Is your home recording too quiet? This is a bit of an issue with commercial music today. When music is perceived as louder by the human ear it is often perceived as intrinsically ‘better’. So a lot of pop music is mixed and mastered to sound as loud as possible, with everything blasting out at 0dB and with little dynamic range - in other words, not much difference between the loud sections and the soft sections of individual songs.
As a result, people are used to hearing commercially-produced music that’s been produced with a ’squashed’ dynamic range to permit that extra loudness. In contrast, a typical home recording is too quiet and may sound ‘unprofessional’ to untrained ears.
There is a movement to counteract this, called Turn Me Up! - take a look at their home page for a great video that explains, briefly and clearly, the technical side of this debate over dynamics.
Turn Me Up! is basically trying to restore a bit more dynamic range to modern commercial recordings. One major ambassador for the campaigned is Elbow’s producer Craig Potter. If you listen to the first track - Starlings - on Elbow’s album The Seldom Seen Kid, you’ll notice quite a range in volume in the recording from the quiet intro to the blasting brass section.
Anyway, basically this means that your music is going to sound quiet compared to the stuff in the charts, which, as I’ve said, is a dead giveaway that it was home recorded. If you really want that pro recording studio sound, you’re going to have to pump up the volume and give your dynamic range a bit of a bashing.
One simple effect you can use to deal with this is a limiter (or sometimes ‘maximiser’). A modern limiter is typically a simple software plugin for DAWS such as Logic, Cubase and Pro Tools. It usually has two parameters – threshold and ceiling. It stops (limits) the signal from going into the red and distorting while using compression to raise the general perceived volume. The company Massey do a fantastic free limiter plug-in. Here’s a video of it in action:
So a limiter can prevent your recording from sounding too quiet without sending the really peaky sections into the red. However, as you can hear, it can distort your music if used at extreme parameters.
Graeme Allen is a recording engineer and producer based near Leeds, UK. He offers recording packages priced to suit non-professional musicians and bands who need demos.
In addition to his technical skills, Graeme is a first class musician in his own right, playing rock, blues and jazz guitar and classical violin. Visit his website at www.graemeallenproduction.co.uk.
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