Episode 37 - Loudness Pt. 2
Show Notes: Loudness Pt. 2
Live with Matt Rad - Episode 37
Jan 26, 2021
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 34
Show notes by: Bradley Will
Soft Clipping vs. Hard Clipping
You’re gonna want to use soft clipping in the pursuit of loudness whereas a hard clipper is inharmonic distortion and will make for a very aggressive and disruptive sound.
You’re sacrificing transients and dynamic range to get more level when you clip.
Clipping your master is going to have very little effect on your loudness compared to making the right decisions in your mix on individual elements.
Maximum loudness is not going to come from distortion and clippers. It’s going to come from good fundamental mixing.
Distortion is good for loudness but too much can very quickly make it sound like shit. You should not rely on it too much. Don’t be heavy handed.
If you have 4-5 elements competing for the same frequency range you’ll be unable to make anything stand out. Having well-defined areas for each element will help them each stand out because they’re not competing.
If everything is loud, then nothing is loud.
The most successful mixes on the charts right now like ‘Positions’ don’t have good low end.
The song is super limited. It doesn’t have to be to achieve the same position on the charts.
They sacrificed low end for loudness.
After you understand what gain-staging and arranging can be, then these tricks four loudness will take you further. Until then, these are advanced techniques.
Jon:
”There’s no way to explain how to use a clipper other than showing someone.”
Turn it up until you hear it hiss and then back it off a bit.
Jon delivers -12 LUFS masters on a final big label pop record.
Numerically it might read as quiet, but perceptually it is going to sound louder than a Post Malone record that is slammed.
If Jon has his way, there will be no audible distortion on a final mix or master.
There should be no hard-clipped final masters going to a streaming service.
As engineers our job is to do the job without allowing that distortion to occur.
You’re going to deal with clients wanting things louder all of the time. This will be a continual challenge for you.
You need the client to have enough trust in you to allow you to bring the level down.
It’s takes a trained engineer to get the loudness without resorting to hard-clipping the entire mix.
Doing this successfully is what makes us good at our jobs.
Finding the right limiter/soft clipper is not going to save your mix. Good gain-staging will get you there.
Q: What is meant when Jon says “Where the energy is coming from in a record?”
Jon:
My job is to understand what is driving the song.
Was the song written around the energy of the bass part? Was it the piano chords? The vocal melody?
What is the driving force of the songs? The instrumentalist? Vocalist? Where is the secondary energy coming from? Is the chords or the groove?
Listening and understanding the arrangement is his job.
It’s about that five band spectrum and thinking of it emotionally, not numerically.
You need to understand the intent of the record. What are you supposed to be focusing on emotionally? It’s your job to preserve that essence.
What is the focus? You need to create a hierarchy of loudness, because not everything can be loud at the same time. Again, if everything is loud, then nothing is loud.
As a mixer, even if you’re not writing and producing the song once you identify the key elements in the record, you can push those up and lower those elements which are more “filler” or “ear candy”.
With this approach in mind, Jon used to have a buss called “bullshit” for the elements of a super-dense mix that don’t really matter. For every element that wasn’t the focal point he would buss them through here and then either lower the volume of the group, suppress some of the upper-mid presence, or filter it in order for it those elements to take up less space.
———
The tool that people miss out on the most to get loudness is the concept of ‘reduction’.
Reducing volume of elements
Filtering unneeded or unwanted frequencies.
Obscuring sounds
Rough mixes are already aggressive. Jon doesn’t need to add much aggression. He just needs to reduce the stuff that doesn’t contribute to that aggression.
Getting loudness is more about taking things away.
Everyone should understand that
Rely and trust upon the engineers at the end to output the proper loudness.
If you find yourself doing it because you’re not happy with the mix, it means you haven’t found the right mix engineer.
Trust your mix and mastering engineer. Producers have better things to do like make a tight beat and tight arrangement. You shouldn’t be thinking about loudness.
When it doubt, go quieter.
Matt had a moment in the early 00’s, around 2010 when he weighed going full Serban/mixer. He realized that if he’s going to be a mixer, he should focus 100% on being a mixer. That’s not how his brain works, so he stuck to being a producer.
Jon went the opposite way.
Loudness comes from gain-staging.
Transients:
Jon considers transients to be a “secret” of his.
He puts transient shapers after most dynamic or saturation tools.
Using a transient shaper is preferable to using a compressor to accentuate transients.
This is not a beginner method. Don’t do this if you don’t fully understand the “why” of why you would do it.
Also don’t do transient-shaping in multi band mode because it will introduce phase issues that you don’t want.
9 out of 10 times Jon doesn’t use multi-band processing.
At this point Jon is using Neutron transient designer most frequently.
Jon doesn’t go up more than 2-3 dB on Neutron. Usually it’s 1-2 dB.
Saturation is a form of dynamic control. This allow you to reduce dynamic range and also thicken up a sound but you lose transients. So after you thicken the sound up with saturation you can add that snap back to the sound that you may have lost.
Transients makes you dance and move.
It’s the anchor to your beats
It’s nervous system stuff.
Jon recommends that everyone should listen to Jerry Seinfeld’s episode on Tim Ferris in which they discuss Jerry’s process (Episode #485).
