-----------------------------------------------------InfoFemale - 20There’s a thing in the music industry called “The Loud Wars”, I’ll explain why it’s destroying the music you listen to and my thoughts on it:
Pretend you’re listening to Pandora or Terrestrial radio - if you were to hear the same exact song back-to-back where the only difference was the volume, then you would claim that the quieter song sounded dull, whereas the louder song sounded brighter, crisper, and fuller.
But that’s the phenomenon, because nothing was different about the 2 songs except for the volume. Here’s a short, but interesting video showing exactly what’s happening.
This also applies to live concerts you attend. If one band plays louder than the other (not in terms of genre, just pure volume) then you’ll walk away thinking band #2 was better than band #1, but unsure as to why.
Welcome to the Loud Wars - where every song attempts to be “louder” than the previous song simply because humans perceive loud music to sound better.
So music producers, against their will, have been forced to make their client’s music louder and louder over the years in this competition for your attention and sales.
So why is this a problem? Well, when you “compress” everything into one single dynamic range then you completely kill the beautiful emotion and effect that music naturally has. Soft vocals no longer whisper, the quiet parts are sonically just as loud as the REALLY LOUD parts, and so on. This creates a short term profit, long term loss scenario - where at first the song sounds amazing in comparison to others, but after a week it starts to sound boring, predictable, and unadventurous to your ear.
Compression and production can be used very effectively, but the darkside is that in the past 2 decades they’ve been destroying the craft I once loved. The Loud Wars are a race to the bottom, and it’d be awesome to see this changed for a new generation of music lovers.
My orchestra music may acoustically be a lower volume when played next to a traditional song, but the effect is that it’ll never get old. That’s why people keep emailing me saying “I listened to your song on repeat for 3 hours. I don’t know why, but your music is infectious”. Well, now you know why.
It’s because of the Loud Wars, and I refuse to let my music fall victim to it. You shouldn’t fall victim to it either.
*Loudness
But yea, I make metal… which I usually make loud as shit in the mastering process becuase… well its METAL though I try to leave some room for it to breathe when I master because I love my drums punchy.
When I master anything else though, I just make sure it doesn’t clip and there we go. Done and done done.
Which is why I compress my master track to hell, then boost it +40db to compensate
I’m a pro at this mastering thing
