[00:00] Hey everyone, this is Oscar from Underdog and let's play two little games. The first game is, can you tell me what's wrong with this sound?
[00:12] Let's listen to that again. Can you tell me what's wrong with that sound? I don't know how you're watching this YouTube video, so your monitoring situation might influence how you're seeing this sound,
[00:26] but I'm going to bring up one of the most useful analysis tools to understand with your eyes what your ears are hearing. And that's called an oscilloscope. There's a free oscilloscope called Smexoscope in which you can see what's going on with this sound.
[00:39] And I'll look at this sound. Okay, what do we notice? We notice an incredibly, incredibly spiky transient on the start of this kick drum. The conclusion that we're going to take from this is that this spiky peak,
[00:52] this transient is going to trigger a limiter later on in the signal chain. And that limiter is going to have to work really hard before it's even going to be able to touch the body of the sound. So another way of saying this might be that the dynamic range of this sound
[01:08] is not well managed. And so this is going to stop us later on from getting a loud mix. We'll come back to what a loud mix means in a second. But let's play game number two, which of these sounds is louder? Is it this one?
[01:22] Or is it this one? I'm going to play them both again. First this one and now this one.
[01:34] Which of these is louder? Do you know? Well, the answer is that technically in some way, they're both equally loud because on the meter, if you look at the first one, it's peeking right here.
[01:46] And the second one is peeking right here at exactly the same peak decibels. So why does one sound so much louder than the other one? Well, if we look at the other analysis tool that we've got,
[01:58] which is called the spectrum analyzer, right? There we see all the frequencies of the sound. And what we notice is that the second sound is way more distorted, which means that it has way more high frequencies or high mid frequencies.
[02:12] And our ears don't hear all frequencies as equally loud, we're more sensitive to high mid frequencies. So two signals, which are equally loud, but one contains more low frequencies and one contains more high mid frequencies.
[02:26] We're going to say that the high mid frequencies one is louder. And often that might mean that we say that it's better. So we have to keep this in mind as the second rule in that if we want our song to sound loud,
[02:38] we're going to have to make sure it has an appropriate amount of high mid frequencies. And now that you've played these games with me, let me talk for a moment about mixing loud. So you're probably aware that when you're making electronic music, you can think of the creation of your sounds.
[02:52] Then at some point you have to think about the mix down of your sounds and then at some point of the mastering of your sounds, right? And these are three individual stages that are usually in a professional music industry often handled by different people.
[03:07] However, especially in electronic music, more and more, these jobs all come down to one person who is the sole creator of the music. So it's very helpful for you to understand a little bit the mixing concepts
[03:20] and the mastering concepts so that you can when you create your sounds already have an impression of what it's going to sound like at the end. And maybe if you get good enough at mixing and mastering, you don't even need to outsource this stuff. Now, a lot of people, they make a lot of poor decisions along the production
[03:36] and mixing journey. And then they say, now just needs to be mastered. And then the mastering engineer is going to save me, right? And to some extent, the mastering engineer can do that. If they're very clever and skilled,
[03:49] however, in a perfect world, what the mastering engineer has to do is actually nothing, almost nothing, right? Because the mix is already so good and so loud and so dynamic and punchy and bright
[04:01] that the mastering engineer just has to put their stamp on it and say it's good to go. So in the early stages of making your own music, think of the mastering chain as just a limiter at the end and of an equalizer at the end.
[04:13] And neither of these are supposed to do anything dramatic. Sometimes they can just make a small correction in either and that limiter should be working a tiny little bits, but not much. And so that's where you have to come back to your mixed down stage and look at
[04:26] the treatment of your individual elements and how they mix together. So that those mastering plugins, the equalizer and the limiter, have to do almost nothing. And so whenever you're looking at individual elements in this mix down,
[04:39] you have to think of the two lessons that we learned today. First of all, is the dynamic range of this element under control? The kick drum that we showed had most of its sound down really quiet and then this incredibly spiky transient.
[04:52] So if you send this into that master limiter, the master limiter is going to have to limit 10 decibels or something before they can even start compressing the kick a little bit. So a better approach there would be to find a way
[05:05] to already compress or limit the kick at the source stage. And then the second dimension is the frequency spectrum, right? And if you just make sure that your sounds are not all too muffled, that some of them are quite bright and have a lot of upper mid range frequencies
[05:20] and that they're quite prominent in the mix, then together with the first part, which was the dynamic range. If everything has a good controlled dynamic range, and if everything has relatively bright frequencies,
[05:32] well, then now you're already looking at a mix down. That's quite bright, punchy is not out of control in terms of dynamics. It's not out of balance in terms of frequencies. And then the mastering equalizer can only do some tiny little movements.
[05:48] And the mastering limiter can just shave off two or three decibels at the loudest point. And then your song is going to sound punchy and impactful. And those are the basic concepts of mixing loud. If some of this was a bit fast for you
[06:00] and if the terminology was not so clear, then do check out my foundations of electronic music course where I go step by step through everything in a much slower and more comprehensive way over the course of a few weeks.
[06:12] Other relevant videos on this topic are here and here. Come say hi to us on our Discord channel. Like the video and subscribe to help me with the algorithm. Leave a comment below to show me some love. And until next time, stay producing, be good to another and take care.
[06:27] Bye bye. Bye bye.