Loudness in Mastering | Are You Listening? | S2 Ep5

[@iZotopeOfficial]

Have a question for Jonathan? Reply below and we’ll address it in a future episode of Are You Listening!

[@sq7507]

Hi! My question is in regards to streaming Platforms like Spotify and it's loudness values. If i have a quieter master than -14 LUFS with -1 dbFS peak level, does that mean that when it gets normalized it will be limited again? Is it then better to make louder masters? Thanks!

[@sq7507]

I have another question! Why do we limit peaks when mastering for streaming sevices to begin with? Thanks!

[@sq7507]

Why should we push CD masters louder? Is lt because peak level can be a little higher here allowing for louder, more dynamic masters to exist? Thanks Jonathan and Izotope!

[@TheShpmusic]

Hi there, i really admired his works. In my mixes i do a bit of midside Eq on the mixbuss, where i will use subtractive eq to notch out the bad frequencies. The most i will yank out is 1db. This also glues the mix together as a whole making it more cohesive. I don't boost the Eq on the midside i leave it for the mastering engineer..so my question is, what does Jonathan thinks of this subtractive apporach to midside eq on the mixbuss. Please and thank you..👍

[@koenduits5488]

Hi! Thnx for these amazing video's! My question is: what do you think about one person mixing and mastering a song/record? I see peopIe do it, but as a mixer I wouIdn't want to because of the Iack of perspective that inevitabIy occurs when working for so Iong on the same thing.

[@BLBStudio]

Best free content in the area of music production. Just wow!

[@mrpudikin]

I totally agree

[@willwaterfalls]

Normally it's hard for me to watch videos of someone just talking for extended periods of time with no music playing, but for some reason this guys voice and demeanor made me watch this whole thing as well as 3 other similar videos on this channel. It's ironic he's discussing loudness and being so calm and quiet. I just want to be friends with this guy lol

[@kristianandreasen3230]

1:43 - concepts of loudness (average level and timbre/distribution of energy) 2:21 - contrast 3:11 - where should the level reside? 6:58 - loudness wars 8:20 - using meters for measuring loudness 10:14 - limiting to get loudness 11:19 - how loud should my master be? 12:23 - difference in peak and average level / flattening out dynamics 13:15 - squashed limiting A/B demonstration 14:30 - importance of loudness match or level matching 15:04 - pro tips for making your music loud (no exact recipe but advice on best practices) 17:27 - conclusion

[@ilikeflxwers]

This is the most educating series I've ever seen on KZbin.

[@joaospin]

I think Jonathan should talk about DIY mastering vs. hiring a professional vs. auto mastering sites.

[@georgemoore8577]

I absolutely love the product and all of the videos that are apart of their learning section. I think the most important or should I say valuable part of the izotope brand is the "Are you Listening " series. Priceless!!!

[@TheRiteHand]

Let me set aside the (excellent) informational value here and just say that it’s a pleasure just to hear this man speak

[@TokyoSpeirs]

Even if you couldn't care less for Ozone or iZotope, this is by far the most informative and concise series on mastering (and mixing) on KZbin.

[@Kosich2]

so help full!!

[@filmmaker5457]

As a former musician, sound is extremely important to me. This is a very good explanation.

[@Josh.Bartel]

It’s super difficult to give set in stone rules about loudness in mastering which makes it such a hard topic to explain. Nice work explaining it as well as you did!

[@KelvinSarrz]

I think thats the magic that separates the pros from the amateurs lol. Happy mastering man!

[@FataMorgana-Official]

Jonathan, I have seen a lot of videos in this series and I think they are really good. My main approach for mastering is: Use your ears and make a master that sounds as good as possible and make it as load as you possible can. How much you should compress and if you should use a limiter at the end of the master chain really depends on genre (the more you use compression and limiting, the loader the master can be). I recently remastered a recording I made in 2001. I just used my ears and made an analysis after the mastering was done, it ended up around -9 to -10 LUFS integrated, which somehow is the "normal" level for a rock/hardrock record. Jazz is lower, metal is higher, but the important thing is to be in se same ballpark as your competitors. The band Fata Morgana is not a metal band so I think I did it right. Feel free to listen (just click on me). If you like guitar-driven hardrock with more complex arrangements but still melodic, you should defenetely listen. Remember, your ears are going to tell you whats right. not numbers! And the most impotant thing: Have a great song and let good musicians record it and produce it well. // Peter, Guitarist, Songwriter & Producer in Fata Morgana

[@pietrogirardi]

Thank you for this video, I'm in the position of mixing and mastering my own stuff, and always heard just the downsides of this approach. This is the first time I hear about it with a positive attitude: I often find myself going back to the mix to carve out those peaks that hit limiter the most, so that I can push it a little harder (not just for the sake of "loudness" but to better distribute the energy throughout the whole spectrum). I'd really love to see an episode about clipping, I find the ozone limiter to have a great ability to do it and would like to see a pro like you share some knowledge about it. Keep up the good work!

[@samrhythm5447]

the song he's mastering makes this video so much more entertaining, it's fire

[@gusdee4844]

Learning more about that crest factor and realizing its the issue ive been dealing with. Everybody says keep ur kick at -6 but the limiter always crushes it and squares off the peaks. Ive been eqing low end out of it or lowering it by alot. Its always the kick and snare that are the samples squashed by the limiter.

[@rapiton]

gus dee I agree. Really useful information.

[@gusdee4844]

@@svengali5862 oh yeah I know bro, thats the way I do it and thats when it happens lol. I always start gain staging with the kick and snare, as they say its the most important. Not new to this but squaring off always been an issue since I started mixing my instrumental stems with the vocals. Been getting better results when I take out alot of low end/punch and add mids so its percieved louder.

[@bhargavdobhal5327]

Thank You Jonathan Wyner and Izotope🙌🙌 for this really helpful video🔥🔥.

[@lucaformentini]

very well thought and explained subject!

[@iqi616]

14:30 This is fundamental

[@FieryRam]

^ This

[@lindasmusicandvideos7838]

Hi Jonathan, I love your "Are You Listening" episodes. They are informative, and inspirational! I have Ozone, and your advice and information has been a great help. Thank you, Linda Ponte

[@phyleneamuso1051]

I'm new to music prod and Izotope, it seems the most intuitive of many offerings.This is fantastic! Thank you so much, ive been a musician for decades but digital is new to me so .... I can learn the software and what to listen for as I train my ears. You are teaching at a perfect level for me as well, just complex enough that I'm learning but able to follow as well.

[@_Zedlav]

great series, thanks for the high quality content

[@sq7507]

This guy is awesome. Thanks to you and Izotope I'm finally understanding mastering! Keep it going!

[@alexdrouin4872]

Thank you so much for all this series Johnathan and Izotopes, you guys are the best.

[@ErikMontenegro92]

What a series! I learned so much thanks to you, this is invaluable! Thanks so much

[@luckybase1234]

I really like your teaching and I wish I would’ve found this earlier,! Thank you for sharing your wisdom and knowledge!

[@betoporto2213]

Wow! I'm very happy for listening to this class. Congratulations. Thank you very much.

[@preciousmisfits5134]

I'm a big fan of this series - keep it coming! My question (or request) is for an episode that covers gluing a mix together in the mastering stage. I am an independent artist and I play, mix, and master my own stuff. By definition it is 'unglued' since each take is done independently of the other. The bass and electric guitars are DI, the vocals and acoustic guitars are miked, and the drums are patterns or loops. As a result one of my big challenges is to glue all this together. Your expertise would be greatly appreciated!

[@iqi616]

Best done in the mix. A light touch of room reverb helps glue electronic or DI instruments together. It particularly helps when trying to make sampled drums sound like a kit - think of it like having a room mic on a real kit. The other aspect is the arrangement - if the parts are fighting for space, the mix is never going to gel.

[@DIGOOfficial]

Inspirational, informative and educational. Thanks IZotope, and Jonathan for these invaluable drips of knowledge. As is always the case, you guys not only make great plugins, but top notch tutorials too \m/

[@Pearlpassionstudio]

Another excellent tutorial on your series. Well said and learned a few things I never realized, thanks. Most interesting was the crest factor, low end that eating up my loudness control. As being a drummer, naturally I favor my part of the equation, perhaps to loud. Most importantly that kick and snare that needs to pop out of that mix...Back to the drawing board on the stems..Thanks much sir.

[@legaz8821]

Wow! Great stuff! Thank you for your knowledge!!

[@justanothertreeonthenetwit3958]

Thank you for your videos. I appreciate them and will always buy iZotope's future products, while I remain alive, that is. I seriously think your products rock, and your extra input in videos is more than welcome: thanx for not being ass smokers.

[@charlespetersohn6780]

Thanks, very helpful.

[@bboymac84]

Yayyy more episode! Thanks Johnathan!!

[@SelfPropelledDestiny]

This is a slight tangent, but on high crest factor music, I can't help thinking of a recording of a classical orchestra, and the way the dynamic differences in the music actually slightly annoy me. Now, I love me a lot of classical pieces and am fervent about my favorite composers, but I do wonder if there should be other options of lower dynamic range classical recordings. So I am wondering, has anyone ever produced classical pieces like it were a rock album? By that I mean, isolating timpani and recording just that, then the piano, then the oboes, etc., utilizing more of the stereo field to create interesting panning effects, and creating an extremely modern mixed version of classical pieces? See, because of the "culture/heritage" of classical music, it is held that it must be played and recorded altogether at once, with little separated stereo aside from the natural room sound. I just wonder if they might find a new and different audience if someone tried recording these works in a newer fashion. I feel like there must be someone out there doing something like this, if anyone knows let me know.

[@MaxCarola]

Thanks for the advice. I noticed that when you use Spotify in a free version there is no normalization. So that defeat the normalization idea and bring the situation more like a CD release. What do you think about that?

[@kidconnitv9774]

You Sir taught me alot! BIG THANK YOU !

[@RealChrisMalcolm]

This series is great!

[@dannowell269]

I'm loving these uploads

[@archivradio]

very nice video! for beginners, though, you might explain in an upcoming video a fundamental thing about loudness correction: is it a dynamic effect (like a compressor) or does it affect the whole audio - like normalize. you think this is trivial? it is not.

[@burgewo]

Yes I’m listening

[@202guitars]

From my understanding, if your track has a higher level then the normalized level for a streaming service, it applies limiting to turn the track down and could make your track sound more “squashed.” My question is, if we’re not supposed to be concerned about that when mastering, how would you prevent that squashing from happening? Would you do a separate master for streaming and say, vinyl or CD?

[@monkeygoat76]

If the normalization on the streaming services turns down your too loud mix the normalization doesn't make your mix squashed, that's what you have done yourself when you squashed the dynamics to make your track loud. The normalization doesn't put a limiter your music at all, it just lower the whole track to make it less loud. The only stupid normalization I know of is the one Spotify use, it applies positive gain to the music with lower average loudness than their used normalization level (-14 LUFS), that means that the most dynamic music that don't aim at "to be loudest" will be squashed just to make it play at -14 LUFS. If you want to make your music sound the best it possibly can, don't use limiters at all! The music will always sound the best with the full dynamics intact whatever platform it plays on, if you want to listen on the music louder you simply turn up the volume on your playing device, don't kill the dynamics! Right now most streaming services use normalization levels around -14 LUFS, but this can whenever they want to be changed to -23 LUFS. Therefore the only right thing you can do at this point in mastering is to leave your music at its full dynamics, that way it will always sound the best it can whatever happens with normalization levels in the future. Do you all think you are making music that will compete with the boring squashed shitty radio hit music, or what? Aim higher for the love of music! :D

[@EXE4098]

Perfect - Thanks.

[@synthshoot1026]

Thank you very much.

[@glick278]

HareKrishna&GodBless🙏❤️

[@Shepiod]

Thank you for what you are sharing. It is very helpful. I do mostly acoustic guitar/upright bass/percussion jazz recordings where dynamics are really a huge part of the mixes. I use Ozone 9 advanced with all my mixing and mastering. What type of over-all loudness db peak would you recommend as a general target or parameter to work from so far as numbers are concerned with a focus on streaming? Thank you.

[@TheBlackhat97]

thank you alot! that was so helpful, i ask if you want to go more in deeped with loudness & mastering, any experienced information can make us better. i apreciate.

[@SonicologyRecords]

Great video!

[@burgewo]

everything I learned is from Izotope on KZbin .

[@RodKruz]

Great talk!

[@wesbeach69]

Great video. Was wondering when he was going to mention " AKIRA TAKISAKI"

[@SammyBlunt]

Do you recommend keeping the ceiling at -1.0 for uploading instrumental music to KZbin? I see a lot of producers recommend putting the ceiling at -.3 db for KZbin beats. Is this incorrect?

[@syndice]

Depends on the genre, if u see people u like doing it, it's probably a good idea to try it as well.

[@sixto6]

Awesome series but can we get Catalina support for Ozone 8? That'd be great. I check the support article weekly to see if you guys have caught up... It's strange to me that you guys can develop compatibility for your new products like Ozone 9 but fail to write the same lines of code for your older products.

[@iZotopeOfficial]

Hi, Thanks for contacting us and for supporting iZotope, sorry for the trouble with Ozone 8. We had to patch the current and most up to date products first before we started working on products that were recently discontinued such as Ozone 8. Catalina support is coming soon. If you need help doing the manual install steps as outlined in our Knowledge Base, please reach out to [e-mail] and we'd be happy to work with you. We appreciate your patience in this!

[@sixto6]

iZotope, Inc. I actually had a conversation with one of your support guys about it and they advised me to just simply not update to Catalina... and that was about all that they had to say about it.

[@danielrobertson9854]

Question, when a customer downloads from a site that lowers the LUFS, will the customer get a high level format or the compressed format?

[@jikunspite8660]

How high the lufs and true peak i allowed to hit before im sending it to aggregator and will still sounds good on streaming platform? Thanks a lot.

[@jacksolarmusicmastering]

what headroom do we need for streaming platforms? -1db will not be competitive, is -0.3 still fine?

[@barajijazz62]

talking about loudness between digital platforms and cd levels , how much level I need to increase my master made in 48/24 and going for the final master in cd format ??? Thanks for your comments

[@leavesproduction1043]

Where to get additional mastering pressets for Ozone 8\9?Thank you.

[@s90210h]

Thank you so much for this information! Here's a slightly unrelated question: What are the two white rack units to Jonathan's left?

[@markroyrainey]

The top one is the Weiss DS1 I'm pretty sure and the 2nd looks like the Weiss EQ7 - www.weiss.ch

[@FlotownMastering]

Yup, DS1 and EQ1.

[@hgranat]

Weiss EQ1 and Weiss DS1 Compressor/limiter - www.weiss.ch/products

[@s90210h]

thank you!

[@5RIVERZ]

Excellent 👍

[@manta5890]

what about chaining multiple limiters? is that a good idea to avoid pushing a single limiter too hard?

[@PiercombProductions]

Great stuff as always, Jonathan. Here’s a question I hope you can address that has me puzzled. As a test, I captured five songs from Apple Music into Logic (pop, rock and country) and loaded up Insight on the master buss. Their integrated LUFS over the duration of each ranged from -8.2 to -10.6. How do I reconcile this with the idea that the streaming services normalize loudness to -14 LUFS. Help!! I’m confused.

[@htb123times]

siamesersgp it’s pretty simple. Master at -8/-11 and let the service turn it down. In a pervious video someone said they did a test of one track uploaded @ -14 and one uploaded @ -8, they said the -8 sounded a lot better than the -14 one. Do what you will with that information

[@infinaneek]

Epic shirt

[@dafingaz]

Nice!

[@mcsstudios101]

Loudness wars. I don't go there. Most of the music imported to online sources change your volumes according to their platform anyway automatically. As far as a mix...all up to the person behind the board. Daw recording through experience has me reducing all my levels around -12 to start. Headroom helps. Honestly I get close to what i think is good....and let Ozone 5 ...which is what I'm using do it's magic with minor adjustment. Just don't distort your sound as this will mask everything. I usually do -3 max output.... and play with the maximize settings. Every mix is different. it's all about choices.

[@fancha831]

wondeful

[@kevinfrieden7929]

i see you like your swiss gear 😉😎

[@mika461983]

so what can we do with this kick to pronounce better? it's very common situation

[@dandanthepieman8598]

no right way to do this. I would go back into the mix soft clip the kick and try and make sure it's not peaking as much in the Master so I'm turning the overall level of it down but its perceived loudness is where it should be so the limiter doesn't have to work as hard. I've had situations where this doesn't work it depends on the kick drum and what it can take

[@88keyz]

👍🏾

[@VINYL-CHECK]

Hello, I like this series very much, but their is one thing I do not agree with. Louder is not better! From a listener point of view I tell you, that I love a LUFS from around 15db, no matter which genre it is. (Not for classic) And I reale hat the loud masters and my listening friends too. I realy know nobody that say: Hey, that sounds so good because it is so loud. I only know people that say: I can‘t hear this record or album because it‘s to loud and sound terrible. LUFS = 15 db and the hole thing works and there is enough place for punch in the bassdrum, snare, toms and every instrument that need it to sound „right“. Thanks for the series.

[@kinkias]

Who the hell needs loud records??!!? Dont crush dynamic range! We all have volume buttons, thank you!

[@monkeygoat76]

Exactly, just use the volume control on your playing device and leave the full dynamics in your music intact. If people A/B their songs with the full dynamics intact vs a limited version and level match them, the full dynamic version will win all the time.

[@lucalone]

sometimes less is more...

[@cyberprompt]

I fell asleep waiting for loudness

[@DarkMetaOFFICIAL]

how loud i mix my tracks : af yes 😂

[@NathanChisholm041]

I'll take dynamic range and turning my volume to where it needs to be over this so-called loud music that's spewed out over the radio, Spotify etc any day! This perception of loudness equal better needs to stop. These kids have been taught poor musical understanding from companies obsessed with being louder than the next guy...

[@Janomix]

Somebody has achieved a powerful -6 dB Short Term and -7 dB Integrated clean, clear and transparent master with -1 dB true peak on your EDM music like professional EDM producers right in the box? No? Ok, it is because only these powerful master only can be achieved with profe$$ional analog and digital gear... never with plugins. Stop lying please!

[@monkeygoat76]

I like this video series, but why do you still push for levels higher than around -14 LUFS when all the streaming platforms who probably stand for 90% of all music listening already have normalization levels at or around that point? This is a golden opportunity for you to tell all the people who watch this video that it will just reduce audio quality if they limit the dynamics beyond this point, the streaming services will just turn down everything that is louder than -14 LUFS, and if you compare those songs with the other songs with the dynamics intact they will not sound louder, just less dynamic. Thanks to the introduction of normalizations on all the music platforms, we now have the chance to kill the loudness war for good. Please make an educational video on that.