More on Post Production:

So how do you make your recording reasonably loud but still have good dynamic range.  If you look at the "volume envelope" of most recordings as displayed by most editors, you will see narrow spikes are the loudest parts.  These momentary spikes are essentially inaudible and can be "shaved off", allowing the track to be normalized considerably louder with no audible effect on the music.  To do this, you use a limiter.  The limiter is set up to remove some of the extraneous peaks, which will allow the normalizer to add gain without clipping.  What is the difference between a limiter and clipping?  A good limiter, properly set up (these days, your limiter will probably be a plug in or setting in your audio editing software) will "shave off" the peaks inaudibly. Clipping will probably cause annoying distortion.

There is a limit to how much you can limit the recording.  If you shave off too much, you will find the track will loose its dynamics, and you may hear "pumping" where a loud note in one part of the audio spectrum, often the bass, will cause the audio in the other parts of the spectrum, like the midrange to momentarily dip.  If this happens in one of your recordings and you need to limit the audio without pumping, there is a plug-in called a multi-band limiter but its set up is beyond what we are doing here.

Knowing how much to limit is an art, trial and error.  You need to listen carefully to the resulting track.  I do it by eyeball, looking at the volume envelope and deciding how many dB I can shave off without damaging the sound of the track.  If you are not sure, try different amounts of limiting followed by normalization and see what results you like.  Less is better until the track plays back "too soft".

There is another method recently made available which takes most of the guesswork out of this, but it was initially only available in more expensive software.  It is called "loudness control" and was developed to help TV stations control "loud" commercials.  You set a desired loudness number, -18 LKFS is a good conservative number, -14 is a little louder, and apply the software to the track.  If it is a good plug-in or software package it will apply a "transparent" limiter as needed and normalize the track to play at exactly the desired loudness and not clip.  Some packages may not include the limiter, rather they will tell you how many dB you have to shave off with the limiter to be able to apply the loudness plug-in without clipping.  I have recently started using the very good loudness plug-in that is a part of Izotope RX Advanced to normalize all my tracks.

The next step is to apply fades at the beginning and end of each track.  At the beginning, I use a graphical fade in, where I completely attenuate the track for almost the entire 0.350 second and then quickly fade in ending at exactly .350 second (see above about the start mute time of CD players to understand this.)  At the end of the track, the fade depends on how the track ends.  If there is long applause, I apply a slow, even fade of two to three seconds at the track end.  I don't like to fade applause faster, as to me it sounds "chopped off".  If there is no applause or short applause, I apply a short quick smooth fade after the last note before the end of the track.

Finally, you probably want to add metadata and either burn CD's of the completed album or make computer files to listen to.  If you are making computer files, the metadata tags are necessary for the player (Windows Media Player, Foobar 2000, your smartphone software, etc.) to locate the track.  At the minimum you need Track Number (make it track one for a "single" track), Track Name, (Track) Artist, Album Name, Album Artist (may be the same as Track Artist), and probably Genre and Year.  You can add more, like composer, etc.  Most tagging standards don't make provision for Arranger, something many steelband people would like included, but you can usually add custom tags.  Unfortunately most playing software won't show custom tags.  Another way is to use the "comments" tag, with an entry like "Arranger: John Doe".

Your editing software will probably have a way of making FLAC files for computer storage playback, and/or mp3 or m4a files for portables or .WAV files to make a CD if the editing software doesn't include a CD burner package.  One other note:  If you are burning a CD, burn it DAO (Disk at once, all the tracks are burnt at the same time) not TAO (one track at a time.)  Many players will not properly play TAO CD's, and if they do, you'll likely get a loud pop between tracks.