Grass Audio Studio, Munich (2025)

13/11/2025

DON'T GET LOST IN THE MIX Part II.

Efficiency is Key

Another great way to avoid getting lost in the mix is to set a timer. Do this for each instrument and vocal track or group. Set a time limit for yourself that you'll use to mix those tracks or groups. After that time, move on to the next track or group. This helps you avoid getting lost in mixing for hours and allows you to make decisions more quickly.

Stand by your mixing decisions and don't keep changing them, even if some seem odd or you're not sure if "you're allowed to do it that way." Trust your gut. Sometimes the best mixes come from the wildest ideas.

Organization and Folder Structure

To keep track of your projects, it's worth implementing a consistent structure and naming convention. Ultimately, the structure reflects your workflow. For example, if you're creating a beat and then exporting your tracks for mixing and mastering, you can structure your folders in exactly the same way.

Use the project name, including key and BPM, as the main folder—this is also recommended for naming the session—and create subfolders for the composition and mix masters. Then create another folder for the exports, where you'll store your masters. The audio files themselves should also follow a consistent naming convention, such as "Instrument_ProjectName_BPM_Key".

Once you've internalized this system, you'll always be able to keep track of everything and quickly find specific files.

12/11/2025

DON'T GET LOST IN THE MIX Part II.

- Listening Volume

Besides a healthy work-break mentality, the listening volume plays a crucial role. It's recommended to always listen at a constant level. This level should be a specific volume, because our hearing is differently sensitive to frequencies at different volumes (see Fletcher-Munson curves, also known as "curves of equal loudness").

- Hearing Fatigue

Everyone has probably experienced this: We listen to our favorite music and after a while, we get used to the volume. What do we do? We turn it up.

The longer we listen, the more we feel the need to turn it up. If we then take a short break and continue listening to the music, we're briefly startled: "Whoa, that's loud!" Yes, unfortunately, our hearing tires very quickly, and we then want to get more input by turning up the volume.

Mixing is a real problem. We're constantly fighting against our own hearing. After a while, we unfortunately stop hearing the details. We make mixing mistakes. Small EQ adjustments sound the same. We tend to crank the EQ up too high.

- Recording, Mixing, Mastering – The Right Monitoring Volume for Every Situation

Mastered music is loud. Our unfinished mix is quieter. Individual instruments that we solo are even quieter. Nevertheless, it's recommended to monitor everything at 80-87 dB SPL. This means we need the right position for our volume control in every situation.

We can also mark the position of the volume control so that when monitoring a single instrument, we can quickly adjust the volume to the correct position and thus hear that individual instrument at a sound pressure level of 80-87 dB SPL (monitoring volume, monitoring level). When listening to the entire song again, we turn the volume control down until the "mix position" is reached.
.. One more important thing: Don't adjust the volume on your computer. This reduces the resolution of your converter, which degrades the sound quality. And yes, you can hear it.

11/11/2025

DON'T GET LOST IN THE MIX Part I.

Everyone, including you, has been there: You've just started the mix, tweaking the vocals a bit, the drums a bit, and before you know it, 40 hours have passed and you're still not finished. Unfortunately, more time doesn't automatically mean a better result. Quite the opposite, in fact. The more time we spend on a mix, the greater the risk of overlooking mistakes and getting used to the "wrong" sound.

Mixing Sessions

The biggest problem is overly long mixing sessions. Your ears get fatigued after a while. This leads to poor sound choices and careless mistakes. Eventually, you lose sight of how your mix should sound to be good. Your ears get used to overly emphasized highs, just like they do to overly muddy guitars. Too much compression is no longer perceived as problematic, and your mix drowns in reverb.

To avoid this, you should always take breaks and let your ears rest. When you continue working on your mix after a break, you'll notice mistakes again and can correct them. It will also be easier to see your mix from a different perspective.

There's a rule of thumb for breaks while mixing. After 60 minutes of continuous mixing, take a 10-minute break. For 90 minutes of continuous mixing, it should ideally be 20 minutes. Mixing for longer than 90 minutes at a time is a no-go. Period.

This isn't just about your focus, but also about the health of your ears.

10/11/2025

The Eye Hears Too! The McGurk Effect.

Perhaps you've had the experience of adjusting an EQ parameter and then realizing you've been tweaking a completely different track than the one you were listening to solo. Yet, you thought you heard a change in the sound.

No: You only saw it and thought you heard it – the McGurk Effect!

In the age of digital technology, we always see what we're processing on the computer. We see EQ curves, volume levels, waveforms – and much more.

Many audio engineers use this visual support in their work. They adjust frequencies with the EQ while watching the graphical display. This is, of course, very helpful and can speed up the process. But: It can also happen that the visual impression influences the auditory impression.

Of course, I can easily prevent the negative consequences of the McGurk effect by being aware of it and ultimately consciously (and perhaps sometimes with my eyes closed) relying on my hearing.

Secondly, in my experience, this kind of deception also works with knowledge rather than sight: I've often experienced adjusting something on an EQ, for example, and thinking I could hear a change, even though I was actually manipulating a completely different track. In other words, my knowledge that I was adjusting something on an EQ led me to believe I could hear the change.

Conclusion: As in all areas, it's also important in audio production to be aware of one's own human weaknesses (which are often fascinating phenomena, as in this case). Because then I can work around them.

Not completely—to believe that would be presumptuous.

But sufficient for very good audio productions.

31/10/2025

The Magical -14 LUFS

Let's talk about the -14 iLUFS that's always in people's minds. Spotify also offers all its Premium users the choice of three different levels: Loud (-11 iLUFS), Normal (-14 iLUFS), and Quiet (-19 iLUFS). Around one-third of all customers use this service.

It's important to note that Spotify itself applies a limiter to a track below -11 iLUFS to reach this level.

So -14 LUFS may not be the right approach if Spotify is using your limiter.

In my experience, not much has changed in the loudness war since the introduction of volume normalization—the pursuit of ever louder tracks to drown out the competition. Everyone still wants loud tracks because it still feels better to listen to a heavily compressed track.

Conclusion:
Sure, we don't need -3 iLUFS, but -7 to -12 iLUFS remains the user-selected norm across many genres.

30/10/2025

Frequencies and their impact on LUFS

Different frequencies have different influences on loudness and the measured LUFS. Thinking back to the Fletcher Munson curves, it's the frequency ranges between 200 and 900 Hz, as well as 2 to 6 kHz, that our ears perceive most sensitively. Thanks to K-filtering, we can definitively say that frequencies below 100 Hz have little influence on loudness, as they are filtered out for evaluation.
Frequencies above 2 kHz are perceived most quickly as having a decisive presence, but at the same time, they also contribute the most to the LUFS evaluation.
Since DSPs don't evaluate instantaneously, but rather in an integrated manner, we need to pay particular attention to the loudness of individual song parts.

29/10/2025

Dynamics over Time

We know that a song's dynamics represent the difference between its quietest and loudest moments. In the context of LUFS, the Loudness Range (LRA) scale calculates the relationship between the loudest and quietest points using Loudness Units (LU).

To achieve a specific loudness, we inevitably need to use compressors and limiters. However, we can already make decisions about our loudness design here. If we want our chorus to stand out particularly strongly, we have to reduce the volume like the other parts to achieve the same iLUFS compared to a uniformly compressed song. Conversely, this also means that our verses will be perceived as comparatively quieter. The same applies to a heavily compressed song. In this case, the entire song's basic loudness appears louder, but it no longer has the opportunity to increase. So what should we do?

28/10/2025

What is LUFS?

LUFS stands for Loudness Units Relative to Full Scale. It's a unique way of measuring loudness for music and other audio signals, more closely aligned with actual listening than previous methods such as peak and RMS. One Loudness Unit (LU) is approximately 1 dB. Full Scale (FS) refers to 0 dBFS (decibels full scale), the highest level of sound in a digital audio system without distortion. Another term, LKFS (Loudness, K-weighted, Relative to Full Scale), is functionally identical to LUFS.

This also provides the first clue as to how the measurement differs from traditional RMS/peak. A "K-weighting" filter is added to the input signal. Essentially, this means a +4 dB high shelf for frequencies above 2 kHz and a low cut for frequencies below 100 Hz, with a slope of 12 dB per octave.

LUFS is measured in three different ways:

1. Instantaneous loudness (mLUFS): Measures the loudness over a short period of time, typically 400 milliseconds, with an additional 75% overlap to the previous measurement window.

2. Short-term loudness (sLUFS): Average loudness over a period of three seconds, based on the instantaneous loudness measurement.

3. Integrated loudness (iLUFS): Average loudness over the entire duration of the measurement, usually ignoring sections below a certain threshold. For this, the gates are set at -70 LUFS, and the second floating gate is set at -10 LU below the currently measured LUFS value.

27/10/2025

Somehow, when it comes to loudness and the right approach for streaming and all other formats, we all struggle to find a solution that everyone is happy with. Yes, the streaming services have all defined their levels for their volume normalization. No, that doesn't really help us if the tracks still seem to have different volume levels. Why is that? And which level is the right one? Let's start looking again.

Loudness vs. Loudness

Loudness and loudness are two different things. One defines the measured volume of the sound pressure level, whereas the other, in the context of music, describes the perceived loudness of a track. Let's go a step further and look at how our ears perceive the incoming sound. The aurally accurate loudness curves, also known as Fletcher-Munson curves, can be used to determine how large the difference in volume between different frequencies must be for us to perceive them as equally loud. To replicate this perception, we in the audio world have been working with LUFS since 2012.

To be continued :)

22/10/2025

One of my most important and oldest tools

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