Having been a longtime follower of the discussions on the Gearslutz Mastering Forum I decided to call the project I founded with a friend 3 months ago LOUDNESS WARRIORS.
Now that we exposed the first piece of our art to the ears of the public we were immediately confronted with the reality of Loudness War.
The track is some music written to accompany a short trailer for a little movie festival organized by the owner of a some little movie theatres located south of Munich, Germany.
The visuals were done by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some music for it and I told him I would do some music with my new project LW.
Out came the following:
YouTube - FSFF Trailer 2009
After hearing it the cinema owner called my video friend to tell him the trailer did not have competitive loudness compared to other commercials shown in his cinemas. My friend who did the video had been to one of the cinemas to see how the trailer worked in reality. They had forgotten to switch the sound on for those commercials going from a server into a LCD video projector. Although there was no sound people stopped talking immediately to watch the beautifully done visuals. Nonetheless the guy wanted it LOUDER. One of the commercials I got for loudness reference measured -3 dB RMS peak on RME's Digicheck.
So I had the painful job to remaster our own work up to the point where distortions became rather unbearable and a lot of the intended dynamics in the piece were planished after having tried quite some time to achieve a pleasantly open-sounding mix and master. At least the Youtube link above keeps the “good” version.
By the way: The sloppiness of the first guitar recording was kept intentionally. Think: indie music for a indie festival.
Greetings from Munich, Germany
Joerg Weger aka GoldenEars Sound Balance Engineering aka fUNKYpUNK tafka RasJacko