Loudness Comes From Mixing
There’s a misconception that “loudness comes from mastering.” While finished masters often do sound louder than mixes, this can create the false impression that mastering is where loudness is actually achieved.
In reality, mixing is the stage that does almost all of the loudness heavy lifting. Mastering can refine or enhance what’s already there, but the foundations of loudness are built in the mix, and there are two core reasons.
Reason 1
You have far more control over loudness when working with individual tracks than when working with a single stereo file
In mastering, every adjustment affects the entire track. In mixing, you have the same tools—compression, automation, limiting, clipping, parallel processing—but you can apply them with precision to each sound. This allows you to build loudness in stages and shape dynamics with far greater nuance.
Most producers know about LUFS, and LUFS are certainly a better measurement of loudness than decibels. But LUFS don’t hear quality: it simply reports a number, and you can hit that number easily by driving a mix into a limiter. Matching a reference track's LUFS certainly doesn’t mean you’ve matched its impact.
There’s no universal LUFS target for any genre or tempo. What makes a track genuinely loud is the cumulative work done throughout the mix: managing dynamics, controlling peaks, and creating a balanced distribution of energy across the arrangement.
On a fundamental headroom level, treating dynamics on a track-by-track or group-by-group basis gives you far more potential for loudness and clarity than relying on the stereo master alone.
Up to this point, these ideas are fairly well understood. But the bigger reason that loudness comes from mixing is actually to do with definitions.
Reason 2
The way many people conceive of “loudness” is too narrow
When people describe a track as loud, they’re rarely referring to LUFS alone. They’re talking about qualities like:
Presence
Clarity
Depth
Warmth
Impact
Perceived macro-dynamics
Even more fundamentally, we are talking about music being satisfying and fulfilling.
None of these come from simply pushing a limiter harder—whether in mastering or mixing. They come from how the music is written, arranged, and built into a coherent mix where every element occupies the right space.
When comparing your track to a reference, don’t focus on LUFS. Compare the musical building blocks instead:
Pitch / Frequency: Are you using the spectrum effectively? Are elements competing with each other? Are there undesirable gaps?
Rhythm: How do the various rhythms interact? Are they all doing the same thing? Are too many transients landing at the same moment?
ADSR: Do elements have appropriate attack, decay, sustain, and release so they fit together rather than fight each other?
Density: Are you using the right number of elements, and are the important ones actually the most prominent?
These aren’t just composition concepts—they’re the foundation of mixing. Mixing is arranging viewed through a technical lens. Here’s how those same principles translate directly into mix choices:
Pitch / Frequency
Managing frequency content is the most effective way to create clarity, space, and perceived loudness. Reducing masking allows elements to interlock instead of overwhelm each other. Cleaning up unwanted frequency buildup increases headroom and ensures the track holds up at high volume in real environments. A mix that hits high LUFS because of messy frequency content will sound harsh or fatiguing in a club.
Rhythm
When too many elements peak at the same moment, headroom disappears. Creating rhythmic space—through compression, sidechaining, transient shaping and arrangement—opens both technical and psychoacoustic headroom. Even if nothing is clipping a limiter, competing transients still fight for the listener’s attention.
ADSR
Not every sound should have a punchy attack or a long, rich sustain. Balancing ADSR profiles determines what feels forward or recessed in the mix. ADSR also shapes texture; different profiles give elements different roles, helping the mix feel dynamic rather than flat.
Density
Mixing doesn’t usually involve deleting parts, but it does involve deciding which elements sit forward and which sit behind. Level, EQ, stereo placement, transient shape, and saturation all influence density. If everything is fighting to be prominent, nothing feels big. Loudness is a zero-sum game: pushing one element up pushes others down in perceived importance and literal headroom.
Tip
When crafting sounds or mixing your own music, one of the most common mistakes is soloing elements too often and trying to make each one impressive alone. You actually want to hear what elements sound like in relation to everything else. In many great mixes, soloed parts sound plain or even weak—and that’s fine. What matters is how they function in context. A mix is judged by the whole, not the individual ingredients.
Macro Dynamics
Perceived loudness also depends on how different sections contrast. The transition between quieter and louder moments should feel meaningful without becoming disjointed. This contrast is shaped far more by musical and tonal changes than by shifts in LUFS.
Examples
Below are three versions of the same track. The first one, the stems are unmixed with just a limiter. The second one, the stems are only mixed using techniques mentioned above in ‘Reason 1’; compression, gain automation, limiting and track level (no multiband). The third one is mixed using all techniques.
Note that all three of these tracks have the exact same integrated LUFS reading (-8.6 LUFS), and are all at 0.0dB True Peak. They have the same master limiter settings. While it’s only an example on a short excerpt, this demonstrates clearly the main points I’ve been speaking about.
Summary
DJs or listeners can always turn your track up. But if it sounds harsh or fatiguing and they have to turn it down, it will feel both quieter and worse. Forcing a weak mix into high LUFS values doesn’t fix anything. This is why well-mixed tracks hit harder at lower LUFS than poorly mixed tracks at higher LUFS.
It is trivially easy to achieve incredibly high LUFS values in mastering. But this is equivalent to pushing the brightness of a video as high as possible and hoping for it to look HD. Depth, warmth, clarity, space and presence can be enhanced in mastering, but to a limited extent. They can’t be entirely manufactured when these elements don’t exist in the first place.
Once you’re confident the music itself is finished, mixing is where real loudness is built.
