Loudness Definition: How Modern Metal Gets So Loud

You’ve been there. You finish a mix, feeling pretty good about it. The guitars are heavy, the drums punch, and the vocals sit right on top. You bounce it, A/B it against the latest Architects or Spiritbox track, and suddenly your mix sounds… weak. Quiet. Less impactful. Even when you match the peak volume, the pro track just feels denser and louder.

What gives?

The answer lies in understanding what "loudness" actually means in modern production. It’s not just about turning up the master fader until it clips. In today's metal scene, where the production standards are higher than ever, loudness is a carefully crafted combination of psychoacoustics, technical metering, and smart mixing decisions.

Forget the simple volume knob. Let’s break down the real definition of loudness and how you can achieve it in your own metal mixes.

The Three-Headed Monster: Peak, RMS, and LUFS

First things first, you need to know what you’re measuring. Staring at the peak meter on your master fader is only telling you a fraction of the story. To get loud, punchy, and competitive mixes, you need to understand three key metrics.

True Peak: Your Last Line of Defense

This is the simplest one to grasp. Your True Peak level is the absolute highest point your audio signal reaches. Think of it as the ceiling. The goal here isn't to hit it as hard as possible, but to never go over it. Digital clipping sounds awful, and streaming services will penalize or distort tracks that go over 0.0 dBFS (decibels full scale).

Actionable Detail: Most producers set their final limiter’s ceiling to -1.0 dBTP (decibels True Peak). This gives streaming service conversion algorithms enough headroom to avoid introducing distortion. A great tool for this is the limiter in iZotope Ozone or FabFilter Pro-L 2, which have excellent true peak detection modes.

RMS: The Old School Muscle

Before LUFS became the standard, we talked a lot about RMS (Root Mean Square). RMS measures the average power of a signal over a short period. A track with a higher RMS level will generally sound louder and more powerful than a track with a lower RMS, even if their peak levels are identical. This is because it has less dynamic range—the quiet parts are closer in volume to the loud parts.

The "loudness wars" of the 2000s were essentially a battle for the highest RMS level, often crushing the life out of music. While we don't obsess over RMS anymore, the concept is key: a higher average level equals a greater perception of power.

LUFS: The Modern Standard for Loudness

This is the big one. LUFS (Loudness Units Full Scale) is the modern standard for measuring perceived loudness. Unlike RMS, LUFS is weighted to account for how the human ear actually perceives sound at different frequencies. Our ears are more sensitive to midrange frequencies, for example, and LUFS meters take that into account.

You'll see a few LUFS measurements on a good meter like Youlean Loudness Meter or iZotope Insight:

• Momentary: The perceived loudness over the last 400ms. Great for seeing the impact of a specific snare hit or guitar chug.
• Short-Term: The loudness over the last 3 seconds. Useful for gauging the loudness of a specific phrase or section.
• Integrated: The average loudness across the entire track. This is the main number streaming services look at.

For a modern metal track aiming for a competitive, slammed master, you might see integrated LUFS values anywhere from -8 to as low as -5. But be warned: chasing a number without making the right mixing moves will just result in a flat, distorted mess.

So, How Do You Actually Make It Loud?

Achieving modern metal loudness isn’t about one magic plugin on your master bus. It’s a process that starts from the ground up, built on a foundation of clean, controlled, and intentional mixing decisions. The extreme low tunings and dense layers of modern metal make this even more challenging—every element is fighting for space in an already saturated frequency spectrum.

It Starts in the Arrangement (Not the Master Bus)

You can’t make a muddy mix loud. If your 8-string guitars are clashing with your 5-string bass in the 80-200Hz range, you’re just creating a wall of low-mid gunk. No amount of limiting will fix that. A loud mix is a clear mix.

Before you even reach for a compressor, make sure your parts are working together. Do the kick and bass have their own pockets? Are the chugging rhythm guitars getting out of the way of the lead? A tight performance and a smart arrangement give you the headroom you need to push for loudness later.

Carving Space with EQ

This is your primary tool for creating clarity. Every EQ move you make to reduce frequency clashes adds to your perceived loudness. If the kick and bass aren’t fighting, they both sound clearer and more powerful without you having to turn them up.

Actionable Details:

• High-Pass Everything: Use a high-pass filter on every track that doesn’t need sub-bass information. Guitars, vocals, cymbals, even the snare. This cleans up low-end mud you might not even realize is there, freeing up massive amounts of headroom.
• Find the Clutter: The 200-500Hz range is often a warzone. Use an EQ like the FabFilter Pro-Q 3 to make surgical cuts in this area on guitars to make room for the snare's body and the bass's attack.
• Tame the Fizz: Modern high-gain tones, especially from modelers like the Neural DSP plugins, can have a lot of high-frequency fizz (8kHz and up). Use a narrow EQ band to find and notch out the most annoying "mosquito" frequencies. This lets you boost the "air" and "cut" without harshness.

Strategic Compression for Punch and Control

Compression reduces the dynamic range of a signal, making the average level (RMS/LUFS) higher. This is fundamental to achieving loudness. But instead of just slapping a compressor on everything, be intentional.

Actionable Details:

• Drum Bus Glue: Use a VCA-style compressor like the SSL G-Bus Compressor or Slate Digital VBC on your drum bus. A slow attack (30ms) and fast release with 2-4dB of gain reduction will let the initial transients pop through while raising the overall body and sustain of the kit.
• Snare Punch: Use a FET-style compressor like an 1176 emulation (Arturia's Comp FET-76 is a great one) on your snare. Set a slow attack and fast release to shape the transient and add more body, making it smack harder without just being a "tick."
• Parallel Compression: Blend a heavily compressed version of your drums in with the original, uncompressed track. This adds density and power without sacrificing the natural dynamics.

The Magic of Clipping (Yes, Seriously)

Here’s a trick the pros use constantly. Before your signal even hits the final limiter, use a clipper plugin to transparently shave off the sharpest peaks. A limiter can sometimes "pump" or "suck" the life out of a signal when it reacts to a fast transient. A good clipper just chops the top off cleanly, without audible artifacts.

Actionable Detail: Put a clipper like StandardCLIP or Sir Audio Tools StandardCLIP on your drum bus or even individual drum shells like the kick and snare. Shave off just 1-3dB of the highest peaks. This will reduce the peak level being fed into your master bus limiter, meaning the limiter doesn’t have to work as hard and you can push the overall level higher before it starts to sound squashed.

The Final Limiter: The Gatekeeper of Loudness

This is the very last plugin in your master chain. Its job is to set the absolute ceiling and bring the overall level up to your target LUFS.

Actionable Detail:

1. Set your limiter's output ceiling to -1.0 dBTP.
2. Choose a "modern" or "aggressive" algorithm if available. The FabFilter Pro-L 2 has several great styles for this.
3. Slowly increase the input gain or lower the threshold while watching your LUFS meter. Push it until you hit your target (e.g., -7 LUFS integrated).
4. Listen critically. Are you hearing pumping? Is the kick losing its impact? If so, you've gone too far. Back off, or better yet, go back into the mix and create more headroom with EQ and clipping so the limiter has an easier job.

Bringing It All Together: The Nail The Mix Approach

Understanding the definition of loudness is one thing. Knowing how to use EQ, compression, clipping, and limiting to build a dense, powerful, and competitive metal mix is another. It’s a skill built on a thousand small decisions, from surgical EQ cuts on a cymbal to the precise attack and release times on your drum bus compressor.

These concepts are the building blocks. But seeing them applied in real-time by the producers who mixed the albums you love is a total game-changer.

Reading about how Will Putney gets his drums to punch or how Jens Bogren achieves his crystal-clear yet crushing guitar tones is cool. But watching them do it, explaining every plugin choice and every automation move on the actual multitracks from bands like Knocked Loose and Arch Enemy? That’s how you truly level up.

At Nail The Mix, we put you in the room with the world's best producers every single month. You get the raw multitracks and watch them build a pro mix from scratch. If you're ready to go beyond the theory and see how modern metal gets its power, it’s time to unlock your sound and start mixing modern metal beyond presets.