Quote:
Originally Posted by KevWind
As far as normalizing multiple songs, as already stated your ear ,or better yet a pro mastering engineers ears is still the best bet . For home mastering, there are of course several brick wall type look ahead Mastering plugins that if not abused can help bring the level up and still prevent clipping ( going over 0db )
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That's different than "normalizing" or just setting the levels to the natural maximum, bring the highest peak up to 0 db. Now you're talking about deliberating reducing the dynamic range in some way so you can raise the overall listener-perceived volume of the track. That's basically a part of the mastering process, and if you're self-mastering, you may want to do this - but with acoustic guitar, a little goes a long way. Overdo it by even a hair and you'll hear it, and people will be saying "wow, listen to that compression" instead of "listen to that great music". There are lots of situations to deal with here - for example, you might have a track that peaks out quite low, -10db, say, and somewhere there's a single spike that goes to 0 db, a string squeek, a click, percussive hit, etc. If you "normalize" that, nothing's going to change because the loudest peak is already 0 db, but overall the recording is soft. So you have to do something to reduce that peak before you can do much. A limiter is one option, manual editing is another.
I think the important thing is to not get obsessed with "louder", that's the current volume wars mindset, and a maxed out, heavily compressed track might work for heavy metal, it's not going to sound attractive on an acoustic track - certainly not solo guitar. Keep the levels at a nice moderate range until you get to the mastering stage (even if it's you who will be acting as the mastering engineer), and don't worry about them. If you're doing a single track, like a you tube video, when you get to the final stage, put your mastering hat on and work on making the levels appropriate for release. If you're doing a CD, you want to listen to the levels in context with all the other tunes, not just pushing each individual track to max volume.