I'm sure this has been addressed to death, so sorry for the redundancy but I'm unable to find the advice I'm looking for in previous threads.

Essentially I've been doing some testing and looking into why my tracks come out overall low in volume. Generally I make sure I have enough head room throughout mixing so as to bring up the levels a decent amount during mastering. Regardless of how I adjust my levels while mixing in the end the tracks always come out low in volume.

What in particular might I be overlooking or doing wrong?

Any ideas?

Thanks,
andrew

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can you please make screenshot of mixdown? that might be a help.

but i think if everything is correct in the mix, than its your mastering.

normalising,Eq,Compression,Limiting... should help

akazi, you're certainly right, it looks like a mastering problem. I suppose the limiter I have on my master channel is severly reducing the dynamic of the sounds. Looks like i have work to do...lol.

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How about not using a limiter on the master channel, and export the track and import it into a Wave editor and then use compression or whatnot to get the track to its right level.

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its all down to the mixing. from what i have seen a good mix means that it can be forced through a limiter and boosted in percepted volume loads before things go wrong.

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Guys, the whole headroom thing... Why do you have to leave 4db on your master? Isn't it better to cut the volume down than to boost it up?

Try cutting away frequencies below 30Hz (They're pretty much useless). I had alot of trouble with headroom in my latest production until I did that.

quote:

Originally posted by Eldritch Try cutting away frequencies below 30Hz (They're pretty much useless). I had alot of trouble with headroom in my latest production until I did that.

Yeah sometimes the low frequencies can really ruin a proper mix and create a huge waveform with low output.

I dont see why anyone would use anything at all on the master channel.. except for some clever EQ

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Finish the track, then do some post mastering to adjust the levels.

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Agree with Subtle here, bounce the track down first then master, don't run your limiter on the master fader trying to combine the process.

yup, thanks for everyone's input, the limiter was screwing things up. I remixed this particular track, redid all the eq'ing and compression and finally got it up to commercial levels while mastering. for now on I'll simply bounce the final track to master, makes much more sense to do it this way.

cheers

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Sounds great..

Also,are you using 16bit or 24bit?