We've talked about this before, but it bears repeating
again...
I know how you feel.
You’re confused by loudness and scared to over-compress your mixes during mastering.
But at the same time you also like mastering. Mastering is fun and allows you to get punchier mixes and louder songs.
I bet you also don’t understand all this loudness jargon though.
Like -16 dB LKFS, EBU R128 or all that jazz.
It hurts my head sometimes too.
Listening to professional mastering engineers and loudness gurus talk about all those standards is kind of like hanging out at a Star Trek convention.
You’re just hanging out checking out all the cool Trekkie stuff and enjoying all the nerdy pop
culture.
But in the corner you hear the ultra-nerds.
And you can spot them easily too.
Because they’re the ones speaking Klingon.
That’s exactly how listening to mastering engineers talk about loudness is sometimes.
It sounds like Klingon and you just can’t understand
it.
Luckily, the Jedi Master of Mastering (I’m really mixing up my metaphors here…) has two awesome plug-ins to explain these things to you in plain English.
Actually...it's more in numbers than in English but you know what I mean.
It’s Ian Shepherd’s Perception Plug-in and the loudness meter Dynameter.
They translate your insecurities from worrying about squashing your mix to knowing exactly how loud they should be to translate well to all the streaming platforms out there like Spotify, Youtube, TIDAL, Apple Music
etc...
With the Perception plug-in I can make sure I’m not just limiting the hell out of the mix. Instead I can make sure all the master bus processing I do is actually making my mix sound better, not just louder.
And with the Dynameter I can tell whether or not my mixes are in the best possible loudness range to sound the best to everyone listening to my mixes online.
I’d go into more detail but Ian speaks better Klingon than I do and we're wasting time talking about these plug-ins instead of using them.
Check out these two plug-ins below, and make sure you use the coupon code MPLGBLACK to get 30% off your order for Black Friday.
As they say in Klingon: QoQ loudness quv chaDo’maq naDev vItu’: