Last year I was approached by indie punk band Relentless Turmoil to master their latest album, Loud Isn’t Loud Enough. If you read anything about mastering on internet forums and what not, you’ll hear time and time again that it’s a strange black art. For a home studio based producer, it’s supposed to be an elusive task. But like most things when it comes to production work, the devil is in the details. Mastering is also about creative decisions just as much as it is about technical know-how, and most of the moves are quite subtle.

The process depends on what I’m mastering. For a single song, I consider overall tone, dynamics, and final volume. For an album of songs, I also consider sequencing, gaps between the songs, and relative volume between the tracks.

Sequencing and silence

Loud Isn’t Loud Enough is a unique album. Nine of the eleven tracks are full songs; one is a live track, and the last is a track of random “mess-ups.” The entire thing can heard in just over ten minutes. The shortest track is 22 seconds, and the longest clocks in at 1:33. There are great riffs and big energy to almost all the tracks. I decided to let some of the tracks overlap with each other, or leave no silence at all. I wanted to keep the album moving and energetic. The live cut and “mess-ups” track finishes off the sequence.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard an album that serves up a surprise final track. On the 1995 Tea Party album The Edges of Twilight, the final track, Walk With Me, clocks in at 14:20 with a five-minute song, a long silence, and an instrumental outtro. You’d never hear the instrumental bit if you stopped playback after the song itself, and maybe you only heard it if you forgot to stop the playback.

I brought a bit of this spirit to the final “mess-ups” track by adding almost 40 seconds of a buzzing guitar amp sound off the top, at a reduced volume. If a listener heard the album at a low level (who would ever do this with a punk record?), they might not even hear the buzzing and think the album was over, or they’d hear a very faint sound, turn up the volume, and be suddenly assaulted by the screaming band members a minute later. The band loved the idea and the way I did it.

Loud Isn’t Loud Enough

This is punk music. Punk is by its nature loud; like, your amp goes up to 12 kind of loud. Loudness is about more than the final mastered volume; it’s about the dynamic range. In other words, the difference between the loudest moment and the quietest moment in the song. The loudness wars aren’t about the maximum volume as much as they’re about the drastically reduced dynamic range.

Relentless Turmoil was clear in their directive – they didn’t want to squash the dynamics. They wanted the music to breathe with the beat and rock out like a classic punk or rock record. I fully agree with this approach, and I don’t believe you need to overdo the loudness in order to have a great energetic record.

Tone, dynamics, and final volume

I referenced a classic Sex Pistols record to achieve a similar tone for the Relentless Turmoil record. I adjusted each track with a little more “oomph” in the bass and a bit less harshness. The overall tone is warmer than the final mixes provided by the band.

Like the subtle moves to the tone, I also made adjustments to dynamics with subtle settings to overall compression and mutiband compression. For the final volumes, I hit the limiter a little bit harder.

Neither relentless nor turmoil

This album was great fun to work on. I don’t listen to a lot of punk music, but to me, any good music deserves the same attention to detail and care. The songs grew on me, and it’s a really fun album. Take a listen below and name your price on Bandcamp to download it.