sound Archives - Aaron J. Trumm

Turn It Down, Sonny!

March 15, 2021 by Aaron

Audio Instruction, Instructional Stuff, Published Work, Recording Magazine

audio volume, home recording, listening level, nquit music, recording magazine, sound, turn it down sonny

Listening at the right volume levels

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

I’m 42 (45 now but I think I’ll stop updating this) years old, and although that’s not old, I admit to being a little crotchety (aka sensical) about certain things. Listening level is one of them. Turn it down! You’re too loud! Get off my lawn!

It’s a topic oft-covered, especially if you read or take a course about mixing, but it bears repeating, since we’ve been talking about monitors and acoustics this month. The question is, how loud is too loud, and why? After all, aren’t listeners generally listening to the final product loudly?

Well, actually no. Not as loud as you. And if you watch life go by, you’ll notice a whole lot of music being played at low levels so that people can still talk to each other, so your mix needs to sound good at that level.

Partially to that end, it’s common (and good) advice to mix at a low enough level that you can still hold a conversation. Said with numbers, that might be around 75-80db in a small room, and maybe about 85db in a larger control room (ie: sitting farther back). There are actually several reasons for this:

Fatigue. Your ears and also your whole body tire quickly when listening at high volumes. Your length of session and effectiveness thus decreases. Bad decisions get made earlier.
Long term hearing damage. You want your hearing to stay with you as long as possible. Very loud listening is damaging over time. We tend to lose high frequencies as we age anyway. You don’t need to speed this process up.
SHORT term hearing damage. Listen loud enough, and you could actually damage your hearing NOW. That’s hard to fix, and it can cut your musical career short.
The Fletcher-Munson curve. Basically, this curve describes a phenomenon of human hearing where perceived loudness changes per frequency as volume changes. That means that the balance of a mix sounds different at different volumes. In practice what this ACTUALLY means is that if you achieve good balance at a low to moderate volume, your mix will continue to sound balanced as it’s turned up, but the reverse is not true. If you achieve balance at a high volume, your mix will tend to fall apart at lower volumes.
Monitors can be damaged at very high volumes. This is expensive and time consuming.

Now you do need to check at various levels. Personally, I mix mostly at a low volume, one where I can still converse. Early on, I crank it up for very short periods of time to get the subwoofer pushing so I can really understand what’s happening with the bass. It IS actually easier to hear problems with low end mud at a higher level. Then I turn it down again. Late in the mix, I turn it up again for a short bit to check for harshness that would annoy or hurt a listener who wants to crank it up (this often appears somewhere between 2 and 5k). Then I turn it down again. Then at the end, I listen loud once through the whole song, just to get happy and have fun.

Of course mixing isn’t the only place where this comes into play, and I get even more persnickety in a live scenario. Guitarists, I love you, but turn your amps down. Yes, as your amp gets cranked up, it has a moderately different tonal character. However, that character difference isn’t worth the sacrifice in mix quality in a room that’s properly manned by a front of house engineer. If you turn it down, she can control it in the mix, make your vocal shine, give each player exactly what they need in their monitors, and actually make your band sound good. Otherwise everyone keeps saying “I can’t hear the vocal! Where are we in the song?”, and your audience thinks you’re mediocre, which is wrong, because you REALLY ROCK. Right? Turning your guitar amps down is the number one way you can help the sound person help you.

Ok, now that you’re off my lawn, I will admit that cranking a great tune is about the quickest way I know to get to musical euphoria, so I get it if you want to give it a crank every once in a while. I do. Every mix, at the end, when I’m done making decisions, and often in the car. But as a professional who relies on his ears, I keep it below the pain threshold – ALWAYS. And when I’m working, I’m working, so I keep it where it needs to be for me to make the best decisions, achieve the most sonic control, and have the most energy at the end of the day. I also take earplugs with me everywhere just in case, especially for concerts, which are pretty much always too loud.

Thanks for reading. I’ll go back outside to my rocking chair now.

If you want to talk to me about this – well find me on Facebook @AaronJTrumm! 🙂

Valhalla DSP – Good Stuff, Man

May 14, 2020 by Aaron

Reviews

aaron j. trumm, audio, audio effects, audio plugins, delay, effects plugins, freq echo, freqecho, modulation, music production, nquit music, reverb, sound, space modulator, valhalla dsp, vintageverb

If you’ve followed me for long, you know I don’t often write reviews on my personal blog (I do it all the time for writing clients).

But, as I’ve grown my business both in music and in writing, I have occasionally come across really cool things which are also made by really cool companies. Sometimes (and this is new), I’ve even sought out an actual sponsorship relationship with them.

So today I thought I’d just quickly let you know about Valhalla DSP. They make effects plugins which are super cool, great sounding, and supremely easy to use.

Disclaimer And Background

The disclaimer – in this case, I do not have any kind of official sponsorship relationship with Valhalla DSP as of this writing.

However, they did very generously provide me with a license to their most popular product (Valhalla VintageVerb), when I was writing an article called the 5 Best Reverb Plugins Compared for Soundfly’s FlyPaper blog.

They also were kind enough find an old account I had never touched point out the other products I already licenses to, and attach Valhalla VintageVerb to that. All in response to me simply asking if they had any demos, because I was writing an article.

This may seem normal, or inconsequential – but it is NOT. This kind of friendly, helpful response to a fellow professional is rare, and when companies are great with me, I want to be great back. So, I’m writing this as a way to give an extra thank you to Valhalla.

Love At First Hearing

I was already going to write something, because I love being treated well, but then I happened to actually start USING my Valhalla plugins, and after about a session and a half, I found myself inserting Valhalla effects pretty much as a default.

“Ok I need to play with a reverb here…” *mindlessly opens Valhalla VintageVerb*

“Hmm how bout a delay?” *Inserts Valhalla FreqEcho before realizing it*

“What if…” *Valhalla SpaceModulator* “….oh..yeah…that!”

Great Sounding, Easy And Fast

The thing that makes me gravitate toward these plugins is they’re so easy, yet they sound really good. It’s not a hundred years before I find the basic sound I’m looking for. It’s – click click ah ha!

With simple interfaces and controls, it’s easy to find a preset, tweak a preset, and get a sound, and the thing always sounds great. Plus they load quickly and they have yet to jitter, drop, or crash.

And this is working with them in COVID-19 isolation on my laptop, not my monster studio desktop. (Granted, this laptop is no joke – but it’s not a full-on production machine.)

I’ve been able to quickly dial up long tail reverbs, short ambient rooms, shimmering modulation, and super important – a nice stereo vocal delay effect that I used to have to spend three times as long dialing up on another delay. I use that kind of short delay a LOT of vocals, and FreqEcho just saved me a LOT of time.

Affordable AF

Oh – and these things are affordable as hell. FreqEcho and SpaceModulator are freeish (their word – they’re free with purchase), and VintageVerb is a mere $50.

That’s sort of amazing.

That’s It, Go Try These Guys

That’s it, y’all. For now. I just wanted to sing these guys’ praises because I’m impressed. Maybe I’ll have more to say later, but for now, just go try Valhalla DSP. I recommend them!