Is my music Volume fine? I mean, was listening someone else music and then one of mine and the volume difference was abismal. Was the other one too high or are mine that low
I like making music, drawings and animations! (I've never had time to finish any) Non-Commercial work unless an arrangement via PM. Commissions are open.
Age 22, Male
looking for a job
Dominican Republic
Joined on 6/9/18
Posted by CDJeremy - 2 weeks ago
Is my music Volume fine? I mean, was listening someone else music and then one of mine and the volume difference was abismal. Was the other one too high or are mine that low
Honestly, ditto the other person in this reply section. Your overall music volume is fine; probably what you're hearing is a difference in LUFS, not decibels. Decibels are relative to your listening position, but LUFS is the absolute loudness of a given song, if that makes sense. So the other song you were listening to may have been hard clipped at the same decibel level as you, but they probably cranked their limiter so they had higher LUFS than you.
Even despite that, honestly your songs are already loud enough as it is; I had to turn down my speakers to listen to some of your music, which is absolutely not a bad thing, I just prefer to listen to music at lower volumes.
Best piece of advice I can give you in general: don't overthink it. If it sounds good to you, it is good. Overthinking it can lead to overmixing, which can very quickly lead to you ruining your music. So rather than worrying about whether your songs are loud enough or not, and asking other people what they think, mix the song until YOU like it. No one can take away from you that you like what you made.
But just as a general guideline to work within, I try to master my songs to average at -6 LUFS. If you have a decent enough limiter, it should give you a LUFS value in it, but if not you can use something like LufsLimiterFree, or I believe Voxengo's SPAN has a LUFS metric built into, but I don't know how it works.
When mastering and using the LUFS meter as your guideline, you want to use "Integrated LUFS" not short term, reason being that integrated LUFS is the average loudness of your whole song. -6 LUFS is roughly what I aim for, but you don't have to hit that loud exactly, and nor do you need to use that specific number as your average.
Or you can choose to ignore me altogether, and go back to what I said before: mix and master your songs in a way that makes YOU like them. Not anyone else, it's only you who needs to like them. I'm also saying this assuming you don't know any of this already, and that's very presumptive of me, so I hope you do find this all useful!
Thanks so much for the heads-up! I'll keep it in mind for my future projects! I'll try some of the tips you posted there and find out which one works best for me. Thank you so much :D
@CDJeremy Absolutely, not a problem! I should tack on, because I've had another thought come up. You'll often see sources that say you should master between -14 and -12 LUFS; this isn't entirely necessary. The reason you're told to do this is because platforms like YouTube Music and Apple Music (and any other services you may know of) will lower the volume (or raise the volume) of your music to whichever is the closest or whatever their standard is. You do not need to master for either of these LUFS levels because the music will be turned down or up to that level anyway, if you put it onto streaming services. I was taught to master as loud as you can get away with, without sacrificing the tonal characteristics of the music itself, and that number happened to fall around -6 LUFS for me, on a fairly light limiter.
MSVi09
some people clip the heck out of their tracks to make them seem louder
CDJeremy
I think it's more of a technique I don't have yet, but I'm glad to know that my songs don't have such a low volume :)