What LUFS do you aim for

[Gold]

Paul clearly stated he doesn't ever use compression for volume/level.

There is a difference between volume and level. I know you know this. Level is a technical measurement while volume is perceived loudness. A LUFS meter is trying to display both. Louder is always better until it's not. If you have two identical mixes and one is slightly louder the louder one will be perceived as better. It's a perfectly natural human response. Getting things loud has always been an objective in mastering. In the early days it was to get the audio above the noise floor. Now it's just a competitive advantage.

A good mastering exercise is to take a mix and raise it until it's at maximum level before clipping. Then try to get it 6dB louder without changing the sound.

 

[scott2000]

Interesting presentation from FabFilter if it hasn't been mentioned already..

 

[ruffrecords]

Thanks for those links. Very informative.

Cheers

ian

 

[audiosway]

I never paid much attention to LUFS, but the latest version of Audacity includes a LUFS normalisation tool which will set the LUFS of your track to any value you like. So I have been playing around with a few values and I wondered what values folk typically use. I quite like -11dB.

Cheers

Ian

It really depends for me on the genre. Normally, I'll shoot for -14 LUFS on the mix itself. As for mastering I've noticed that my Hard Rock mixes tend to get mastered around -8 to -10 LUFS. Folk or Country will go to around -10 to -11. Same with Indie music -10 to -11. It also depends on who masters it as well.

That said, if I get a mix that sounds really good and it's sitting at -8 or -10 I will print it there and let the mastering person take it the rest of the way. I don't think there are any hard fast rules with mixing. I use a lot of staged compression and parallel compression. That's how I'm able to get hot and clean mixes.