Louder is always better, right? Who doesn’t love to hear their favourite tracks on huge speakers? It makes everyone dance and sing from the top of their lungs. It is exciting and energetic. But being able to get that feeling whether you play a track in a pair of headphones or a huge arena starts from a well balanced mix.
Part of a mixing engineer’s job is finding the right levels for each element of the song throughout the track while keeping a healthy headroom. The more instruments playing at the same time the louder it gets, which results in less headroom to work with and the closer the mix gets to clipping. Tools like brickwall limiters are very useful to prevent mixes from clipping but they can be deceiving since they can destroy the dynamic range of your track.
So, how do we find the balance? How can we get our mixes loud and still get a healthy headroom? Let’s start by defining these two concepts: loudness and headroom.
Back To The Basics
Loudness is a subjective perception of sound pressure. It is a combination of physical, physiological and psychological components. A high sound pressure level (SPL) will normally be perceived as a loud sound. But due to the nature of the human hearing not all frequencies are perceived equally loud at the same SPL. This is shown in the Fletcher-Munson Curves, also known as Equal-loudness Contours.
On the other hand, headroom is the amount of dBs between the loudest point of an audio signal and the clipping/distortion point of the recording. When a digital signal clips, the signal is capped adding unpleasant high frequency sounds and even making it inaudible.
With these two concepts in mind we can now think in ways to make your mixes feel louder without losing headroom.
Create Contrast
Not everything needs to be playing at the same time all the time. A good arranger will probably have it in mind while writing the song. But sometimes………..
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