Standardize your monitoring level

One of the most common things I notice with people who are starting their journey with production and mixing is that the stuff they send me to listen to is all over the map loudness-wise.

One song will be at -20 LUFS — the next one might be at -8 LUFS — the next one somewhere else. It’s essentially random.

And I believe that the reason for this is that they haven’t learned yet how to listen to their works in progress in a consistent way.

So here’s a quick tutorial on how to do that!

1. Open up Spotify, or Apple Music, or whatever other streaming service you subscribe to.

2. Make sure that the “normalize volume” feature is turned off, so that you’re listening to everything at its mastered volume, not the quieter normalized volume.

3. Take half an hour and listen to some of your favorite music. Jump around between artists and genres, and play with the volume knob on your interface. The goal is to arrive at a listening volume that’s medium-loud — i.e., on the comfortable and non-fatiguing side of loud, a level you can listen at indefinitely.

4. Note exactly where your master listening volume knob is set at on your interface. I have a UAD system, so this is easy, because I can look in their Console app and it tells me the number. You might want to take a pencil and mark the setting of your volume knob on your interface, if it doesn’t have a precise digital readout to reference.

Going forward, when you’re working, mostly work at your nominal listening volume, and make sure that everything you’re working on is sitting at a consistent level perceptually from song to song. (Hint: the vocal is what specifically should sit at a consistent level from song to song, regardless of what the music is doing around it; this is how you balance bigger songs with quieter songs.)

Standardizing your monitoring practice is a simple trick, but it will make your work much more consistent!

Procedurally — jamie

ps some of you have sent me some lovely comments apropos of my 1-month anniversary post! Thank you. 🖤 And there have been a bunch of new subscribers, and some new paid supporters — thank you all so much too. I wanted to share this one comment I got, because it touches on exactly why I started this list. This is from our dear friend Chetan Tierra — a fearsome classical pianist and co-owner, with his wife Melissa, of San Diego Piano Academy: