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While watching movies on television, you can't have failed to notice that during commercial breaks the advertisements can be so loud that you have to leap up and grab the remote control to hastily turn down the volume.

Advertisers deliberately try to make their commercial as loud as possible, so that it leaps out compared to the ones that appear either side of it.

The same thing happens in the music world. Many independent musicians will also have listened in despair to their favourite artists' tracks on Myspace, and wondered why their own tracks sound only a fraction as loud.

In this tutorial we will show you how to get your track as loud as possible. We have included quite an in depth introduction here - click here if you just want to skip to the actual tutorial.

Introduction

Compression and limiting basics

The terms compression and limiting are often used interchangeably. However, although both use similar (sometimes identical) technology, they serve different functions, and it's quite common for both techniques to be used simultaneously on the same section of audio.

Compression is the art of controlling volume levels such that the subjectively loudest and quietest parts fall within a desired volume range. Although this is usually done in such a way as to sound natural, compression can also be deliberately abused to create a 'larger than life' sound, such as creating the impression of an elastic-sounding room ambience that responds to the playing of the instrument, like the classic 'big rock drums' sound.

Limiting, on the other hand, is the removal of undesirably loud, transient peaks not considered critical to the overall artistic impression of the music. Such peaks, when untamed, prevent you from recording the final signal at a 'loud' level and, at their worst, can physically damage sensitive equipment such as tweeters.

Although it might seem that both tasks could be performed with an advanced 'multi-knee' software compressor (which allows different points to be graphically placed on a threshold curve), in practice these two techniques usually require very different attack and release times, and unless a compressor has an acceptable in-built limiter function then two separate plug-ins are required.

Compressors can be hard to understand and even harder to master, especially since the results are very much dependant on the type of sound source that you're trying to control. The first walkthrough below is a quick guide to setting a compressor up correctly for a basic 'smoothing out' of overall volume levels, regardless of whether you're working on an entire mix, or just one element of it. The second demonstrates how to use EQ to work with compression rather than against it.

It's worth noting that the settings on any compressor are a matter of personal taste, requiring a great deal of experimentation, and that the precise behaviour of every compressor tends to be different and unique (which is why some people swear by certain plug-ins and dislike others). Remember that the goal of the exercise (in most cases) is to gain a good degree of automatic control over the volume levels without it sounding obvious to the listener that it's being achieved artificially.