Loudness Standards and more Updates

Calibration a studio, getting it ready for a mixing and mastering is essential because you want your final mix or master to be translated accurately across to different studios. Now a lot of that translation can be lost depending on the studio monitors that you're listening to on and the acoustics of the room. The s6 Studio at SAE is currently the best studio on campus for mixing and mastering so I try to get in there as often as I can, even for getting get vocals on the Avalon. Because the of the niche market that I'm trying to get into which is the underground hip hop scene, our reference tracks are usually tracks uploaded to SoundCloud and sometimes if the artist is established enough they have a re-mastered track for commercial use on YouTube, along with a video clip. For example, Lil Pump’s ‘Boss’, Produced by Diablo reached 31.3 million plays on SoundCloud, making it so popular that they made a video clip. I was late in discovering Lil Pumps unorthodox style of music but it’s grown on me.

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Both versions of the track are noticeably different. Since SoundCloud doesn’t conform to any loudness standard and YouTube does. You can hear the difference between the, what I like to call, the ‘polished’ YouTube video clip version and the ‘experimental’ mastered track uploaded on SoundCloud. I can appreciate both versions, each for their own characterises, the SoundCloud version appeals to the young, innocent side of my understandings in music production and the polished version appeals to my I guess you could say, more mature side of me, or the polished side of me.

This has encouraged me to keep experimenting and creating music as an underground producer and also keep heading on this path of being a polished audio engineer. I have to find that balance between, trappin, getting lit with my artists and also hustling with the academic side of things.

As I'm writing this blog, I also found on Lil Pump’s YouTube account, he has a polished version of Molly on YouTube as well. I would have to assume the Producers, Big Head & Ronny J released the raw super loud low-end version on SoundCloud and a polished version on YouTube exactly for that reason I feel. The polished version conforms to the loudness standards of YouTube is -14 LUFS, you can check out the in-depth article on this blog, (https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/76296773-mastering-audio-for-soundcloud-itunes-spotify-and-youtube)

Another thing that I just read is that SoundCloud transcodes your audio quality to 128kbps mp3, and to me, that is great news and bad news. I like the fact that the SoundCloud mix has its own characteristics of being a lossy but raw and authentic, in my opinion, this version appeals to me because it’s authentic, it’s real. The polished version is great for listening to on a loud and expensive system that you don’t want to blow your speakers on but right now, I'm not monitoring on studio monitors so I don’t care if listening to what the industry would call “bad audio quality”. There’s no right and wrong way to create music, you must know the rules before you break them, or, you must see the trends and learn the new underground, up and coming artists’ day in and day out and do your own research. I found that most of my time is caught up in analysing artist, studying their come up and also trying to work with my group of independent artists and creative practitioners.

Today (17th Aug) I mastered Simon’s Track to -14LUFS, to make sure he has a YouTube and Spotify master, but for Apple Music which it’s -16LUFS, so I or Simon, could master it for Apple Music if he wanted too. Simon also has a raw, mixed but unmastered version which is quite loud, from memory I think it was around -12 to -11 LUFS. Now that is a great mix for competing in the loudness wars on SoundCloud but where do you find a good balance and area of where u want your LUFS to be. I like to compare it to tracks that have reached the charts on SoundCloud, they’re obviously there for a reason. the SoundCloud

As for mastering for YouTube, according to this article (https://www.justmastering.com/article-mixingformp3.php) The highest definition of video equals the highest available quality audio which is currently 192kbps, the uploaded file should be lossless and is recommended to be at 48khz sample rate.

I will be going more in-depth into my production reflection and aesthetic choices for both of our tracks as well as our contracts and agreements, as well as creating a hypothetical budget for our work we’ve put in and also comparing the final product to industry standards.

Resources:

Masteringthemixcom. (2017). Mastering The Mix. Retrieved 18 August, 2017, from https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/76296773-mastering-audio-for-soundcloud-itunes-spotify-and-youtube

Justmasteringcom. (2017). Justmasteringcom. Retrieved 18 August, 2017, from https://www.justmastering.com/article-mixingformp3.php

Pro-tools-expertcom. (2017). Pro-tools-expertcom. Retrieved 18 August, 2017, from http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2016/9/6/video-mastering-using-lufs