This channel is a great resource for mixing advice and tips, Ive learned a lot from this guy.
If you want to get your ghetto masters loud enough to compete with others then this video here has some great advice on clipping, limiting and saturation, chipping away gradually at the peaks to achieve a low crest factor(the difference between the loudest peaks, and the quietest troughs) instead of expecting the master bus limiter to do all the work and wondering why you cannot achieve a loud master without the final limiter crushing the hell out of it or it being distorted to fuck.
In a nutshell, use clippers and limiters on loud transient instruments, like snares, kicks and vocals for example, the key is how big the peaks are, to clip/limit small amounts from the transients on the individual tracks, then also clip on the drum bus and vocal bus, then clip on the final master just before the final limiter, this takes away the hard work from the final limiter. You only want to push your final limiter to at tops -6db reduction to keep it transparent, if you start pushing it further than that then its starts to sound crushed.
Different compressors have different attack speeds, sometimes a compressor/limiters attack isnt fast enough to catch the transient completely, thats where clipping comes in. It does add distortion which is why many small clips instead of one big one works so much better. You can make up the loss in volume on clipped channels by using saturation, saturation adds upper frequency harmonics which due to how our ears are tuned to the frequency range of a human voice, smaller boosts to that range can make sounds sound louder while not actually being louder and having smaller peaks.
The goal is transparency, not being able to hear the distortion that clipping/compression/limiting adds, but it being there enough to do what its meant to do, make something sound louder without being actually louder.
Personally I have replaced a lot of my compression with clipping, I still use bus compression and side chained compression. But then I have also replaced a lot of that side chained compression with Duck, a transient shaper.
Hope this can help some of you guys wondering why you cant get your master to -9db LUFS without it sounding like shit as a result. With correct clipping/compression/limiting and saturation you can get a master as loud as -4db LUFS, for genres such as drum and bass. But Ive personally never achieved something so loud. -6 to -7db LUFS is about my limit.
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