JULY 30, 2025 INTERVIEWS
A Practical Guide to Loudness Metering for the Recording Studio
Years ago, before they hired (Tape Op contributor) Chris Koltay to tour with them, I mixed the band Deerhunter at a festival. Afterward I went to find the band and say hello. Lead singer and guitarist Bradford Cox came right up to me and said, "Dude! You turned up my guitar for the solos! I could hear it from the stage! Nobody knows to do that. Thank you!" It seemed so obvious to me, I couldn't understand how somebody would not do that. A few years after that I noticed another live sound engineer, mixing a Latin band, had a VCA group [voltage controlled amplifier] labeled "VAMP." He explained to me that the VCA had everything except the vocals in it. That way when the vocalist stepped away from the mic, and the band started to vamp, he would push the whole band louder to fill the void. Here was something just as obvious as turning up a guitar solo, and it had never occurred to me. The point is, when listening to popular forms of music, we generally want the music to consistently fill up about the same amount of space. When James Brown counts to four on "Funky Drummer," so everyone could "lay out and let the drummer go," Clyde Stubblefield does play a little bit harder, but the mix engineer also clearly turns him up right when the band drops out, and, correctly, doesn't turn him down until after the second beat when the band comes back in.
