Loudness tend to come from music mixing; mastering doing the polishment for greatness. You have two stages: you deliver great LUFS about levels, also LU points bring different sound aspects across dynamics, while Dynamic Range brings instruments versus instruments about loudness between them. Sometimes a song reach -13 LUFS sounding way loud, since we have psychoacoustics as a premise, it means: the way your song is EQ in the end will or not make people feel louder or not, for this reason I bypass LUFS integrated or short-term a lot, being a consequence they being 'loud'. I simply check with my interface + studio speakers about how far the sound goes without distortion and about the % I moved the main interface's output knob.
#My music is "quiet"
rocky orbit
Beyond:
You should sweep what should be, EQ what should be, every piece of attitude should have a proper reason, even creatively done. If you exaggerate without needing you might suffocate the sound of an or more instruments, making them a lot thin, dull, bad. I recommend levelling things down, everything: playing everything together only, none processing, but at lower interface levels to slowly doing it louder, since will bring to you more perspective, after you see nothing is clipping about a junction, you start with faders only, after a good static-mix about faders, you start with EQ about needs, I tend to filter lows about noise etc... or what should be, you create space between instruments or merge them. What I mean? Or you simply make them fight about the same frequencies, or you create less fighting deciding who will have more or less frequencies about certain ranges. Compression I prefer not severe, like lower threshold and higher ratio, tends to decrease quality, only if the fx asks for. About limiting 2 limiters, even Fruity Limiter is ok, I always pass through some limiting to filter things 'slightly', then the second one to tame a little the peaks, I had a very great result about it and no, I don't use a lot of plug-ins, only the needed ones, sessions like the last one with 28 tracks peaking 28% of CPU usage (with ARC 3 by IK Multimedia) or 20% without it added.
About SPL I prefere quiet/moderate: I work online as engineer and can't do noise/my hearing is okay about low levels, then I work with and without emulations + studio headphones (low-levels too) + real TV.
It's up to you layering or not, what makes sense? Why? Which synths? Which drums elements? You should perceive the needs about your style/real needs. Separating everything should be okay? Maybe, but what about layering nice sounds together and they being beautifully working ?
Sorry if this answer you won't enjoy: but normally the final about a project occurs with a mastering person. I say normally, because you might mix your music and enough, but a mastering engineer might give proper directions.
understood.
It's just an advice: but production is not engineering...
A producer may be a manager (do this, record about this studio, hire these engineers); a producer may be a creator (EDM, beatmaking about rap etc...);
Engineers are technical people about certain aspects; while mixing person receive recordings and do a nice general main sounding signature, the mastering person analysis & tries to make all sounding okay across multiple systems, even meta-data for CDs with ddp (a protocol to press CDs).
Again, you may mix your song, but technically mastering is done about fresh analysis or if you mixed two or more songs and are aligning them.
The best option is a mentor/personal teacher. Then you follow the learnings with proper books, articles and videos.
I like to say that 'audio' is complicated about complex, because not only music, but the entire thing, like this post I did explaining acoustics, it's hard to have proper acoustics, for example, and audio work is something expensive if you want to be a major (even if you only edit podcasts, for example).
I am always learning something new, like my teacher (from past course) explaining to me about audio cables.
Loud is not an isolated process, it's an entire process..
it's ok if I show you a song I worked?
click about 'electronic music': https://www.mixinsong.online/en/portfolio
my latest project
oh, I can't upload my metrics here.
sad
wintry skiff
from a more naive point of view (not focusing on any of the actual production points specifically and more looking at raw numbers): melda production has a suite of tools, including a loudness analyser, that they got on their site for free.
i've seen that most streaming services tend to have -14 LUFS as their loudness standard; you'd want your integrated LUFS to end up around there. however, as gomes has said, human hearing is SUPER subjective, so a classical track at -13 LUFS won't always be equal to a dnb track at -13 LUFS, so these are more just guidelines.
in terms of actual production and mixing: there are some good rules to follow for mixing, but a very good idea for someone without a budget would be to test your mixes on anything you can play it through. again, as gomes said, mastering, as opposed to production, is getting your track to sound good on anything it's played on.
knowing more about the technical details helps you point out what exactly needs to be changed (if the mix is too "sharp" for example, you may have something kicking about too many high frequencies, or if it's too muddy, you may have some instruments either pumping too much low freqs, or have too many instruments playing together in the mid frequencies), and so it's often a case of going back, changing, seeing how it works on everything, and doing it again.
with more time, and budget, you can do some more stuff: you'll get used to the stuff you mix on, and once you know what sounds good on the stuff you play your tracks on (please use well-mixed tracks as reference every once in a while on these things as well, to get a good idea of what stuff you know sounds good sounds like on the stuff you're mixing on), it becomes a little easier to hit the right beats while mixing. you can also, with more budget, get some studio monitors, which will give you some more clarity and detail in your mixes.
i should mention that i mix and master simultaneously, which is not entirely pro. im broke lmao