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Post by OtisGreying on May 3, 2022 21:03:31 GMT -6
I started my latest mix into my Tokyo Dawn Limiter 6, the mix is very close to being done and the limiter is doing about 2.5-3 db when my snare hits right now, when I take the limiter off the snare sounds a bit too pokey but thats cause I've been mixing into the limiter, I wonder - should I not rely on the limiter to be making the snare work even if it sounds good?
And as I'm getting further along I'm wondering "why wouldn't I mix at the full level so I have the best idea of what people are actually gonna be hearing?"
Less curveballs, no?
But often I read it being a controversial take - lots of people advise against it maybe because relying on the limiting to shape the mix would make the mix suffer if you aren't careful about over limiting things. (or I think that's what they mean)
Do you guys mix with limiters on or off and why?
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Post by ShadowK on May 3, 2022 21:45:04 GMT -6
I mix into a mastering limiter, always have because in the past quite a few artists or bands didn't care about the fine definitions between mixing and mastering. They compared it to their favourite songs, it sounded quiet, they didn't like it so I just skipped a step.. I've seen a few, well recognised mixers put limiters / MB comps / transient enhancers / fixing tools etc. etc. on every individual track, they still call it "mixing" but it's a bunch of semantics in my book.
Yes, I understand that there's a lot more to mastering than slapping a limiter on the master bus and I offered it as a separate service to those who knew the difference. Although if one is a "technical" mixer who can make decisions about their own tracks with a level of detachment the lines become blurry rather quick, in a professional sense there's nothing to stop you doing the mastering portion from the ground up as part of an "overarching" mix and develop the track based upon the specific limiting tools at your disposal. It's an approach nothing more..
That being said it's nice to get a second opinion on these things and not doing so can be detrimental. On the other hand I have on occasion remastered a track because handing it off didn't work out too well, sooo yeah it depends on the situation I guess.
I think my point is there's no "right way", if it works then cool.. Good job, move on..
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Post by EmRR on May 3, 2022 22:31:46 GMT -6
I’ll use a software limiter to catch the couple of stray transients, but that’s it. I still prefer an outside mastering engineer with fresh ears, who can hear what I no longer can, preferably in a far better monitoring situation than mine. It’s my job to leave them room to maneuver dynamically. I find the good mastering guys do things to my mix I can’t even understand, in good ways. If I’ve already flattened it, then they can’t so much. Then, I always prefer the dynamics of master tapes over limited final masters anyway. That squashed smaller sounding final gives me something to blame on someone else! : )
My mix comp is usually set 1.2:1, hitting 0.5-1dB. Anything that needs more is dealt with at track or bus level. I vastly prefer individual track processing and a nearly untouched mix that sounds open and dynamic, with all the pieces existing in their own boxes versus mushed together. I'm compressing a little while tracking, then maybe again some in the DAW. Very rare I'm at ratios over 3:1.
The one place I do mix into a limiter is the streaming music show - goal is a live mix with picture that doesn’t require post-production time. Sort of a ‘good enough’ situation. Multitracked and all camera angles saved just in case, but rarely revisited.
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Post by drumsound on May 3, 2022 23:51:00 GMT -6
I mix into a mix bus compressor. It's patched in before I start mixing.
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Post by thehightenor on May 4, 2022 0:23:21 GMT -6
I mix into a VCA > Vari Mu > EQ
Then at the mastering stage add a touch of Limiter.
I guess I could add the limiter to the mix stage without too much change to my workflow.
But as I’ve worked the same way for so long now I may as well stick to my current method.
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Post by paulcheeba on May 4, 2022 0:25:52 GMT -6
I always mix into a long hardware mix/mastering chain that currently has 3 eqs 2 compressors, 2 limiters and MAS. Sometimes an HG2 too. The great thing is I don’t really need software after.
It’s all very light though.
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Post by Dan on May 4, 2022 0:26:10 GMT -6
Can work in practice, bad idea in principle. Better to use some kind of clipper or saturation device to just to get rid of and distort the peaks without modulating whatever else is going on when the snare hits. Andrew Scheps admitted he just uses the U-he Satin clipper. If you don't want to distort anything else, limit the snare with a working limiter, that is a working fast attack compressor, or one of the handful of lookahead limiters that can truly peak limit and aren't levelers + unoversampled clippers with program dependent holds. Or saturate or clip the snare.
All that being said, I wouldn't go back and redo work that's working. Just something to keep in mind for the future. If you're mix is DONE, let it be done.
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Post by christophert on May 4, 2022 0:49:41 GMT -6
I only mix into tube preamps and hardware EQ's.
Sometimes use a hardware comp at the end of the chain.
No limiting - leaving that for later. If I have regular peaks from drums poking through, I would rather treat them at the source.
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Post by Ward on May 4, 2022 6:21:42 GMT -6
I do, for two reasons
1. Pre-mastering so that I don't have the sound drastically changed by the mastering process and clients are satisfied.
2. Limiting in advance, I hear exactly what the main buss limiter(s) is going to do to the final mix and already know what the final product will sound like
Ok, one reason.
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Post by srb on May 4, 2022 7:26:04 GMT -6
I mix into a comp and eq. The comp is doing 3-4 dB GR, but at about 50% wet/dry. I do prefer the dynamics of -16 to -14 RMS level mix. I prefer to raise the overall gain/level later in steps (one analog, one digital), if I'm mastering, too.
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Post by svart on May 4, 2022 7:32:31 GMT -6
You should.
I always have in some form or another. When doing OTB mixes I would always push into the converters to transient clip. Now that I'm ITB, I'm actually finding that I don't need to limit transients that much anymore, but I keep a safety L1 as the last plug in the master bus just hitting the very peaks of the transients to keep them at -0.2db. It barely ticks on some snare hits here and there.
Usually my RMS is around -12dB with this happening.
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Post by drbill on May 4, 2022 9:39:17 GMT -6
With streaming site LUFS levels being more realistic (-14LUFS), I'm finding I don't need that much limiting anymore compared to a decade ago. I mix with a Silver Bullet (now mk2) and Zod's on the mix buss. They do shave off transients and thicken and I use them for the TONE, but they don't really clamp down like a traditional limiter. When I get to mastering, a gentle kiss from a hardware Manley Vari-Mu - maybe 2-3dB max, and some small to mid transient control from Fabfilter L2 almost always gets me to the desired levels. Hitting the limiter hard and getting everything small and crunched seems to (mostly) be a thing of the past now. Checking LUFS while mixing has become super important for me. The TC Clarity is always on, and gives a great real-time glimpse of how much will be needed come mastering....
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Post by Ward on May 4, 2022 10:42:33 GMT -6
With streaming site LUFS levels being more realistic (-14LUFS), I'm finding I don't need that much limiting anymore compared to a decade ago. I mix with a Silver Bullet (now mk2) and Zod's on the mix buss. They do shave off transients and thicken and I use them for the TONE, but they don't really clamp down like a traditional limiter. When I get to mastering, a gentle kiss from a hardware Manley Vari-Mu - maybe 2-3dB max, and some small to mid transient control from Fabfilter L2 almost always gets me to the desired levels. Hitting the limiter hard and getting everything small and crunched seems to (mostly) be a thing of the past now. Checking LUFS while mixing has become super important for me. The TC Clarity is always on, and gives a great real-time glimpse of how much will be needed come mastering.... Great insight, It's hard to break old habits. |
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Post by ShadowK on May 4, 2022 22:45:59 GMT -6
With streaming site LUFS levels being more realistic (-14LUFS), I'm finding I don't need that much limiting anymore compared to a decade ago. It has for sure made it easier to keep a track intact but if we forget vinyl and album correlation plus meta / ISRC / UPN for a second mastering used to be about enhancement. For example it's far easier to do M/S processing on a master bus or summed track than it is to cohesively do the same over several busses. Now volume levels have calmed down I can switch my hardware BM ML for example into M/S mode, enhance frequency range harmonics, use the output function as a restrained clipper / saturator before doing a bit of transient extension in Ozone which is used as a secondary brick wall to take some of the load off the BM. Outside of M/S mode the BM is probably the loudest / least damaging brick wall I've heard but like every overmastered track it still doesn't sound "right".. I can get a decent boost in volume without touching a limiter by engaging a tube boost on the Empress EQ HW, there's also a shift function which is supposed to bring both cuts and boosts more "in line" even though it sounds like more M/S processing to me. Of course, I could attempt to do all of this whilst mixing now that toolset definitions have become mightily blurred and if done right a limiter should only raise the volume.However that was far more difficult to achieve when limiter tech wasn't at the level it is now and most of us were chasing the loudness wars. In the past if you hit a brickwall that hard I could guarantee the tonal balance of a mix would completely shift, in that scenario there was way too much guesswork at the mix stage. I know many learned to compensate but it didn't make the process any less hit or miss.. Presently mastering limiters are generally excellent even if they have their own musical quirks, at lower volumes they're far less damaging and mixing into a suite of mastering tools is cool but the use case scenario has completely changed. When it comes to master bus compression I don't tend to use it as an overarching compressor, during my 10,000 original hours I had a tendency to over compress everything so I started experimenting with several techniques and settled on parallel mixing everything. The MB comp for me is just a wet / dry blend of the track adjusted to whatever needs it the most. I'm sure you know far more than me Bill but as we're all sharing experiences  .. |
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Post by drbill on May 4, 2022 22:52:32 GMT -6
With streaming site LUFS levels being more realistic (-14LUFS), I'm finding I don't need that much limiting anymore compared to a decade ago. I'm sure you know far more than me Bill .. Doubtful. I just use my ears, and go for what makes me smile the most.....at - 14 LUFS. |
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Post by Dan on May 5, 2022 8:02:34 GMT -6
I'm sure you know far more than me Bill .. Doubtful. I just use my ears, and go for what makes me smile the most.....at - 14 LUFS. Keep in mind Bill that LUFS is just an RMS meter with a gate that has little bearing on music signals. This is why the instant reading of a LUFS meter is more useful than the momentary, peak, or integrated ones. It does not replace RMS, PPM, -dbfs, or true peak meters. The gate in the integrated LUFS meter is also how EDM producers defeat the streaming service normalization. The breaks and intros cause many of the loud parts to be gated away, lowering the LUFS readout. Metalcore is the only other genre I can think of off the top of my head that does this. So the most formulaic, most corporate (look at EDM festivals), genres of modern popular music defeat the corporate endorsed algorithms on the corporate streaming services to be given priority during playback. Of course if you raised classical music or older rock masters to the same RMS level as EDM, it would be way louder and punchier. |
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Post by Martin John Butler on May 5, 2022 8:49:37 GMT -6
To me, it's all about finding the tone you want. I've often used the UAD ATR-102 for adding some level, and then used the Black Box for tone and a little compression and two compressors further down the 2 bus. I've never used the limiter setting though.
Lately, I've gotten more adept at hearing the tonal differences compressors make more than the volume change. My last final mix only had one compressor after the ATR-102 and Black box, and I used barely 2 db of compression.
I"m working on a mix right now with just the ATR-102 and the Black box on the 2 bus. I tried a half dozen compressors and every one changed the tone of the track in such a way that I preferred the sound with no compression. It's a mostly acoustic track, nothing big or bold, no drums, no bass. I decided to leave well enough alone and let mastering bring this one up to proper levels.
So, I no longer automatically compress for volume, I compress for tone only.
Now, that might change if I had some hardware compression down the road.
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Post by bossanova on May 5, 2022 20:28:01 GMT -6
I'm sure you know far more than me Bill .. Doubtful. I just use my ears, and go for what makes me smile the most.....at - 14 LUFS. To echo this, I also mix with YouLean Loudness meter inserted partway through the process (it provides a great visual timeline for not only LUFS, but also for Peak to Loudness ratio over the course of a recording). What I found is that (given my own work or the sources I’m usually working with) my ears tend to arrive naturally at somewhere between -13 and -16 LUFS once the (non limited) output on the mix bus has been adjusted to peak at -1db or so. If I’m coming in quieter than that, it could be because it’s an especially dynamic arrangement but usually it’s because there’s a track peaking and eating up headroom somewhere. And so I end up at -14 on average because my internal reference curve starts hearing squash after that, unless it’s something like piano/vocal or recording without drums where there won’t be as many extended transients. |
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Post by ericn on May 5, 2022 20:42:26 GMT -6
In the early days of digital it was pretty common, I mean gee we were so used to the fact that zero was not the line of death. If I have mixed to analog for a while hell yeah you will find some kind of limiter if I’m mixing to digital again.
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Post by Dan on May 5, 2022 20:59:33 GMT -6
In the early days of digital it was pretty common, I mean gee we were so used to the fact that zero was not the line of death. If I have mixed to analog for a while hell yeah you will find some kind of limiter if I’m mixing to digital again. Check out U-he Satin as your final insert prior to the dither man. Play with auto-makeup and the soft-clipper. Nothing is getting through that and it won't do any of the weird limiter pumping you don't want. |
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Post by OtisGreying on May 6, 2022 3:59:57 GMT -6
In the early days of digital it was pretty common, I mean gee we were so used to the fact that zero was not the line of death. If I have mixed to analog for a while hell yeah you will find some kind of limiter if I’m mixing to digital again. Check out U-he Satin as your final insert prior to the dither man. Play with auto-makeup and the soft-clipper. Nothing is getting through that and it won't do any of the weird limiter pumping you don't want. How do you like the Tokyo Dawn Limiter's clipper Dan? And the TD Limiter 6 in general? |
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Post by kyamcalvert on May 6, 2022 8:07:32 GMT -6
Paying a few hours time at a decent mastering house to go in and get a handle on how processing affects your mixes is worth its weight in gold.
Mixing "into a limiter" is not something I would personally consider good practice. I'm not going to process an entire mix to tame back a snare that I already have control over. Using dynamics processors to print out a "heated" mix with some volume for a client is a different story. I'll do that if they ask, but usually also take the time to explain that mixing is not mastering and a good ME is going to bless your records in ways I can't as the mix engineer. I tend to live by the doctrine that it's tough to improve something and easy to make it worse. Especially true for "finished" mixes...
Personally I've learned more about tracking and mixing from my mastering guy than anyone else...hearing your mix in a room like that and understanding what that processing is doing is a lesson you just can't learn on your own.
/end unsolicited advice
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Post by sirthought on May 6, 2022 8:30:05 GMT -6
I always mix into compression and a limiter on the mix bus.
But then again, I've been learning more of a top-down technique like that used by Andrew Scheps or Brian Moncarz. I know that's considered controversial or not desirable by some, but it's been working well for me.
And neither are set to anything extreme in the beginning. If compression is hitting more than 2 db then it's not what I want. And the limiter is mainly making sure I'm not clipping, as it gives me a good warning when I check it now and again.
I always mix to where there's lots of headroom available for mastering. But overall I don't worry about the numbers as much as how it sounds. I will see where levels are hitting.
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Post by notneeson on May 6, 2022 13:11:59 GMT -6
I always mix into compression and a limiter on the mix bus. But then again, I've been learning more of a top-down technique like that used by Andrew Scheps or Brian Moncarz. I know that's considered controversial or not desirable by some, but it's been working well for me. Dude, if it's working, who cares? I have yet to hear the internet mix a great record.  |
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Post by Dan on May 6, 2022 15:08:40 GMT -6
Check out U-he Satin as your final insert prior to the dither man. Play with auto-makeup and the soft-clipper. Nothing is getting through that and it won't do any of the weird limiter pumping you don't want. How do you like the Tokyo Dawn Limiter's clipper Dan? And the TD Limiter 6 in general? It’s great for mastering but how the hell do you mix into a milder version of Molot, a dynamic high frequency shelf (the de-esser), an oversampled clipper meant to clip spurious pops and stuff, and a limiter that can be set as multiband? It’s impossible. This separates the functions that most digital limiters claim not to do but are doing or trying to do behind the scenes. PSP Xenon does this too with the glorified clipper and leveler. So they can be much cleaner than say Fabfilter Pro L if operated with care and intent for smaller amounts of gain reduction. Because they’re not simple volume maximizers that level, transient modify, clip, and pump based on program dependent holds. Now people expect limiters to preserve “punch” or some other non-technical term because they’re used to digital limiters that cannot limit. Yes Waves L1 and L2 were developed by smart people yet terrible for sound quality. L1 manual recommended -.3 db headroom lol when the real peaks could be 4-5 db or more higher on these peaky itb productions. Limiters designed openly as distortion devices like the Oxford and Faraday Limiters perform better lol. You don’t even want to use the latter two’s full functions to try to catch stray peaks from lack of peak control in digital mixes because they will cause more harshness and distortion trying to stop the stray over than letting it through on a decent system. And those old “limiters” can’t limit either like a working fast attack compressor. They can only see the samples. Even the standard true peak readouts are +/- 1db all the time. So some limiter from the 90s or early 2000s on your two bus to try not to clip the converters or 24 bit fixed point pcm mix down won’t even work at that. These modern limiters that can like TDR Limiter 6 GE or DMG Limitless are heavy as lead cpu use wise and DMG has a lot do stuff going on the background like the earlier limiters that TDR separated out for more control. You can’t mix into that easily on most computers. Now people still refuse to mix at lower levels or print floating point mix downs meaning the .wav file can’t clip. It’s like people don’t know what floating point audio is. The only problem with printing as 64 or 32 bit float is a little program named Apple Logic truncates 32-bit float files to 24-bit fixed upon import, distorting slightly. Lots of people won’t go out of their way to convert it to 24-bit fixed themselves with an external program or are ignorant of what Logic is doing there so it’s better to just lower the gain to where it won’t clip and print the mix as dithered 24-bit fixed point file to make opening it seemless. The Apple daw can’t even open all the files it can export… |
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