Wanna make you track sound louder? Here is my subjective point of view on how to acheive it. Remeber. it's all subjective, though. I might be wrong in some places but all I am doing is trying to share. Hope you can find sth for yourself in  here

This was done using LeVee's guitar track

First, you need to centre the wave (amplification form) so that you avoid clicks and pops - if u look closely at the end (and the beggining too) of the wave form you'll see a sudden drop - u need to get rid of that. (pic 1).





Once you have done that, silence out the unnecessary part that is shaped like a lightning and produces clicks/pops when listening back. Fade out the last seconds of the track before it goes into silence. (pic2) Don't forget about the beggining.





As the track is pretty quiet (pic 3) u'll need to pump up the volume level a bit - there's a lot of volume headroom (black background).





The way I would go about it is to compress it first (so that the track is an even line). Let's try compression ratio 4:1, threshold -24, very fast attack( pic 4) - as u can see the track is beginning to look more even.





Let's pump up the volume but try to stay as natural as possible - normalization (pic 5).





After you have done that (pic 6) the track is MUCH louder and sounds fuller.





I have also deleted the first bit as it's nothing but unnecessary noise (the first 3 seconds). Tha last thing I'd do is get the low frequencies up and level up the remaining freqs. I'll use a compander (standard settings - pic 7, and pic 8 shows the results)








And of course, it probably needs some reverb on it so i added some quick reverb. Pic 9 shows the difference. As for some noise that's audible due to amplification - u can use denoiser but it will wreck the quality, so I'd just leave it as it is.





Hope you have fun doing your own tracks  --  good luck. I hope it helps.
Thank you Jim for hosting the pictures!

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ADD OPINIONS AND SUGGESTIONS AND CRITICISM :)
Jim

Very helpful....   I usually just remove the noise as much as I can, and then amplify slightly, and then duplicate the track to add fullness and volume....

 So I will try this next time, and see how it goes....  I am interested in knowing the software you are using....

This looks much different than what I am using.....

            JimK
 
P.S. Resized the pictures so they fit the page better.....

Jim (JBP)

This is great stuff - it's nice to see how others approach a bit of technical fiddling.  Being a relative newcomer to the world of PC digital recording (well, 10 months nearly now!) I find this information really helpful, and certainly something to try on my own recordings.

Jim (K)
It looks like JBP uses Adobe Audition, which is almost the same as Cool Edit Pro.  Adobe liked almost everything about the cool edit software, so they bought it and renamed it, and called it there own!

There's only one downside with this post for me - I'd like to hear the difference!

Great tutorial! Before amplification I usually run a noise reduction process over the track. I do this by selecting a bit of the track without any deliberate noise (ie music), then clicking on noise reduction in Cool Edit Pro/AA and clicking "get profile from selection", then closing and selecting the whole track, opening noise reduction again and clicking OK.

If you do this on each individual track it makes it a lot easier in the long run.

this is reallynice JBP...4 months ago I would have been so lost trying to follow this...This is good  Thanks

As to what JimD said..I never thought of doing the track 2 times for fullness
I night give that a go...

Flyer

I normalized some guitar tracks that I did recently and the top of the wavelooked kinda squared off. I was looking around at the normalization process, and it has a tab to click on that says  "Set Hot Spots" . I clicked on this and the play bar goes to the hottest spot in the trac, then the normal;ization box comes back up. My question is do you set or need to set the hot spots on the tracks when doing normalization. 
ps I don't have the manual to the windows recording software I'm using.

Here is the link to the tracks I nomalized without setting the hot spots. I did not see any clip indicators any where in the process i set my comp/ settings close to the ones you posted. I don't hear clipping but I could be wrong.
anyway let me know what you think if you can.
http://forum.bandamp.com/Audio_Review/3895.html

I guess you should, but to be honest I dont have that option in my software, and if I dont realise the fact that i do, I never use it. Can't help you on that one, but I suppose its a good aidea to use the hotspot metering stuff. Maybe someone else can help.
Jim