[Csnd] How to ballance the csound tracks by volume

Date	2013-07-04 16:25
From	Anton Kholomiov
Subject	[Csnd] How to ballance the csound tracks by volume
	How do you balance your compositions? Are there some standard strategies? When I'm doing smth with csound I try to keep the things from overblowing. But the average volume is always too low. When I hear some real world recordings the average volume is always the same. So when one track stops and another one starts I don't have to find the right volume for the speakers. Volume is the same for all tracks. But I can not reproduce it with my csound compositions. I start with one volume and gradually it goes to some another level. Anton

Date	2013-07-04 18:19
From	Michael Gogins
Subject	Re: [Csnd] How to ballance the csound tracks by volume
	You have raised a complicated question. Mastering engineers are the people who are responsible for what you hear on "real world recordings." To understand what they do, read the book Mastering Audio by Bob Katz, a real-world mastering engineer. To over-simplify, your question has (at least) two answers. First, you need to balance the perceived loudness of one track with the perceived loudness of another track. You can achieve a first approximation of this by "normalizing" the soundfiles with sox or an audio editor so that the "peak amplitude" of each track is about 3 decibels lower than full scale. In real-world mastering, this balancing is one of the most important tasks of the mastering engineer and is more subtle than just normalizing everything the same way, because different pieces have different loudness profiles. Second, you need to ensure that the overall dynamic range of your tracks is suitable. Most "real world" music is highly compressed (sometimes to as little as 6 dB) so that it can be heard easily even in noisy environments like a moving car. Most "art music" is not very highly compressed (often the range is as much as 40 or more dB) and if you listen to it in a car, you will keep turning the volume up when the sound gets quiet and turning the volume down when the sound gets loud. All music is compressed to some extent -- the ear is hearing a dynamic range of 50 to 60 dB in a normal environment, and music with the same range would be hard to hear in that kind of environment and impossible to hear in harsher environments. Dynamic range is done using compression in "real world" studios, but this is not necessarily the best approach with computer music, because we have far more control over the actual loudnesses and relative loudnesses of the sounds. I think it is better to adjust the loudnesses of each individual sound in your pieces to achieve the dynamic range you need. That is what performers of purely acoustic music do on stage. However, Csound has compression opcodes (more than one actually) and I use them at times. But most times, I generate my scores using CsoundAC. The CsoundAC Score object has methods for rescaling notes on a variety of parameters, and I use this for rescaling the dynamic range of the notes, usually to about 9 to 24 dB. This does most of the work of a compressor without in any way affecting the internal timbres of the sounds. I suppose there is a third aspect -- the dynamic range of one track in an album needs to fit with the dynamic range of the other tracks. Not "be the same as," but "fit." Again this is a subtle matter and one of the main tasks of the mastering engineer. Hope this helps, Mike =========================== Michael Gogins Irreducible Productions http://michaelgogins.tumblr.com Michael dot Gogins at gmail dot com On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 11:25 AM, Anton Kholomiov <anton.kholomiov@gmail.com> wrote: How do you balance your compositions? Are there some standard strategies? When I'm doing smth with csound I try to keep the things from overblowing. But the average volume is always too low. When I hear some real world recordings the average volume is always the same. So when one track stops and another one starts I don't have to find the right volume for the speakers. Volume is the same for all tracks. But I can not reproduce it with my csound compositions. I start with one volume and gradually it goes to some another level. Anton

Date	2013-07-04 19:38
From	zappfinger
Subject	[Csnd] Re: How to ballance the csound tracks by volume
	In pop music a common mastering scheme is to apply overall compression and overall (slight) reverb on the mix.. Richard -- View this message in context: http://csound.1045644.n5.nabble.com/How-to-ballance-the-csound-tracks-by-volume-tp5725190p5725197.html Sent from the Csound - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.