Lunchtime Keynote—Alex Case: After the Loudness Wars - Get “Louder" without the Fader

Presenter:
Alex Case, University of Massachusetts Lowell - Lowell, MA, USA

Take this mixing challenge: place the faders at the lowest levels that make technical and musical sense. Try to make critical tracks easier to hear through more sophisticated means than simple fader rides. Turning it up is too easy and mucks up the rest of the mix. One loud track can make it harder to hear the other tracks in your mix. To get a track to rise up out of a crowded mix, leverage the strategic application of panning, ambience, reverb, compression, gating, EQ, distortion, and other unmasking effects. Tailoring non-fader properties of the sound to keep the track audible is more work and requires mastery of many subtle aspects of signal processing for mixing. However, resisting that urge to simply push up the fader means the other tracks won’t have to play catchup.