Weekly Tip #29: Avoid Normalizing

When working in Photoshop… Do you resize the picture every now and then, just because you can?

I doubt it! Yet people keep normalizing their audio every chance they get.

Makes no sense.

There are a couple of situations where normalizing comes in handy. But these are rare occasions in the music production process.

Let me first tell you what normalizing is in a nutshell and when NOT to normalize.

Peak normalizing is the process of finding the loudest peak of the audio signal, and applying a constant amount gain to the entire signal so that the highest peak reaches the target level.

In practice it’s often (and often unnecessarily) done to bring the signal to 0 dBFS – it’s maximum digital level.

Virtually every DAW and audio editing software out there has a built-in function for doing this automatically.

So, what’s the fuss?

People like to normalize for the wrong reasons.

Before you normalize, realize that:

• It doesn’t affect the dynamic range of the signal in any way. Once again: You won’t gain more dynamic range by normalizing. The difference between the loudest and quietest parts of the signal stays the same.
• Normalizing every sound/track in your mix won’t make it sound louder or better.
• You may risk creating inter-sample peaks (and thus, clipping when the sound goes to a poor DAC).
• It will bring up the noise by the same amount.
• You lose headroom and risk clipping when the audio with no headroom is processed with certain plugins.
• Any processing step you take degrades the original sound – the less you process, the better.

Nearly always in music production and mixing situations, normalizing is not really necessary.

You’re better off concentrating your efforts recording/bouncing things loud enough (-3 to -6dBSF) in the first place.

The exceptions? There are two kinds of situations where normalization is required:

1. If the signal is so quiet that the volume controls in your DAW are not enough to bring it up to par with the other elements in the mix.
2. If you must make the signal peak at a certain predefined level (for example when doing sound design, mastering or working with test tones).

If you can think of more, do let us know in the comments!

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