Part 13 of 31 – Are you sure your EQ or compressor is making your track sound better? Could it be that you’ve only made the track louder?
Louder Sounds Better
The honest truth is, we as humans tend to think that louder sounds better. If you do any processing on your track that makes the track louder, you will favor the sound with the plugin than without the plugin. Louder sounds like we’ve enhanced it somehow. To fix this, you must gain match your plugins before making a true comparison.
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Hot damn, those drums sound incredible! Did you track em yourself?
Great tip as always, sir!
Yes, tracked them here in the studio.
Great tip, couldn’t have said it any better myself.
I often find myself missing this step. Not sure if it’s because I’m used to the sounds I aiming to get and know when I get it or if it actually is the increased loudness hyping things up for me.
Sure, if increased loudness with that plugin is your goal then by all means, crank it!
Would you turn the output gain back up on this ssl plugin after you have made your assessment on whether or not the plugin (eq comp) is beneficial to the track/mix?
Yeah I would just make sure that the gain going out is the same as the gain going in. So if I no longer want those EQ cuts, I would probably bring the output gain back up a bit to compensate.
After the volume comparison is the track left at the matched volume level or turned back up to where it was ???
Leave it at the matched volume.