Volume is always kinda low

[robiby]

Hello,

I have a big problem I don't know how to fix: all my tracks are normally at low volume. That's because putting them at normal volume always leads to destortion...
I whatched some tutorials about mastering, using audacity for limiters and such, but the point is that I don't want to limit the kick, for example.
When I hear my music from my smartphone I can't hear any kick (I do hear snares quite loundly tho). And here I'm talking about Hydrogen "GMKit".

I just can't figure out how to deal with that... Is LMMS mixer exagerated? I mean, is it that the mixer is at red level, but there is no distortion yet?
How can I do?

Thanks in advance,
~DeRobyJ

[musikbear]

you can find a lot of help in mastering downmixing and aslike on youtube -f.i. this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA55hC4v6WA. I made a long time ago, but it still has some ok stuf, even though lmms has changed A LOT to the better since then. A LOT!!

[robiby]

Yea I use FX channels a lot. I didn't know that the Master can actually hit the red zone, I tended to avoid any hitting putting that on 30%.
As for the kicks, I'm trying to use some other sounds I have...
I'll reply again if I don't fix the problem with this. Thanks for the vid, tho!

[theguitarplayer]

imo, master volume should generally not leave 100 %. all mixing should be done with individual fx channels. That way you won't have trouble with "quietness". Anyhow, if it does get too quiet you can always use amps

[Sti-Jay]

Wowowow, mr guitarplayer. So little dynamic headroom... In many types of music (orchestral, passionate) you need to have dynamics.

Also robiby, is it a problem with the sounds being overall low? Then you can just turn up the volume on the cd player? Haven't you heard songs from 80's and earlier which really are very quiet? Low isn't necessary bad, actually, then you are guaranteed that the song is not clipping (can never be recovered) with overall low volume. Only time when a sausage waveform is needed is in a car or other placed with a lot of background noise.

Just keep on working with the mastering technique robiby. For professionals limiters or compressors on master is a big NO, but for us amateurs, it helps a lot. May I suggest using a compressor instead of a limiter on the master, it might solve the weakened kick. What I usually do is to handle the kick first, because it is so powerful. I add the c*compressor on it, set ratio to somewhere between 1.5 and 6, and lower the volume of the kick drum of course. Normal beginner error is to have too much volume on instruments you want to sound powerful. There are other ways to achieve the same effect.
And lastly, mixing is even more important than mastering. Mixing is editing the sounds in a smart way, e.g. remove high frequencies on the bass and low frequencies on the lead, then the song will sound better and you get less clipping.

[musikbear]

i have mentioned this before, and i depth, but one thing that is important is to avoid waves in non-audiable parts of the spectrum, especially if these waves resonances with each other. Even though the ear cant hear the sound, the overlapping resonance waves will distort the sounds. use eq's to filter these areas, ((and find sounds that are not building overlapping resonance -but thats quite difficult

[diiz]

Wowowow, mr guitarplayer. So little dynamic headroom... In many types of music (orchestral, passionate) you need to have dynamics.

You should remember that LMMS, like all modern DAWs, processes sounds in 32-bit floating point (ok, some real fancy ones may use 64bit). The 32-bit floating point format is interesting in that it contains headroom much beyond 0dBV (100% volume), in fact up to somewhere around +750dBV (+20dBV = 1000% volume, +40dBV = 10000% volume, etc... so you can calculate how insanely much headroom the 32bit float format allows).

Not only that, but the floating point format also allows lossless manipulation of signal volume - in both directions. In other words, not only headroom, it also has footroom to spare. I could go into the technical details as to why this is, but I imagine that would be a bit boring to most here...

So as long as the sound is in the end normalized to 0dBV (or a bit below if you intend to compress with mp3/ogg), it doesn't really matter how it got there - doesn't matter if the master is 100 or 50 or 25, as long as the end result is that the signal is normalized so that it doesn't go above 0dBV, then it's all good.