Lower the level on your computer speakers, raise the level on your car’s stereo, and raise the level on your phone. Done.
Define vocal recording . Is this vocal attached to/part of a song? Acapella? If it’s the latter, then you obviously need to do what I said above. If it’s the former, it’s a mixing thing. Assuming that’s the case, nobody on an internet forum can give you correct advice on what to do, without hearing the rest of your tracks that comprise your mix. You can’t come on a forum, and say, “xyz is too low. I am not going to give you any audio exs., and I am going to give you absolutely no clue as to what kind of music it is, what else is going on in the song, and how anything was recorded”, and expect someone to give you proper advice.
I’ll agree with both of you, but I’ll claim that proper EQ at the mixing stage will probably have the biggest impact. No offense, Tom, but mastering - in my very limited experience - helps a good track to really shine. But if he’s having volume inconsistency issues then I would argue that his mixes need work first.
No offense taken. I agree. There are other things that effect the perceived vocal level like guitars that sit on top and flank it. If the vocal is stable and the guitars are wonky, the vocal will seem to be the issue, mainly because as listeners, we are listening for the melody in the vocal. We tend to notice it ahead of other things. the fact that sounds so different on many systems is a sign at the spectral balance is out of whack. When it is dynamically out, that is a strong cause for drastic differences between playback systems as it can be the most taxing on the speakers and amps playing it back.
But, I haven’t heard the song in question, so all this is mere speculation.
Well, it’s more than that in my opinion. Frequency response curves in the target playback environments are going to differ from speaker to speaker. So it’s a combination of a few things:
The monitoring environment isn’t great so carving out EQ bands on various tracks isn’t as effective because you don’t get an accurate representation of the impact of EQ changes.
The target environments aren’t identical or, sometimes, even close to being the same so the expectation that your mix is going to sound the same everywhere just can’t be met.
For that last point, you have to set your expectations properly. For example, I know my car’s bass response is crappy. So when I take a mix into the car I know that the bass will sound weak. I adjust my expectations appropriately.
That’s what you have reference material for. You have CDs or something and you have some environment where you double check your new mix against the references. You know the references sound good so you can somewhat rely on them. Adjust critical stuff (like bass levels and lead vox) according to the reference material and you’re at least one step closer to a good mix.
Stand back from the poop! Make no attempt to clean it up yourself unless you are properly equipped to do so in an environmentally safe manner!
Dog poop has been declared a “a non-point source pollutant” by the EPA. You will need to follow proper poop protocol or hire a licensed remediation service to neutralize the offending offal.
No expert on this end but a couple things come to mind in trying to solve this issue. One is that reference disk, just make sure the music on it is similar to what you doing in your mixes and is in line with what you hope to produce.
Two - Figure this is a big time challenge and accept it as such. I was fighting this very thing when I sent a song to a person that I was almost certain would play it through notebook speakers. Sure enough they did exactly that. When I played the song on my notebook speakers it sounded like a tin can. So what is one to do? Well, you could see this as a testing ground opportunity. You probably have 2 playback monitor targets in your studio. One being your monitors and the other your headphones. Add to that possibly a notebook, the car system, maybe a home audio system and a couple more you might have available to you. This many playback devices gives you a pretty good testing ground to try and shoot for. Don’t forget to use the volume knob on those targets to try and even out that variable. In the end if you want it to sound the best it can on multiple playback devices you need to test them on such and tweak accordingly.