Every Release Teaches Me Something New

Every release I put out, I walk away knowing something I did not know before. That is kind of the whole point for me right now. Not just making music, but getting better at making it with every single song I put out.

My first release, "make you," was a huge moment for me, and it was also a massive classroom. I consistently got similar feedback through SubmitHub and Repost Exchange, "It's good / it's catchy ..... But why is it so quiet? I have to turn up my volume so much."

The biggest thing I came away with was understanding LUFs. If you are not familiar, LUFS stands for "Loudness Units relative to Full Scale", and it is essentially the measurement streaming platforms like Spotify use to normalize the volume of every track you hear. In simple words, if your song is not hitting the right loudness level, Spotify will either turn it down or it will just feel quieter and thinner than everything else in the playlist.

Before "make you," I was not knowledgeable about this thing at all. I was mixing and exporting with what I was learning about EQ'ing and compression. After the release, I started digging into mastering properly, learning how to target the right LUFS levels, and understanding how audio normalization actually works in a streaming context. It changed how I hear my own music.

The version of me that makes the next song already knows more than the version of me that made the last one. That is not me being hard on myself. That is actually the most exciting part of this whole process. Every song will be better than the one before it, not because I got lucky, but because I paid attention. Now, with the current most recent release of "taiko", I've continued to learn even more.

That is the standard I am holding myself to. I hope you come along for it.