Making it Louder Maya Hauptmann 11/15/2025

As an EDM producer, I can safely say the loudness war is over. Loud won. Human beings simply enjoy when music is louder, and so when we're mixing tracks, often times we strive to make them as loud as possible without ruining them. I learned a lot about loudness while doing research before making my album LOUD AF. Here are some tools and methods you can use to make your tracks literally or perceptably louder beyond just turning up the volume.

The first thing I imagine most producers would think to use to increase the percieved loudness further is dynamic range compression. By reducing the highest peaks of a sound, you can increase the gain of the entire sound, making it louder on average. Compression can leave you a lot of headroom to increase the volume of a track without being too noticeable.

You could also push your track into a limiter. A limiter is technically a compressor with a really high ratio but most use the two differently. Flattening the sound beyond a certain threshold is useful if you want it to be as loud as it can be without adding distortion. You can bring up the pre-gain of the signal until the limiting sounds too noticeable and then back off somewhat.

Maybe you're fine with adding some audible distortion. In that case, you might use clipping of some kind. Where a limiter will duck the audio so it doesn't cross a threshold, a clipper will literally cut off the peaks of your waveform. This is a much more aggressive way to enforce a threshold, and is often best used with some kind of compression so that a balance between ducking and distortion can be found. Use caution with clipping, it's really easy to overdo.

Sometimes to make a sound bigger you don't necessarily need to make it louder but rather more full. Multiband compression can be used to make a sound fill out the frequency spectrum and thus seem larger and perhaps louder. A sound that takes up that much of the spectrum being compared to one that fills only a narrow band is equivalent to the sound of a whole orchestra versus a flute.

Often, if an element of a track cannot be heard, the problem isn't that it itself is too quiet but that the other sounds are overbalancing or masking it. Examine the balance between elements in pairs and level them in smaller groups. Assess what frequency bands of the sound in question are important, and boost those with EQ. Then, cut those same bands in other elements to create space for the important one. Interestingly, if two elements are taking up completely different areas of the frequency spectrum, they won't fight for headroom at all and you can push them to be surprisingly loud. If they're taking up similar frequency areas, turning one up could mask the other and cause it to sound quieter.

Sidechain compression can be a fantastic way to make an element come above everything else. This is often used for kick drums and vocals. Making every other sound in the mix duck a little bit when an important element enters will make the important one seem louder in comparison. Make sure to use a decently fast release time on your compressor so the ducking doesn't become obvious.

Ring modulator sidechaining is a more aggressive way to "duck" elements under a more important one. There are several good tutorials for it out there, and in the Kilohearts Essentials bundle, there's a plugin called Compactor that makes this process really easy. Ring mod sidechaining adds audible distortion when the affected elements interact with the sidechained one. I have only ever found this useful in heavy, aggressive genres that have plenty of distortion already, and only to make drums punch through more.

Reverb can be used to make elements sound louder, surprisingly. If there's a particularly dry element that is really loud but doesn't sound big, reverb can make your brain percieve the loudness of it more effectively. As the room or reverb reacts to a sound, that cues your brain into hearing it as louder, because louder sounds make more reverb when they happen in spaces. Sometimes delay or echo effects can achieve this result too.

The preparation for a loud sound like an impact or a massive bass could be argued to be equally as important as the sound itself. A loud sound that is preceded by another loud sound won't jump out too much, but one that is preceded by a quiet sound or silence will sound much bigger in comparison. Make the preparatory gesture before a loud sound smaller than it to bring it out more.

Add multiple layers to a sound if you want it to sound huge. A full orchestra doesn't sound so grand because it has one of each voice, there's multiple voices playing in unison on each part. Similarly if you want a bass sound or a supersaw to be massive, think about the unison layers you could add to it that would compliment or fill out the timbre.

Hopefully these options are enough to get you started. I'm sure there's more techniques out there that can be used to squeeze your audio further, but these are the ones I know.

Thanks for reading.

-Maya