Mixing & Mastering (The Importance of Sound Quality) :: Producer's 20/20 Vision

Hey, this is Wendy Day. I have one of my favorite producers with me. This is High Stakes.

Hello.

Awesome. Hi, High Stakes. How are you? Thank you.

Thank you. I'm pretty good.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm just— I'm so— first of all, I'm humbled that you're here. I'm honored that you're here. And this is such an important topic. It's a problem that I had with a client personally. In terms of his levels. We would listen to all of his songs on all of the platforms, and it seemed like the volume would be really low on Apple, so that when you play one song on Apple and then his song on Apple, it sounded like the volume went down. And we went through so many engineers to try to solve this problem. Our distributor was telling us we were crazy, they didn't hear it. Other mastering engineers didn't hear it. We heard it. So we knew it was very real. And you're here to kind of educate everybody on this.

Oh boy. I don't make that claim to want to educate anyone. I simply wanted to share information. Yes, because that's what I want you to do. A lot for the producer and artist community, a lot for the we live off of music community.

Correct. And just so you know, like, I instill in people that watch my videos, like, My focus is always, don't take everything I say as law, go and do the research on your own. Use this as a starting point.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So I encourage everybody to research what we're going to talk about today.

Sure. Um, I don't know if you'd like to start from somewhere or if you'd like me to give you just a quick rundown.

I would love you to give a quick rundown so that people understand exactly what we're talking about. Cause there's probably people at home right now going, what the? Fuck are they talking about?

Right. So the biggest thing that's happened recently, of course, is the shift from a physical product to streaming music. So when we give money, we get back not a physical product, but access pretty much to a, um, services catalog. And I'm not teaching anyone anything here, but what that has meant is that we now deliver a product to a distributor who was going to modify that product to their— when they distribute it to their client base. So where we would deliver a CD image and that image would be pressed onto the CD, it would be an exact copy of the final master that left the engineer. Now we get the final copy from the engineer, send it to Wendy Day, who either sends it to DistroKid or whoever, whatever platform, who's then gonna service it out to iTunes and the different streaming services. Each service that receives that file does their own little thing to it when they push it out to their consumers, to their clients, because we send a high-quality, high-resolution, large file that would be too difficult to play on cell phones and would consume too much data.

So that's because of bandwidth?

Absolutely.

Got it.

And if you look at Tidal, for instance, they do push out the larger bandwidth files, but you're paying for access to those files and you understand that your consumption of those files needs to make— needs to be appropriate for that type of file, you know, so when we want big large files we can get them, but on a day-to-day your average listener is getting a compressed file basically, and that compression can do certain things to our music that were not there originally, and in the fight to keep quality sound versus super super compressed sound, sometimes services will have to turn it down And there's also the loudness war going on where they want a uniform volume across the different songs in their catalog. So Josh Moe sends a song that's very quiet, somebody else sends a song that's very loud, they want them to be closer, be matched. But when they turn down the song, they're not recompressing the song, re-limiting the song, they're really just turning down the volume knob. So that's why you had the problem where iTunes turned down your client's knob because it was too loud for their catalog. And how they measure that loudness is not even all across the board. Each person does their own thing. They all play through their own compressed compression algorithm, and then they're measuring loudness in their catalog, throughout their catalog, in different ways.

Interesting. I know that when I upload a song to DistroKid, for example, I upload an MP3. When I upload to Stem, I upload a WAV file, which is, which is a fatter file. It's less compressed, I believe.

Absolutely. It's about 10 times the size. If you compare WAV to MP3 in general, it can be even a bigger discrepancy. If you get a very, very compressed MP3 file, let's say 128 kilobits versus 320, which is average, right?

128 is the average MP3.

Unfortunately, it is, because they want to get the most bandwidth, and I'm sure the cell phone companies are asking them, please iTunes, don't kill me, you're crushing me with these large MP3s, high-quality MP3s. So if you have poor service, your compression settings might be higher, you might get less quality if you don't request it on your phone, or sometimes if you don't pay extra for the high quality. Files, you get very, very compressed files. So it's twofold. We're getting compression applied to our masters, and our masters are being measured to match other songs, and those measurements are not subjective, whereas loudness, perceived loudness, can be subjective. You know what I mean?

Very subjective.

Where a hip-hop song with very big 808s eating up all the information, all the space in the low end where you got boom boom boom versus an acoustic track with a tiny tiny kick drum just for rhythm and all the energies in the guitar, that song can be squeezed a lot more than your 808s can be squeezed before they start to sound funny. So when compression is being applied to, let's say, classic country music, or let's just take a soft country song, it's not necessarily going to be as obvious with— when you compare it to a death metal song or a trap song with a lot of energy in the low end. The energy, where the energy is concentrated for that genre makes a difference, but iTunes doesn't care. It's if its requirements are -1 peak or -1 dB peak and 16 LUFS, they don't care that you're playing trap or hip-hop or R&B or country. So you can understand where it can get really tricky to match the energy levels.

It can.

In a hip-hop song with the energy levels of a classic rock song.

And that's real because we, we listen to music now by vibe, not by genre. So there may be a playlist that has a country song next to a rock song next to an EDM song next to a hip-hop song.

Absolutely. There's tons of playlists, and because our music, our genres are blending, we're getting lands also. So I'd say, like, for instance, I think if you compare, um, Latin trap music with Atlanta trap, you'll find that the Latin trap is mixed more like a pop song. Oh, and the Atlanta trap is going to be mixed like a strip club song where all the energy's in the loin. The Latin trap, the loin is a little more tamed. You know what I mean? So, um, Despacito, for instance, a couple years back we had Despacito, which was a huge hit and had 808s in the intro that you can barely hear on your regular small system because they know that the other songs are not going to be booming in the 808 in that genre. So if you're playing on Latin radio, you've got to fit in with that playlist. So yeah. Playlisting and the blending of genres is making it a little more tricky to find the sweet spot between where you want it to sound as loud and powerful as you intended, but also matches the playlist and won't mess it— won't need big changes to fit in. So you don't get turned down.

So you're, you're a producer who also engineers. Do you Do you offer different versions of the song for club or for radio or for streaming, or do you just engineer any cue for across the board?

It depends on the needs of the song. It's something that I do very, very, very little for outside projects, so the requirements, I typically set the requirements myself. Depending on the song, if I'm going to need to do a lot or if I know a lot's going to happen, because for instance, MP3 compression removes a lot of low-end information. And if I want to dominate the strip clubs, I'll probably create the MP3 file myself and mix while I'm listening through the codec. So the technology allows us to listen to the song on our computer as we're working on it as it will sound compressed as an MP3 file.

Got it.

So I can make decisions going in knowing that, okay, once it turns it into an MP3, this is how it's going to sound.

This is how it's going to sound.

And this is— So you plan ahead. You have to, you have no choice. And that's why, so knowing the hurdles down the line and planning ahead for them can help you cross them better. So if we're working with DistroKid and we get the choice of sending in the MP3, then we can prepare the right— set the parameters and use the right type of encoder. There's the LAME encoder that turns your WAV files into MP3. There's the Fraunhofer codec, you know, so you can listen to the differences of those between those. And iTunes doesn't use MP3, they use AAC, which is a completely different format but does the same job and sounds different.

So I think it's actually a little better sound if I remember my early studies that the— and for me, I just— it has a 4 in it and the file number, that's all I ever remember. I think it's M4A or something.

M4A, yeah. M4A is the AAC format iTunes uses, yes. It's a little bit better quality, but it's not just so much about the quality of the conversion itself, but so much more what that conversion will do. So when I'm working on the song, I was doing the song and I needed to know for that market if it was going to be played more on SoundCloud or YouTube, because if it's going to be more on SoundCloud, I can take more liberties and focus on like that. YouTube has different requirements, so I'm not going to make 20 different masters, but I'll pick—

you go crazy doing that.

Yeah, yeah, I'll pick So if we're more popular on SoundCloud, it makes more sense for me to be more stringent with myself with the SoundCloud requirements. Got it. And then if YouTube will penalize me, then fine. But where my core audience is—

But where your core audience is, you're covered.

Yeah.

So are all— I'm assuming that each streaming site is different, like Spotify is different than Apple is different than Tidal is different than YouTube is different than AudioMac is different than SoundCloud.

Exactly.

Got it. And that's why you focus on where your prime marketplace is.

Correct. Luckily we have tools. There's, um, one service, I think it's called Loudness Penalty. They offer the— there's a website where you can check your sound, your song. You can upload your song and it'll tell you this is what YouTube will do, this is what Spotify would do. So if anything jumps crazy, then you can work. Yeah. And there's also the plugin version which you can use while you're working on the song to make those adjustments.

Tell me the name again.

Loudness penalty. Loudness penalty. Yeah, I mean, um, it's, it's great for someone like you to use like that as a safety net when a client turns in a song. You can check it really quick and say, look, I need— we need this readjusted because they're going to turn it down and they might not understand this, but you can safeguard for that. But it won't be a technical service telling you, go do this and respect that measurement. It will just tell you, you're going to lose 3 dB on YouTube. You'll be fine with Spotify, but iTunes will eat 6 dB. So you're really going to sound lower than everybody else.

Very interesting. That's super helpful. So do you use reference tracks when you're— Yes.

Yes, so I go and I work my way back. What I do is I listen to, for the genre or the artist, whichever platform is where their core audience is. So it would be iTunes or Spotify. Let's say a lot of people, a lot of them are popular on Spotify, or let's say that their people listen to them more on Spotify. I'll just, I have references on Spotify. What songs sound good to me on Spotify? What are the songs that stand out in this genre? On Spotify. I have this, this, and this. Then I go to another website and buy the uncompressed version of that song.

Oh, you can do that?

Yes. Um, I think, uh, let's see if it'll let me— the website I use is, um, us.7digital.com.

You sent me a screenshot of it. Thank you very much.

My pleasure. You know, I have, uh, good mentors and I try to be prepared. So for instance, you can find— so if I'm trying to match Pop Smoke's energy in the drill genre, I'll listen to Pop Smoke and I'll pick out my favorite Pop Smoke songs on Spotify and see what they sound like on Spotify. Then I'll go to 7digital and get the loss uncompressed lossless file, and I can mix and reference those two files. I can mix my loss— my uncompressed version listening to Pop Smoke's uncompressed file, and then reference my compressed file to his.

That's brilliant. So you can tell by like how loud his 808s are, for example, in that song, and then you just match your 808s to that level so that you know what it's going to sound like when you put it up on Spotify.

Exactly. And because, so when you're producing, you can use equalizers and compressors, and you can use things, things that, that don't equalize and compress but create new frequencies like exciters. And I always prefer using exciters because they survive the MP3 conversion better than EQ. So if I boost the EQ to get a brighter top end or boost the EQ to get more energy in the low end, that might— I'll lose more of that in the compression. But if I use exciters and saturators, transformer emulators, to get that type of energy, it's more likely to stick when I go and convert to MP3.

Got it. So really streaming has changed the music, you know, and we all talk about how it's made making singles shorter. We talk about how the attention span is kind of reduced, so people are making 2.5-minute songs or 3-minute songs instead of making them for radio, which used to be, you know, 3.5 minutes. But it sounds like we also have to figure in the compression and how the song is going to sound on different platforms when we create the beat. —And creative.

Absolutely. Yeah. And if you're really— so if you're a producer and you're an outside composer, meaning you're not working with the artist intimately, you've got to really hit the nail on the head to get songs to them that don't come from their inner circle. Ralph Murphy talks about this. He calls it being a standalone writer. So when you're standalone and you're submitting material, it needs to be a very, very, very high quality. So if you're writing professionally and aiming to get hits, you're going to be noticing that the tempos are moving, the song lengths are getting shorter, the song structure is changing. We're not wasting time in the intro, we're going straight to the point. The hooks are coming faster and we're out because when we sold the CD, we cared about the sale. When we're selling streams, we want them to press Exactly. So instead of satiating the listener in 4 minutes, we give them 2 and a half minutes and they give us 3 listens for 4 minutes of content. Right. The song was funky and I want to keep hearing it more. I don't have a third verse, but I can play the first 2 verses again. Again, right. But for me, that's not one sale, that's 2 streams.

Exactly.

Double the money. Exactly. Which is more to begin with. Unfortunately, yeah.

So what else has changed recently are, are, um, and I, I realize that this is different for every genre because we, we tend to go in, um, waves with whatever's hip and whatever's, you know, new. I've noticed just recently that, um, lyrics are getting louder and, and I don't know if people mean to do this or if this is just a product of exactly what you and I are talking about. But one of my friends mixed a pop single and the lyrics were very low and the artist complained. He said, you know, my vocals aren't loud enough, they sound a little muffled. And I didn't really think anything of it because I don't really get to listen to raw music like this. I'm not never in the studio, but that day I happened to go to the studio And I was in— this was a pop artist that we had the issue with. And then I was in the studio with rap producers. And as I was listening in the studio, it struck me like, wow, all the vocals are really loud. It's almost like that's the new wave.

It's a function a little bit of what's going on now with so many parameters changing with the technical details. But it's also a function of how we make records, because a lot of time now, and some of your— a lot of big acts from Atlanta on the radio and in streaming world, they don't get the multitrack. They simply go off of the two-track that was sent to them by the— oh, by the producer, right, right. So to compete with that, you've got to make the vocals a little bit more powerful because you're you've got to make them sit within a track that's already pretty loud. So the vocal— so the loudness we're perceiving in the vocals is a reduction in the what we call dynamic range, the difference between the soft, the quiet parts, and the very, very loud parts. And to sound exciting, it needs to be right in your face. And because people are listening on earbuds and on their phones, it needs to be right in your face because because it's the digital product all the way to the phone being converted by the converters on the phone, which is— which are not high quality. Right. So unfortunately, the means of reproduction of the song are very, very— the last part that they thought about putting on the phone, you know what I mean? So the iPhone, they don't sell you an iPhone because it's gonna play songs very well, right? And they don't spend probably a lot of energy— well, I'm not going to say what they don't, what they do or don't do, but let's say it's probably not the first care for the phone engineers to put great converters for the music. And having to deal with all of that, we end up having to make choices and compromises and getting the vocals to sit and compete with the track that's already booming, you do have to push them a little more.

Interesting. Do we lose anything if we're using Bluetooth headphones as opposed to a headphone that plugs into our phone? Do we lose any quality through the airwaves, through Wi-Fi?

I want to say yes, but it's because there is, depending on, you know, I think now we're up to Bluetooth 5, if I'm not wrong. But if you have a first-generation Bluetooth device, the Bluetooth transmission also converts your music and you're probably going to lose some of the same stuff. Nowadays with Bluetooth 4 or 5, maybe less, and there's like device manufacturers, I really love FiiO, oh, I have it right here, I don't know if you can see. The little white thing is a Bluetooth receiver made by FiiO. Oh, okay. And it sits on the black thing, which is a headphone amplifier also made by FiiO. You can tell I love FiiO, right? Yes. Um, they make powerful devices for a prosumer level. They're not the most accurate, but they're not looking to be the most accurate. They're very, very convenient. So this lets me use, um, high-quality headphones with any Bluetooth device. My television's Bluetooth. I can get it, my headphones, and I get all the power from the amp and the reception from the receiver. Got it. But yes, to answer your question, I think we do lose something, but what we're losing when we've already lost so much with the MP3 is not so meaningful. Right.

You know, it's funny, I'm not a prosumer as much as I love music. I know that you are. But for me, when I listen to a CD or I listen to an MP3, I can't really hear the difference. It's very negligible to me. It doesn't hurt my experience. But some of my friends, like, they won't listen to MP3s. They, they, it's like for them, they won't stream on Spotify or Apple. They want Tidal because they want that experience. They want the, the, I guess it's a range that occurs. As best as they could describe it to me, the, you know, non-professional fan.

No, it's absolutely correct because the higher quality your gear, the higher quality files you need to really get the most out of that gear. So if I'm using high-quality headphones, high-quality converters, and I play an MP3, something's going to sound wrong. Oh, okay. There's not enough resolution to fill all the sonic space. Got it. And that's what you lose when you go from WAV to MP3. What they've done is essentially, um, so the ear is tuned for conversation intelligibility, the human ear. Yes. And all the information that is non-essential gets removed. So if you listen to a 128 kilobits MP3 versus a 326— uh, 320 kilobits MP3, you'll hear that the top end, the high end, is more clear, and the mid-range is more alive, and the bottom end is way more extended. So they go from the edges of human hearing and chop off until they get the smallest file they can. Right. That's why on the phone, you can just— if you're in the studio, you hear someone say, "Yo, put a telephone filter on my voice." Why it sounds like the telephone is because the telephone companies, to remove bandwidth, have reduced all the low frequencies and all the top frequencies. And just have the middle range. Because that's the critical part for intelligibility. Got it. So I can still understand what you're saying on the phone, but it doesn't have a lot of resolution. Whereas if I'm playing, if I'm having a conversation with you on Skype and it's open out next to me, it almost sounds as if you're in the room with me, right? It doesn't sound like you're on the phone because there's not as much compression going on, as much filtering going on.

I see. That also means, like, I know that when I send songs to DJs, they want the MP3 in— is it 396? 3— I think it's—

yeah, I think it's 396. It's 128, 256, and either 320. That's the highest resolution. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3, whatever it is. And it's because when they play it in the club, they need the highs and the lows and the middle range because it's so loud in the club.

Yeah, and it's just going to sound weak if you don't have that.

It does sound weak, and it can mean the difference between a DJ not playing your song in the club and a DJ giving you the chance to play, you know, for your song to be heard in the club because the format is correct for them. And I learned very early in my career to always ask people you know, in what format do you want to receive my music? Do you want it, you know, do you want a link to stream it? Do you want a link to download it? You know, do you want an MP3? Do you want a WAV? And a lot of DJs want the WAV and the high-end MP3 files because they're in the clubs.

Yeah, and I mean, it's— if I'm trying to demo my song to Clive Davis and catch him while he's in the elevator, but I know he has cassette decks in his office, I have to give him a cassette. If he has vinyl, I have to give him a record. If he's got a CD player, you know, so you— we've always had to mind the medium. And now that the medium is digital, more stuff is happening to it once it leaves our hands. It's not just a physical copy anymore. So they can modify it and, you know, they need to because people need to consume their music in a certain way. These companies have to store the music files in a certain way. And even on YouTube, if you're watching the high-quality version of the video, the music will probably be a little higher quality. But if you're watching on your phone, you don't need it to be that high quality. That high quality. Right. So they're going to try to save bandwidth by compressing your file.

I'm glad we mentioned this because it reminds me, you know, I'm a marketing person. I'm not a creative person. But when I listen to my clients' music, I listen to it in all the way that the consumers consume it. So when I get a new track, when you send me a song, I listen to it in my car, which is Harman Kardon speakers, which are higher-end speakers. I listen to it on my phone with Beats headphones, which is a very low quality— no disrespect to Beats, but it's a very low quality way to listen to music, even though it's how most people listen. I listen on my earbuds, my Apple earbuds, because a lot of people use them. And then I'll listen to music, like, in Tony's pickup truck, because he's got— he He doesn't have a souped-up stereo system. He has factory, you know, what comes with the pickup truck. And I want to hear the music the way that the fans are, because sometimes it just doesn't sound good. Like, I'll leave the studio, and I'll be like, yo, this is a hit record. This song is so amazing. And then I'll listen to it on my phone the next morning.

I'll be like, what happened to my song? Right. Right, right. And it's just, it's the quality. Yeah, it's a lot. It's the quality, it's the, um, and that's the thing, it's the subjective perception at the moment of conception. Yes. And that's why studios have sometimes 3, 4 sets of speakers. They've got what you call the mains, the big, large, loud ones, your near fields, your small ones, and very, very nerdy studios will have a tiny, tiny, tiny square cube called Auratones. They're speakers that are made to sound crappy so that you can hear what the song sounds like on average.

Not crappy speakers, average, right? Be real, that's what most people have, right?

Right, right. And you, like, um, if you're in the studio, you've seen the Yamaha NS10s with the white cone, and those are in every studio because when you place them on top of the console The angle of the console angling down and as an L in front of the engineer really flattens out the representation of the music of those speakers. But those speakers are hi-fi speakers. Yeah, they were not made for the studio, they were made for home use in your home system, you know, in a regular home system. But we tried them in the studio and found out we loved the problems that they let us hear and we kept using them.

Yes. When I was in the studio this week, I got a lesson in, I think it's Osberger speakers, which are amazing. So I had to keep running out to the car to check the song to make sure it wasn't— to make sure I wasn't being lulled into a false sense of security from the speakers. Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh, this is a hit record.

Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. No, it can happen.

Yes, it can. And once you hear it in that, in that fullest experience possible, it never sounds the same, you know. It's almost like if I could just hear it streaming on Spotify first, I would love it, but when I hear it on the Tannoy's or the Osbergers or the Yamaha's, it's like, it's like, oh my God, I don't want to listen to it streaming on my headphone anymore, you know. It ruined the song, it ruined the song.

Absolutely. And one, remember, one is a studio with 12-inch or 18-inch subwoofers, and you know what I mean? Like, it's just— it's a treated space made for listening, so there's no interference and you get to enjoy all of that.

Yes, but we can't carry that around in our pocket. You can't.

Um, and the trick is to have it sound great in the studio, have it inspire the artist and get a compelling performance out of them, and then turn that into something that will translate into every system. Right. That's the trick. But that goal gets a little bit more and more complicated because we have companies that are not music producers, but that, you know, sell music and are making money from streaming music and making your music available to the public. But also they have contingencies to live with. They've got, you know, cell phone data plans to, mind. And that adds another, another variable between the point A of listening to it on the big speakers and point Z of giving the consumer a pleasurable experience. Right. Makes sense.

Is there anything about this that I haven't asked you yet that I need to ask you? Did I leave anything out?

I don't know. Let me see. I think you've asked great questions. I'd say, well, those are not really questions you can ask, but it's kind of a mind frame to have because that's what really needs to change. Around the '90s, when we got really into digital music production using computers instead of hardware, we got rid of the hardware problems that they— the problems that came with hardware, but we also ran into the problems that digital mediums cause. So we have to mind what's happening with the digital format. And the '90s gave us a very aggressive loudness war because we were all competing to get our song as loud as possible within what could go on a CD. Right. So when we're producing cassettes and vinyl, you could get a little more aggressive and the cassette could take the saturation and compression and it wouldn't sound distorted. But with the CD, once it sounds distorted, it just sounds bad. So there's a ceiling, a digital ceiling with the CD that we're operating under. When I say CD, I really mean digital. So we have a digital wall, if you want, a ceiling. And we need to be under that ceiling. So we always, always try to get our stuff as loud as possible, but still under that ceiling. Because the digital ceiling, you can be a hair under the ceiling, but as long as you're not touching the ceiling, fine. So that made us very aggressive in digital processors to get the sound very, very loud. Right. And now we need to scale it back and get back into the mentality of not just getting it as loud as possible, but making it sound good. And now we can get a focus back on dynamic range and stereo field and technical things, but that really improve the quality of the song instead of just having a song that's as loud as possible. Because loudness is, um, subjective. So how loud something is depends on how loud the last thing you heard was, right? And if it's lower, you'll feel, well, this is not as loud, so it's probably just not loud, and louder sounds better. Loud can also mean distortion. Yeah, so I'd say just focus— the focus needs to go back on making stuff sound as good as possible, using the meters we have to get a sweet spot, but it'll never be perfect and untouched on any streamer. We know they're gonna touch it, but we want to minimize the obviously painful things that they could that could happen to our songs. Got it. Like I said, the biggest trick that I found to live with is to find— like, I keep a playlist of reference songs and I listen actively to Spotify and iTunes. So when something jumps out at me, I'll give you a couple. Like, um, Anime. Yes, they have a— can't— I can't remember the name of the song. Bad thing. Hey, you know the song I'm talking about. I was playing that song and the snares just jumped out at me in the car, so I was like, I gotta check this song out.

I gotta figure out why these snares are hitting.

Yeah, so I have a playlist of references that jump out at me when they're compressed. So those are the songs that I'll have the compressed version and I'll have the uncompressed version, and I use that as my reference. So, got it. Once I'm within the technical boundaries and I'm not offending them aggressively. I compare my song to my references and I can decide what I'm happy with.

Brilliant. This was so incredibly helpful, and the great thing is, like, I know nothing about compression, I know nothing about loudness reality or bitrates or sample rates, and you just, like, made this so that I could understand it.

Oh, I'm very happy I could do that.

I'm so happy too, because it's important and I wanted to understand.

Absolutely. I'm very happy to get the ball returned back because you've made such a big contribution to myself and I'm sure tons of other artists and producers. You've given us so much that it makes me happy to give anything back. Thank you so much. My pleasure. We'll talk soon. Absolutely.

Okay, love. Bye.