This is a question i see a lot on this sub. And while one can jump on the issue whether this is desiderable or not i'd just want to talk about how to achieve it in a way that beginners will understand. (So if there is something i didn't break down appropriately feel free to ask)
So how do you get your track loud?
The only tools you got to greatly improve loudness are a limiter, a soft clipper or saturation. While different devices can archive different results, especially how clean vs. distorted the result sounds they are all pretty similar and certainly no special magic. If it just were about cranking up the limiter and you are successful nobody would be asking this question.
Then what else is it?
While the limiter does the work it comes down to the mix how much work it can actually do. If you can't get your track as loud as you want it's usually because of problematic mixing. A lot of engineers use pink noise as a reference point for mixing (if you haven't load a pink noise sample and look at the spectrum). The main takeaway here is that the sound energy needs to be distributed across the whole audio spectrum. Simply put: if you open a spectrograph and look at it the shape should be pretty even across the whole spectrum and not big peaks with huge gaps in between.
People, but especially beginners, tend to do the "bathtub" EQ curve. Boost the lows and boost the highs and/or cut the mid range. This is usually due to the fact that it will sound subjectively better (it's psycho acoustics). But the trade-off is not only that you are not evenly distributing the sound energy anymore, you actually reducing the part where our hearing has the best perception.
Loudness sits in the mid-range!
More precisely around 1k -1.5k Hz. When you try this you might find that if you boost it heavily it will make some sounds pretty terrible. There are a lot of charts that tell you what frequencies are important for what type of instruments and while some of it goes out the window for electronic sounds a lot can still be carried over for similar sounds. And here comes mixing into play: having some (important) elements filling out this frequency space prominently (but not all) makes a track loud. So when designing e.g. your lead take this into account.
Something i want to mention though not necessarily recommend is the use of multi-band compression. Basically it will compensate for bad mixing but you will in return learn little from it; nevertheless it can be a useful tool.
This post has cut some corners, there can certainly be said a lot more about this. So if you have come across a good more in-depth explanation why not link it in a comment. I hope though that it has given some helpful general direction where to look and where to go if achieving a loud track is desired.
Submitted February 05, 2018 at 12:54AM by Violonc https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/7vc3lo/how_to_achieve_a_loud_track/?utm_source=ifttt