Love it!! Great Creativity...

Hi Adrian, I liked it the second time I listened - the first time there seemed to be a lot going on at the start, and also the loud level (7.4 YT loudness penalty on Loudnesspenalty.com) made it a bit of an attack and rushing for the volume knob!! However once I was used to what was coming the second time around and adjusted for it, I actually really enjoyed your take on this. The vocals felt okay to me, similar to where I had them.

Thank you @Burton Ishmael, I appreciate a lot that you took the time to listen to my mix and actually vibed to it. Feels great! I wonder how this mix might sound live 🤔 hehehehehehe

You know @Maurice Robinson, you can never be too loud hehehehe ;D Im sorry for scaring you on the volume, and happy to read that you enjoyed my mix. Ok yes heard mine after a long day, I agree I think vocals are fine. Thanks for listening!!!

Hey Adrián, good job! I like it.. at the beginning the mix seems a bit heavy on the low-mids but then it works fine.. listening at low volume the vocal is just a bit loud and therfore not really glued with the rest of the instrumental (mainly during the choruses) ;P

Hi Adrián, I like that you go creative, that's what this kind of music needs to bring life into it. You did that.
You like loud obviously, but I turn it down to match the normal level, and so do all the commercial platforms online, so you gain nothing. If you want to hear loud music, use to volume knob on your amp.
There is one other issue, the hihat, snare and vocals are too sharp.
Apart from that it's a very nice mix.

@MAGGHY JI yes its a poor attempt of mine to lowpass the main synth and slowly open it until it reaches I just need to figure out how to make it smoother lol

@Aart DB this is a very complicated subject (there are countless opinions on it) and I have reflected over this for a while now. I decided to always deliver a product that sounds good, not exclusive to a digital platform, because the music is not only going to be played on spotify, but also at other mediums too: like cars, radio, bluetooth speakers, home system, concerts, and even non-normalized spotify users! pro mastering engineer said he goes loud because even when normalized it sounds more glued and unified than -14. and lastly because of this genre, it asks for loudness so bad.

thankfully like you said we can always normalize the files ourselves to properly compare them and not be biased on volume. and hey! when theres a jazz or classical mix for the week then dynamics will increase, not everything needs to be a loudness machine 😇

Hi Adrián, my first thought after reading your explanation about why you make it loud was, that you don't need loudness to create a compressed sound. In fact, as you know, compressing takes away volume, and therefore you need make-up gain to make it louder. So you could compress the hell out of it and still make -14 LUFS.

And there is always the volume button if you still want to make it louder.

In order to not make a fool of myself I decided to test it and compress my mix and still make -14 LUFS. Then I took the same mix and pushed it up another 5 dB to -9 LUFS. I compared those mixes, after normalising the loudness to hear if there are significant differences in sound character. Apart from the peaks being more squashed by the limiter it all sounds the same, exactly like I thought.
Maybe you and I have different tastes about how something sounds good, but there is as far as I can tell nothing that can only be fixed by making a mix louder. Even if you prefer the peaks more squashed you can set the limiter at a lower max.
Therefore it's at any situation possible to achieve -14 LUFS without making sacrifices to the sound.

If I have overlooked something, I'd love to hear it from you. I don't engage in this conversation to win an argument but if possible to get more knowledge, not only for myself.

@Aart dB of course! this is not an argument to win but an interesting conversation where 2 people exchange their knowledge about a highly controversial topic.

here is my 2 cents: I actually agree on the limiter experiment you did with your mix. A limiter will actually limit your sound (lol) and if pushed too hard eg. more than 2 db it will actually squash your sound and completely destroy your entire mix.
people, DONT OVER LIMIT YOUR MIX or you will have a very bad result.

thankfully we have a close-to-limiting function called soft clipping that instead of bringing your dynamics down it will just shave them off and preserve dynamics while also being louder. Nothing gets pushed down, only pulled up.

Now, it would be interesting if you tried the exact same experiment, of bringing your mix up to -9 only with the clipper and just shoving a limiter at the end with no gain/threshold only to catch those micro dynamics that may clip over 0. (your limiter at the end should not compress more than 1db at max and at times only) now thats the magic sauce that gets the glue going, 1db limiting and with a slower release time makes that special sound that will make the slight preferable difference when compared one on one with the -14 mix.
Again, if you take the limiter out and compare then, no difference at all will be perceived (at least in my experience) because clipper is not compressing at all.

okay that was hard to explain I really hope you understood my bad bad bad bad bad attempt of explaining

I have also realized that there are a lot other things that affect lufs count without changing the perceived loudness of your mix.
In your -14 mix, on the master channel low shelf 100hz 6db and your lufs count will increase substantially without changing perceived loudness, but at the same time leaving less space and spotify penalizing your mix but it wasnt even your fault, so at the end a -14 mix will sound louder than your -14 mix with boosted bass on the platform.

On the other hand, decrease -6db on low shelf and you will have less than -14 and spotify will automatically increase your -14 mix, sounding louder than other -14 songs

complicated topic and I dont even know where im going with this xD but yeah with all this info I can say, if you know how to make your mix sound loud, good, and not squashed, you can definitely aim for louder without it sounding bad when penalized and sounding amazing on other systems. I am not a super professional AT ALL, I just aim to become one hopefully lol but if the pro's do it loud and good it means it can be done that way

looking forward to your mix this weekend :3 ❤️

Hi Adrián, thanks for the elaborate reply. I am aware of soft clipping, but have never had the urge to investigate it. Mainly because nearly all of my mixes are way below the clipping point. There is a limiter on my master channel, but mainly as a precaution to prevent the stray peaks from digital clipping.
I see the urgency to use it as a better alternative for limiting because of the soft knee when you are mixing for maximum loudness, like you do.
I'll go and investigateit further, but the problem is that these things are very hard to hear if you are not used to listen to these things. (Maybe Soundgym should make a game to identify clipping and limiting :).

However I think there is still a lot more to say and learn about this. And there are already some more of us making two mixes with different loudness. So you got people thinking and investigating

True what you say about the perception of loudness by loudnessmeters e.g. Spotify. I noticed that it averages the entire mix, so if you have quiet parts in a song the rest of the song could reach well over -14 LUFS, up to 5dB louder and still make the -14 label. And therefore a dynamic mix can sometimes sound much louder than a heavily compressed one when played on a loudness limiting platform.
To be continued...