Normalisation question

Hi guys

I’ve never used normalisation before but recently I had some voice overs to deal with. They were all at different levels so I used normalisation set to Loudness default -23db and it did the trick .

 

With full mixes is it good practise to normalise to the required LUFS before mastering or after or not good practise to do it at all?

Not a fan of normalization with full mixes.

Use Compression and limiters to achieve the desired loudness instead.

I suppose you mean the "Normalize Region Gain" feature. You generally shouldn't have to normalize before mastering, are all those voice overs for the same video? Who is going to do the mastering: you or a mastering engineer?

The voice overs were for one presentation but the guy recording them didn't know what he was doing when he recorded them so they were all at different levels. The Normalise Region Gain worked really well for that.

 

I hadn't considered for album tracks I'm working on, just curious if anyone did that. I've always mastered using Izotope anyway (budget doesn't yet run to pro mastering facilities) and the results sound fine on streaming sites, iTunes and BBC etc.

 

Thanks for your input guys, no need to go down that route then!

Normalize Region Gain on raw voice recordings before doing anything else is a good idea, maybe you need to split them into more Regions if the volume varies too much within one Region. Using the default of -23 is as good as any level.

 

Doing this means you can hit your VO-processing chain with the right level from the get-go.

Great, you're welcome!

Thanks Fuzzfilth, that makes sense.