Mastering for Spotify

How do you get loud masters on Spotify?

Step 1: Mastering

Spotify—and other streaming services—will apply loudness normalization to your track. To sound louder, you’ll need clear transients. Instead of compressors and limiters, use clippers to preserve your transients.

Step 2: Music composition

When an orchestra plays a piece, people at the back need to be able to hear the melody. To achieve this, composers will layer their melodies—in unison or octaves—and they’ll make sure each melody is played in an octave range that works well for the orchestra.

You can use these tips to sound louder:

• Layer your instruments (in unison or octaves).

• Use clear octave ranges (higher octaves have more perceived loudness than lower ones).

• Choose instruments with a clear timbre.

• Use chord voicings that sound clear.

• Use fewer notes in the low end, and more notes in the high end.

Volume faders are a great tool to bring up your mid-range frequencies. Use your faders to bring up vocals, lower your kick, and lower your sub-bass. Be careful with excessive bass and treble since they reduce perceived loudness. Bring up the instruments in the C5-C6 range.

Step 3: The mixing workflow

Follow these steps:

1. Listen to a reference track (the idea is not to recreate it, but to calibrate your ears).

2. Use your faders to balance your track. Turn up your vocals, turn down your kick. Turn up your melody, turn down your bass.

3. Export your master and upload it to Loudness Penalty: Analyzer to hear how it sounds on Spotify.

4. Compare it to your reference track.

5. Repeat until you’re satisfied.

When your master sounds loud on Spotify, you may use plugins. High-pass and low-pass filters can be used from the beginning.

That’s how you get louder masters on Spotify.

How to use semicolons

Read this to learn how to utilize semicolons.

Semicolons connect independent clauses together. An independent clause can stand alone: ‘I am interested in music’, but a dependent or subordinate clause cannot: ‘because I like the way it makes me feel’. A sentence must consist of at least one independent clause, and may include additional dependent clauses (or tags, phrases, etc.).

If they are related, independent clauses can be linked using a coordinating conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so): ‘I am interested in music, but I do not like philosophy’. Use a semicolon and omit the conjunction when there exists a parallelism, contrast, or to speed up the pace between the independent clauses: ‘I am interested in music; I do not like philosophy’.

Semicolons can be used before conjunctive adverbs (however, therefore, meanwhile, etc.) when they connect two full clauses; full stops can be used as well, and a comma comes right after the conjunctive adverb: ‘I am interested in music; however, I do not like philosophy’.

When a list includes items that use a comma, a semicolon should be used to differentiate the list items: ‘I have lived in Brussels, Belgium; Paris, France; and Berlin, Germany’.

The Battle of Hastings

In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England with an army to claim the crown he believed was rightfully his. The English king, Harold Godwinson, had defeated the Vikings in the north, near York, when he heard of the invasion, and together with his army moved south towards the Normans by an astonishing distance of about 200 miles (320 km). When he arrived, it was clear that the Norman army, with its many archers and cavalry, was a serious threat. Although they remained strong, the English were eventually defeated, and England was forever altered; the aristocracy became French-speaking, and the language was influenced significantly.

Writing

Writing is the secret to business – or maybe communication is – yet there is little appreciation for it. Designers, marketers, and engineers get all the love, but writing is not respected. Instead of using persuasive copy – that can barely be called writing – why not change the world? Why not change lives? Why not make an impact? Yet here we are: trying to steal a penny from the reader's purse. How much better it is to write kindly than to be an antagonist to your reader.