Dear Anyone.

I know this is a dumbass NOOB ALERT question anyone should know the answer to - I've had people in other forums in fits of laughter over this - but it's wave sizes. I make a piece of music and the waveform's like wiggles in cotton, but you can hear it clearly. I look at someone else's piece of music in Audacity and t he waveform's like a sausage even though, with my speakers on the same level, it's as loud as mine. BUT - it's RICHER than mine and I'm wondering if that's accounted for by their waveform being bigger than mine - even though it's no LOUDER, it's FULLER. Like listening to a mouse and an opera singer on telly without changing the sound volume - you can hear them both equally but the opera singer is far more of a richer sound.

Please, HOW, technically, are they doing this? I've tried Compression, got a louder sound but not much change in my waveform. Tried saturation - got a bigger waveform, true, but the sound was MASSIVELY clipping. Theirs wasn't, so I don't THINK that's the answer (though you can tell me it is and how they're using it if that was the answer!) Tried putting a limiter on the outbuss - made the whole thing LOUDER but the waveform stayed the same size unless I got it clipping, when it got bigger but of course it was clipping so that's no good.

This prob. hits every single track I've ever written. But if someone could explain how to get a larger waveform without making the sound clip, I'd be very grateful. Never done it. First image is my waveform, second image is the comparison track waveform. How do I get mine looking more like theirs? The instruments in mine are roughly as loud but his make a far fuller sound. Changing EQ levels just wrecked the mix without doing a lot else!

Please could someone with a lot of patience explain the above to me?

Yours hopefully,

Chris.

 

there are lots of things to mention here, but the first one is not allowing your waveforms to be that anemic looking inside your DAW on the channels. That is usually just handled using your Region Clip Gain. The amplitude of the waveform on the actual channel is a separate parameter from how loud the sound is going to be output by that channel because of your mixer. You can have an big thick waveform displayed on the DAW channel, and still have the sound very low by using your mixer to attenuate it. They can be related, but not directly linked.

You do not even need a processor like a compressor to alter the waveform's visual amplitude on the channel. You need to understand the signal flow of your DAW. You can see in the second waveform that it is not highly compressed, limited or even clipped using a plugin. There is no big reduction in dynamic range. It's just "bigger".

By using the channel gain before the signal hits your channel strip in the DAW, it will have identical signal to noise ratio at either size. The audio goes up from the file to audio to your channel strip. But the region inspector Clip Gain is a direct change to the file, and non-destructive.

 

Last edited: Dec 9, 2024 at 9:55 AM

... Are you doing it all in Audacity? Cause the answer in that case is that other people use better clippers, limiters and compressors, and tweak them in real time to get the results they want.

The general answer is, you cut all the frequencies you don't need (usually includes lots of lowish mid and mid cuts everywhere and also cutting out overlaps), then limit every subgroup, then clip the drum peaks away on the whole track, then limit the whole track.

 

It will be nice to have some sort of sound preview. If you think other people's tracks sound "richer and fuller" than yours, maybe you aren't using saturation in a more clever way (using it track by track tastefully, letting it adding without making a mess of everything), that will be the first of many steps. Maybe your need to do more sound layering to get to a fuller sound... there are plenty of reasons but we cannot tell without listening to it first.

Cheers!

 

This is actually a pretty common issue that everyone goes through, because none of this is really obvious until it finally clicks. Actually, explaining it is just as hard, because it's one of those things that aren't just one single reason but actually a shit ton of them in sequence.

Here are some reasons that can help:

• Clip or limit individual channels. This one is huge. Contrary to how it immediately seems, those two things are immensely beneficial to the stereo master if used in moderation. Clipping a db or two is mostly transparent, and if you need more, limiting can be very transparent as well. Compression is usually necessary for loudness, but it's simply not good enough to pull down very peaky transients.
• Try more than one limiter in the master bus. This one is not immediately obvious, but using two (or maybe even three) limiters helps a lot of getting that final loudness. I actually like using Master Plan and smart:Limit in series, this way I can push up to -7 LUFS with almost no distortion.
• Go easy on oversampling. Probably controversial, but oversampling is not as important in individual tracks as other people make it seem. Oversampling is not a catch-all solution for aliasing, and sometimes, it's the reason why you start to lose life in the track. There are plugins such as TDR Ultrasonic that will clean up oversampling artifacts, and that helps a lot of keeping everything clean.
• Don't aim for -14 LUFS, actually go higher. You should be more concerned about the dynamic range, and not the actual LUFS of the track. Some limiters such as smart:Limit will actually tell you how dynamic your track is. If it's very dynamic, you can afford to keep pushing the limiter for more loudness at the expense of that extra dynamic range. Depending on the genre, you can afford to be at 10 to 14db of dynamic range, and pretty fucking loud already.
• Lastly, also contrary to common belief, limited tracks do not look "clipped" until it gets VERY limited. At that point, they start looking squared. I attached a screenshot of a -14 LUFS track I did just recently. It was limited up until -8 or -9 LUFS, if I recall correctly, and then adjusted for loudness automatically by the DAW to be at -14 LUFS like it would be on YouTube or any other streaming platform. I don't recommend doing this to put your music online, because the services will already do it for you, I do that to generate previews for clients. You can clearly see that it sounds loud as any other song despite not looking squared at all.