3 Tips To Make Your Mix & Master Appear Louder!

There are a few things that go into mastering, but one of the big things people try to accomplish with mastering is making the final product louder. The master is usually brought up in volume by using a limiter, but there are some things that can be done before it hits the limiter to make the track appear loud. These techniques will help the master seem louder than it is & they can trick the brain into perceiving something is louder, just by a few little tweaks. We can apply these tricks not only on the master, but on the mix as well. 

Balance The Low End

The low end in any track plays a big role in determining the final outcome of a mix including it’s
quality, headroom, & overall loudness. If we think about a bass or sub frequency versus a high end
frequency, the sub frequency will be larger in size, so because of that those frequencies will eat up
more headroom & take up more space in the mix.

Making sure the kick & bass are balanced will help a lot & also make sure neither one is overdoing it with the volume. It's tempting to crank the kick & bass, but if we listen critically to most professionally mixed or mainstream music, the kick & bass are not crazy loud & are well balanced. A big reason for that is because it will allow for more headroom & allow you to push the limiter even more; yielding in a louder master without those nasty artifacts like crackling, clipping, or hissing.

Mid/Side Processing

Mid/Side processing is a simple but effective tool. You can use M/S for EQing, compression, & even saturation. M/S will allow you to control the middle of the mix & the side of the mix separately.

One of the key things we can do with M/S processing to make the master appear louder is by accentuating the sides with more EQ, compression, & saturation. The sides of the mix will make the track wider & if we hear a nice wide mix, our ears will naturally perceive it to be louder than it really is. You can do things like add a high shelf EQ on just the sides by a few dB or by adding some saturation/distortion to the sides. Plugins like iZotope’s Ozone Exciter or FabFilter’s Saturn 2 will allow you to affect specific frequencies of just the mids or the sides if you want to. By pushing the sides a little bit more in the higher frequencies area than the mids, we can now make the master appear bother wider & louder. You can use these techniques throughout both the mix & master. 

We have a few videos on M/S processing that will show you how to get the most out of it.

Mid/Side Compression

Mid/Side EQ Explained

Use Saturation Or Distortion

Saturation & distortion is one of the best ways to make things appear louder than they are. These tools will excite the harmonics of an audio source which will add energy & drive to them. They can actually make a track appear louder without even affecting the output levels of your master channel.

Saturation & distortion can be applied throughout your mix as well as your master. When applying it on your master channel both M/S & multi-band saturation can be highly effective. We already spoke on M/S, but multi-band is just as useful. We usually use both on our master channel. Both Ozone Exciter or FabFilter’s Saturn 2 have multi-band functions inside of their plugins. This will allow you to apply different styles & amounts of saturation to specific frequency bands that you set. You can do things like adding a smooth saturation to your low-end frequencies at 10% while adding a more energetic bite of distortion at 30% to your high-end frequencies.

Our video on distorting your master channel goes over both M/S & multi-band saturation on your masters.

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