# Sound for reels

> Why a reel sounds thin on a phone, and the order of operations that fixes it.
> Part of the Ferment Handbook — https://ferment.run/handbook (index: https://ferment.run/handbook/index.md)
> Canonical page: https://ferment.run/handbook/sound-for-reels

Most reels are watched on a phone speaker, at arm's length, in a room with
other noise in it. That single fact decides more about how a reel should
sound than any plugin setting.

## Loud is not a strategy

Every platform normalises loudness on playback. Master a reel hotter than
the one before it and you do not arrive louder — you arrive at the same
volume with less left in reserve, which is to say flatter. The dynamic
range you spent is simply gone, and nobody hears the trade.

What does carry is *contrast*: a quiet moment before a loud one, a voice
that sits clearly above the bed, a transition that lands because the two
sides of it are not the same size.

## The order of operations

A finishing chain is not a pile of effects, it is a sequence, and the
sequence matters more than the choice of any single link.

1. **Level first.** Get the voice sitting consistently before anything
   else touches it. A leveller that rides gain gently does more for
   intelligibility than any amount of EQ afterwards.
2. **Then shape.** Cut before you boost. Most thin-sounding voices are not
   missing top end, they have too much low-mid.
3. **Then control the peaks.** A clipper handles transient spikes without
   moving the level; a limiter holds the ceiling.
4. **Then the ceiling.** Last in the chain, and only there.

Put the limiter first and everything after it is working on a signal that
has already been squashed.

## Voice above everything

If a viewer has to work to hear the words, nothing else in the mix
matters. Duck the music under speech rather than turning the music down
everywhere — a bed that breathes around the voice reads as intentional,
a bed that is quiet throughout reads as an afterthought.

## What a phone cannot reproduce

A phone speaker has almost no low end. Anything below roughly the bottom
of a male voice is felt on good headphones and simply absent on a
handset. That is not a reason to remove it, but it is a reason not to
*balance* on it — a mix that only works because of its bass will sound
hollow to most of the people who see it.

Check on the worst speaker you own. If it survives that, it survives
everything.