What Is Metering in Mixing and

Mastering?

In the twin practices of mixing and mastering, we often speak of the meters,
particularly after making bold decisions. "How does that look on the meters?"
I might say to myself, usually after midnight, when I’ve been mixing so long
that I have no idea if things feel squashed in the mix or merely in my head.

Conversely, if I’m compressing the drum bus, I might ask myself, “how much
gain reduction is this showing on the meters?” When mastering a tune, I
might think to say, “how loud is this reading on the meters?”

Meter talk even affects my recording parlance: Say I’m running a guitar
through a preamp whose sweet spot occupies the top of its LED-segmented
meters. Here I might ask myself, “Am I filling the meters?”

Such talk leads us to our question du jour: what is metering in the mixing and
mastering process?

To some extent, the answer is simple: Metering, in these contexts, is any

visual aid (preferably established by our forebears) that shows us where we
stand. Meters don’t help us judge aesthetic concepts; rather, they measure
events pertaining to the science behind. As such, meters help us make better
decisions, particularly regarding levels, frequency content, stereo spread, and
dynamic range.

With this established, let’s get into a brief overview of the meters we use.

Levels
Level meters are arguably the most prevalent meters we come across. They’re
found in DAWs, outboard piece, and physical mixing boards. They show us a
signal’s strength; put another way, they display how level a signal happens to
be at any given moment.

But how the moment is given to us, and how this moment of signal strength is
quantified and measured—therein lies a world of confusion.

By definition, VU meters, implemented long before the digital epoch, tend to

take longer to read the level of a signal (around 300 milliseconds).
Conversely, they take longer to register when a signal has dropped to a lower
value (again, usually around 300 milliseconds). This makes them credible
tools for taking the average temperature of a signal, be it a mix or a single
element like a vocal or a bass.

You might not have a conventional VU meter, like the one pictured below, in
your DAW, though you’ll see them still on many outboard compressors. Your
DAW’s RMS meter serves a roughly similar function, as it aims to portray the
average strength of a signal, rather than its moment to moment peak value.
VU Meter
RMS Meter

But these kinds of meters aren’t as helpful for seeing, measuring, or

quantifying the momentary transient, which is necessary for making sure you
don’t overwhelm your mix/master, or hit your digital ceiling.

In these cases, engineers used to use PPM meters but we have largely
migrated to loudness metering for averages and true-peak metering for
catching the quicker hits.

I don’t have room here to relate how loudness metering came to be, how a
loudness unit (LU) was established (think of it like a dB that takes the context
of frequency and dynamic history into account), but I have no qualms in
telling you that it is my preferred method of level metering, because it is so
versatile.

A LUFS loudness meter always gives you three different readouts—

momentary, short term, and integrated—and they’re all incredibly useful. If
you’re mixing a podcast or a dialogue scene for a film, momentary readouts
help you judge the consistency of the voices, thus helping you make decisions
to juice the gain so you don’t lose a word at the end of a sentence. Integrated
loudness helps you judge the overall loudness of programmatic material—of a
song, a film, an episode, etc.

Short-term loudness, on the other hand, is quite helpful for judging the
overall level of a mix or master, especially in reference to other
mixes/masters.

Loudness meters frequently feature a loudness range indicator, which show

you the difference, in loudness units, between your quietest and loudest
points; this is great for getting a feel for your overall dynamic range.

A metering suite like iZotope’s Insight provides all of this loudness metering
and more—including loudness history charts, and a true-peak meter for
making sure you’re avoiding intersample peaks—nasty distortions that can be
created in the digital to analog conversion process if your signal is running
too close to the digital ceiling of 0 dBFS (a good explanation of true peaks and
why they matter can be found here).

Frequency
As we have meters to help us judge level, we also have meters (visualizations)
to help us judge frequency content. The most common one is the spectrum
analyzer, which shows us, on a two-dimensional plane, the frequency makeup
of our mix.

At the left of a spectrum analyzer sits our bass content, and at the right sits
our high-end. From left to right, we see the specific order of lows to highs.
That’s our X-axis; our Y-axis (the vertical plane), shows us the amplitude of
these frequencies, in both positive and negative values.

We use these meters to help us achieve tonal balance, but it’s important to
note that balance doesn’t equal a flat, zeroed out response on the
spectrograph. There is, depending on the music we’re addressing, a slope to
the sound we’re looking for, with greater values in the lows than the highs.

The spectrum analyzer, along with an adequate reference track, can help us
make decisions as to whether there needs to be more/less of any given
frequency band in the mix or master. How we decide to implement the
change will vary depending on the material, but the choice can be made with
the meter alongside our ears.

Sidenote: iZotope has recently released a smart sort of spectrum analyzer

which provides useful animations to help us ensure we’re balanced. This tool
is called Tonal Balance Control, and it comes in quite handy—all plugging for
an iZotope blog aside, the TBC module now sits between Insight and
Sonarworks’s headphone calibration system in my monitor chain.
 Tonal Balance Control in Ozone 8 Advanced

Phase
We often come across polarity, phase, and stereo meters in our practice.
These measure two signals simultaneously to determine whether they are in
phase with each other. Some offer pictorial representations of what the
stereo-plot looks like as well. However the meter looks, it is essential for
making sure we’re fashioning a product that can translate to all systems, from
the highest of the hi-fi to the lowliest mono iPhone speaker.

Pictorial meters such as the vectorscope give us excellent visual aids and
representation of phase correlation.
Pictured below, a phase correlation meter is a tool that displays a value of +1
when it judges two signals as being completely correlated with each other (as
in, they’re the exactly the same, giving you a mono sound), and -1 when it
judges two signals as being completely out of phase (what we’d call
antiphase). For anything in between, it gives you a continuously variable
reading between the two polar extremes.
I use a phase correlator for judging the big picture on mixes, groups of
instruments, and other global musical phenomena. For instance, you might
like how wide a mix feels now that you’ve applied some stereo processing.
However, there’s a possible downside: perhaps you’ve pushed the boundaries
of good taste.

So, you can cue up a reference track, listen whilst checking the value of your
correlator, switch back to your mix/master, and repeat. If both the reference
and your mix are in the same ballpark, you’re probably doing okay. Even if
you’re not—perhaps your tune has a prominent, out-of-phase synth pad that
the other lacks—you might still be okay; if your correlator gives you a
troubling value in spots, fold the song to mono and listen to see if anything
has disappeared from the mix. That’s the meter and your ears working in
concert as a checks-and-balance system.
Sidenote: good ol’ fashioned level meters are also handy phase tools,
specifically for judging the polarity of your snare and toms against overheads.
I’ll never forget watching Tory Amos’s engineer checking drum sounds in just
this way: he would solo the snare and the overheads, and watch the meter on
the overall output, and then flipped the snare’s polarity. One configuration
read inherently louder than the other, and this helped reinforce his decision
to leave the snare alone. Then he repeated the steps with each tom; turns out
the floor tom sounded better to him out of phase. He might’ve arrived at this
conclusion by himself, but a careful eye on the lever meter ensured he got to
the right decision for the mix.

What is metering good for?

Now that we have defined what metering is—and what your tools for
metering might be—let’s ask ourselves a different question: What is metering
good for?

Let's start by addressing what metering is emphatically not good for. I’m
doing this to dispel certain fearful notions and put fearful people at ease. See,
many engineers recoil from the idea of metering as many musicians tend to
recoil from music theory—the idea being that technique can hamper your
innate sense of musicality or originality. If that has been your modus
operandi in previous situations, I'd like to propose something right off the
bat:

Metering is not a substitute for your ears

You are being paid for your ears—for the way your ears perceive, balance, and
shape music. You’re not being paid to follow the guidelines of a meter and
deliver products accordingly, because meters don’t hear music (at least not
yet); they read an input signal and spit back information concerning that
signal, be it related to frequency, level, polarity, or stereo spread. (Of course,
the flipside is if you're mastering for broadcast or podcast—in which case
that's exactly what you're getting paid for.)

Meters don’t measure how well a background vocal complements a lead part,
whether that vocal should be dipped in level for a certain phrase, or if the
vocal feels better on the right or left side of the stereo spectrum. That’s a
relational and subjective choice, the actuation of which helps contribute to
the goal of music. This is why metering, no matter how complex or
newfangled, doesn’t replace the ear: a meter makes value judgements, while
your ear makes artistic decisions.

But here’s the thing: you need value judgments to make artistic decisions. A
cinematographer needs a light meter to help determine how to shoot the
scene. Likewise, an architect needs a graphic scale to draw up plans with
accurate dimensions.

Conclusion: metering is a check on subjectivity

The biggest advantage metering affords is a check on our subjectivity. But
first, a question: what’s wrong with subjectivity anyway? After all, we’re being
hired for our very subjectivity—that is what defines us, why our clients seek
us out. Why would we need to temper this?

For the simple reason that our subjectivity can change drastically from one
moment to the next. Anyone who’s mixed a song for more than three hours
can attest to what I’m talking about. At a certain moment in the mix—or if
you’re like me, moments in the plural—you reach “a dark night of the soul” in
which everything begins to devolve; vibrancy becomes stale; second guessing
becomes the first order of obsession.

I’ve long said that in these instances, reference tracks are our friends. And
true, they are. But proper metering also becomes a safeguard against the
negative side of subjectivity here. If we’re familiar with certain targets as they
appear on a meter, we can check our work against the accepted averages of
our field and continue to plough on through this dark night of the soul into a
more glorious morning.

Why not just take a break here, when the going gets rough? Because we may
not have the luxury. The client paid us to deliver the mix by morning, and
morning is fast approaching; in such a situation all hands must report to
deck. We might have lost our objectivity, but a quick look over at the meter
when EQing a troublesome passage or establishing the level of multiple songs
might get us where we need to go until such a time as we can take a final
break for the ear and listen afresh.

This is why we familiarize ourselves with meters, how they work, what they’re
for, and the various standards associated with them. It is possible to create a
good mix or master without them—but it’s much easier, and saves a lot more
time, to just use them.