanks to all for the practical and thoughtful posts on this topic. I appreciate the detailed direction.

Green Stone

pcm wrote:Okay, that might not be all that helpful,

Indeed...