e.g. Waves C4 into L1

or L3 Multimaximizer)

or iZotope Ozone - dial in one of the presets till it sounds good - tweak as necessary.

I would also suggest TT Dynamic Range Meter to keep an eye on the dynamic range and X-ISM to make sure you don't have any intersample clips (although Ozone is supposed to warn of this)

Make sure you experiement lots and listen to reference material often

Frostbyte wrote:

You can. What does that do though? Haha, I've never used it.

Normalize just amplifies the sound until the highest peak hits 0dB (or whatever level you set it for).  If you already have peaks that high in your recording it won't do anything at all.

It takes the highest peak and raises the volume of the track.
The highest peak becomes 0dB

The best thing you can do is just adjust all the track volumes by ear.  That's what you're actually going for... for all the tracks to be perceived by a human ear as having the same volume.  That is not the same thing as having identical peak heights in a waveform.

Thank you! Someone finally mentioned psycho-acoustics. Higher pitched sounds usually sound louder than lower pitched sounds, even if your VU meter says they're the same. In my experience certain timbres also seem to sound louder, even at much lower volumes. They seem to cut through the mix. Masking is another weird phenomenon you'll experience in mixing. Cymbals and other sizzley, white-noisey sounds can tend to mask certain lower pitched instruments and frequencies if they're up too loud in the mix.

So it's kind of like a compressor?

Well, a compressor actually changes the relationship of the peaks in the waveform.  Normalize does not, it just raises everything together equally.  It's just a "volume knob" really.

You can. What does that do though? Haha, I've never used it.

Normalize just amplifies the sound until the highest peak hits 0dB (or whatever level you set it for).  If you already have peaks that high in your recording it won't do anything at all.