Matching Mix Volume Levels

[HRose]

Can someone tell me how to bring volume levels up on four of my home studio mixes to match ten mixes done at a professional studio in Nashville? Album is ready to release except for this issue. Studio mix WAV files look heavily compressed. Mine not so much. I like my mixes, so I want to use them but match pro studio levels.

I'm running Pro Tools Studio. Scarlet 18i20. iMac with Intel chip. Wave Lab 9.5 to compile album.

[albee1952]

Sounds like you are comparing your unmastered files to mastered files? More apparent level and compression are often part of mastering. iZotope Ozone is one of several good mastering tools and it allows you to use another file(like a commercial release) as a benchmark, but if you are new to mastering, I would recommend farming this out to a pro as its really easy to get bad results too

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by HRose

Can someone tell me how to bring volume levels up

Using a volume knob

[Darryl Ramm]

You note the other mixes are heavily compressed... the way you bring the levels of your mixes up is to... heavily compress those mixes as well. How else would you do it? If you've got some gross mistake in mix/bus/output levels in you session you move faders, or clip gain or the trim plugin, but it's compression and limiting you are after.

How much are the pro studio sessions really slammed? Has the life been wrung out of them with over compression/limiting like is so frigging common? If you have the mix sessions or pre-mastering output/stems for those other songs maybe "unmaster" them and work though remastering them all yourself or have somebody else with a known deft mastering touch remaster them all.

[HRose]

Thanks for the replies and good advice. I asked the studio in Nashville the same question and got the same answer. Use a Limiter on the mixed stereo files. I'll play around with it today and see what I can do. I can always have the studio finish up the last four songs. I just wanted to know how to get there myself. I do have a pretty good investment in equipment, plugins, etc. So I should learn how to bring my masters up to professional standard for release. Thanks!