For independent artists, releasing their music with the right sound quality can be a challenge. This article discusses the issue of loudness, and why it can be so difficult to attain a professional level of sound quality when producing and releasing music independently.
What is mastering? What is loudness? Why does your track sound not as powerful compared to professionally released music by signed recording artists?
These are questions that independent artists come to when they’re trying to produce their own music.
The reality is it’s extremely difficult to compete with the professional resources major-label artists have in terms of their music production and post-production quality.
The good news is with some knowledge, insight and the right tools, you can make your music sound just as good as major-label artists.
So let’s answer the question: How loud should my music be?
Mastering may sound like a dark art to people - a kind of undefined territory of skill that is unattainable to the general masses.
The truth is, mastering is one of the most simple tasks in the music production process. However, it does require a degree of skill and experience to do it properly.
Mastering, at its most basic sense, is about taking a mixed track and raising its loudness up to a commercial level.
If you’ve ever looked at the meters on your audio gear and seen the music bouncing up to the very top (but not “clipping” with any audible distortion), you can bet that you are hearing some form of commercial loudness.
Put simply, the audio is reaching the 0 point or “unity gain” of the meters, so there is effectively no headroom and a conceivable level of loudness is attained.
This is essentially the main goal of mastering.
Why is mastering “hard”?
Mastering is not an especially difficult process in audio post-production, in and of itself. However, it does require certain skills and experience to be done properly.
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Compression, EQ and more creative effects like saturation and expanding the stereo field are used to enhance the audio quality before it ultimately is sent to a limiter.
The limiter prevents the sound from clipping at unity gain, allowing commercial loudness to be achieved in the audio.
How Do People Mess Up Mastering?
Mastering requires a distinct awareness of not only the volume of the music you are producing but also its dynamic range.
This becomes complicated by the fact that with the advent of so many streaming platforms, music is essentially being listened to on a wide variety of platforms, and each streaming platform has distinctly different standard for how they regulate loudness in their audio.
This loudness is typically measured in LUFS, which stands for Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. LUFS can be measured by playing a track from beginning to end and seeing where the measurement ends up.
Interestingly, while Spotify has the biggest international audience of users and music consumers, it also enforces the strictest and “quietest” loudness standard at -14 LUFS.
The chart below shows some of the other loudness standards of other streaming platforms, proving that if nothing else, the world of audio post-production has become quite complicated and chaotic.
What is Mastering? Here’s What You Need to Know
In many ways, this has led to lots of bad advice, bad practices and lower quality standards, especially for independent artists who may choose to master their own music, rely on plugin presets or contract internet freelancers who provide substandard quality of work.
What Is a Good Master?
A good master balances dynamic depth and consistency to create an enjoyable listening experience for the consumer. In the context of album or EP releases, the mastering engineer will make sure the tracks fit together in terms of their volume, dynamic range and tonal properties (EQ), making sure to create a unifying experience throughout the product.
How to Master a Single Release
When releasing a single of your music, your primary job is to make sure there are no issues with your mix and your track has a controlled dynamic range. This will allow you to then use a limiter to “limit” the transients at the very top of the audio signal, and increase the overall music’s volume to a louder, commercial volume level.
So How Loud Should My Music Be?
The answer is - there is no one number, or LUFS, you should be obsessing over. The reality is there is so much variety in how all the various music streaming and social media platforms alter and regulate their presentation of audio media, that when you are mastering your music - the listening experience is all that matters.
In this way, genre is the key to a great master.
Certain genres, like hip hop, pop and EDM, can be extremely compressed and loud. This is as much a function of the way artists want their music to sound as it depends on what audiences have grown to expect.
At the same time, cinematic music, singer-songwriter music, rock music, acoustic music - and many other genres - benefit greatly from a more dynamic range in their recordings.
In this way, Spotify’s strict rule of regulating music to a rather conservative -14 LUFS could be seen as a way of protecting the listener’s music experience, as engineers are slowly being swayed away from “smashing” their music with compression in order to make the loudest possible master.
In the era of CD sales of music, this was a popular approach to mastering. If consumers noticed you had the loudest CD, the music would appear “stronger” than other albums in your collection. It’s also been documented in scientific studies that human ears have an immense bias to consider any sound that is simply louder as “better.”
However, in the era of streaming, artists are not necessarily rewarded for having the loudest music, so by that logic, this has forced the recording industry to reconsider the value of having more dynamic range in recordings.
How Many LUFS Should My Music Be?
Again, genre is a major determinant for what kind of dynamic range your audience expects. A master of a recording can be anywhere from -14 LUFS to -9 LUFS and still fall within the range of loudness that streaming platforms present to audio listeners.
Depending on where your music falls in that range, some streaming platforms will present a varying audio experience. However, this is generally unavoidable, so when mastering your music, it’s more important to evaluate the listening experience, rather than obsessing over the LUFS number only.
How Do I Make Sure My Master Sounds Good?
If you are mastering the music yourself, make sure to turn the volume down. Listen intently to the loudest parts of your song and the softest parts of the song.
Then, ask yourself a few questions:
In the softest section of the song, do I feel like I can hear the music consistently well, making its softness aa creative effect, not a diminishing effect to the music?
In the loudest section of the song, do I feel like the music is still alive and punchy, that the music, while very loud, has power and force?
If, when answering these questions, you have doubts, there may be an issue with the quality of the master of your song.
At low volumes, a song that isn’t mastered properly as an uneven dynamic range. In other words, when the volume is low, certain sections of the song are simply too soft to hear properly.
Listeners could even have the “jumpscare effect” as they turn the volume up, up and up, only to get blasted with volume when the chorus of your song starts.
This is not a good listening experience and could negatively affect people’s impression of your music.
At the same time, if your music lacks dynamic range, the loudest sections of your song will sound flat, lifeless and may even be somewhat distorted.
This is a sign that the music is not mastered properly and is distorting the dynamic value of the music so much that it is degrading the listening experience for the consumer.
How Do Measure the Dynamic Range?
The secret to dynamic range is not in LUFS, but in LU or Loudness Units. LUs measure dynamic range. If you can measure the dynamic variation of your music, you can get a better idea of how dynamic your music is.
LU is like a long-term reading of how different your verse, chorus and bridge are in terms of loudness.
Again, LU is only as useful a measurement as it pertains to style. Some genres demand very little dynamic variation, others are much more enhanced by greater dynamics.
How to Master My Own Music the Right Way?
Mastering with stock plugins is totally possible in any standard commercial DAW. You can use this guide on mastering your own track in Ableton Live.
There is also a guide on mastering your track using only stock plugins in FL Studio.
There are also mastering services like LANDR and bandlab, that can master your music for you, but again, automating the process of mastering can introduce quality concerns with your music.
Ultimately, investing in a metering plugin and learning how to master your own music, or at least knowing what to look out for, is a great way to make better music releases that can be enjoyed right alongside professionally produced music by signed, major-label artists.
