The Question:

OK – here’s a production question that I’ve sometimes wondered – at what point would it be appropriate to normalize sound levels during production? At the end would make sense, but I sometimes find I want
to normalize some of the raw audio before I start working with it.

The Answer:

Normalizing is sometimes flagged as one of those production “no-nos” and seen as rather taboo by some (maybe most) true engineers. I personally believe it has it’s applications, but I’d be careful not to over-do it.

In terms of music production…
I would personally avoid normalizing all together (and I do). Things will be loud enough once you get all the way through the mixing and mastering phases of any music project.

If you normalize all of your audio and then throw a brickwall limiter on your two track master during mastering, your stuff will be loud and not much more. If you need to make your audio or MIDI louder during production, use the faders! Use a gain plugin. Or, use your compressor’s makeup gain to make stuff a little louder.

That being said, if you still want to or feel like you need to normalize your audio, you should do it earlier rather than later.

In terms of post-production…
I don’t do a lot of music recording right now. Most of what I do falls under the “post” category. When I’m working on dialog editing/mixing for a web-based application, a podcast, or something that’s meant to be streamed rather than burnt to a CD, I’ll usually end up normalizing the audio I’m working on in order to please the client.

More often than not, when you’re working on audio for things like training videos, Internet-based training modules, etc, you’re working with marketing or business-minded people. They’re not real interested in what you do or what “direction” you have for the project. They simply want it to sound clean and be loud which is why normalizing audio for these purposes is often much easier than worrying about any type of brickwall limiting.

Producing music and mixing are highly subjective things. I personally don’t believe in any book of rules, so you should always take advice like this with a grain of salt perhaps. Ultimately it comes down doing whatever sounds the best and gets you the results you want.