ITB Mastering Chain Suggestions

It always changes but for the last 100 masters or so these have all made it: Make Believe/MH Sontec EQ, Equilibrium, Abyss (emulating a Mu), Airwindows Bit Shift gain and Purest Gain, Ozone, Sakura Dither.

Make Believe Mixhead, Sontec, MH Sonic Eq, Unisome (sometimes) AOM invisible Limiter G2.
I also do a bunch of analogue hybrid masters but when ITB thats typical.

Do you use Purest Gain as the fine tune adjustment for Bit Shift Gain's fixed incremental  6dB?

Always changing. Currently.

Pipeline XT (Silver Bullet -> Tegeler Crème)

LTL Silver Bullet plugin (just using Aspect Ratio and vintage HPF)

Bloom

bx_refinement

Ozone 11 (often only one module or two, I just A/B each one and usually leave most off)

Sonnox Limiter




I also have a bunch of other limiters that I will try if the song seems to want something different. TDR and bx_True Peak mainly.

The TDR Combo: Kotelnikov for slight compression, Slick EQ M for EQ and TDR Limiter at the end. Sometimes I add a bit of saturation before too.

Sometimes yeah.  In general I like using the 6dB jumps before and after some processes and use the Purest Gain instead of the gain in plugins, sounds crazy but a lot of times it sounds better (a subtle thing for sure and I don't always do it as it can be impractical).  This is a more recent thing, I hadn't used Airwindows in over a decade and have been coming back to them lately (I don't use them for mastering but the reverb plugins he makes are really amazing).  

Totally depends but ProQ-3, TDR Nova, Silver Bullet and TDR Limiter is a great start

EQ: TDR Slick EQ GE is a fabulous broad EQ. Narrow bells, Softube Weiss EQ 1 / EQ MP or PSP Master Q2. The MDWEQ anti-alias filter are audible at 44.1 and 48 kHz but sometimes it sounds better so I use it.

Filters: TDR filter bundle. Infrasonic and Ultrasonic are so good. Arbiter is the best de-esser around.

Compressors: TDR Kotelnikov GE and Softube Weiss DS1. I used to use MDWDRC2 a lot but it pumps horrible on transients. It won't speed up to suppress or shape them, it will miss them and then release incorrectly and pump them up on mix bus and in mastering. PSP Mastercomp is old school and still good too. Unisum is cool but it's never beaten Kotelnikov GE and Weiss DS1 head to head. If you unsmooth the compression, Unisum tends to sound like a Distressor ime and then I'd rather use Molot GE. I've used Neold V76U73 on some releases I don't like the sound of anymore.

Limiters: Here's where the balls hit the wall. They all distort from digital artifacts or being so fast on attack and release. If they do not produce harmonic distortion when when sweeping around a sine, you have issues because the lookahead is too long so it's affecting past events based on what's going on in the future, potentially undoing mix moves, and not limiting transients because the events are still there, just ramped down like bad automation. Many limiters come with stock settings with a far too long lookahead.

Wut I use:
MJUC mk1 sometimes works for just taking some peaks off.
Sonnox Oxford Limiter if anyone wants to sound like a pedal or a FET comp or SSL bus if it was holding hunter biden's crack pipe like a bus compressor limiting with distortion (enhance / safe mode) or an additional true peak limiter (auto comp). Oxford Limiter doesn't totally take the drums out and sound mono like L2.
TDR Limiter 6 GE just to take peaks off. Single band and brickwall. 1x just for peaks. On tonal content it sounds like clipping or a cleaner FET comp like a Daking pushed hard. 2x is normal. 3x is some mushy stool and I hate everything I ever did with 3x.
PSP Xenon sometimes is best. Usually B or C. A is straight clipping. Turn on all the good options. Use the leveler a little bit. Set transient and release and link to taste.
Softube Weiss MM is some cracked out sheened stuff. It is cool for making random distorted music slam and get loud without shifting around the tone like crazy.

Ursa boost I've never been able to make work easily on a master because 40 ms lookahead pumps like crazy and 2ms often distorts horribly. It is cool though.
Stealth Limiter sounds great I just refuse to pay IK anything or keep it on my computer. The only developer that makes you install two programs to use their plugins the IK Download Manager and the IK Custom Shop to activate them.

Everything multiband sounds like shit. Even TDR where when digging in, it will breath when triggered by bass and take the highs off if triggered by highs. Everything I did with TDR multiband is too dark. Limitless is similar but the peak limiting park isn't oversampled, only the clipper is, so it sounds even worse. Eventide Elevate sounds like a guitar amp. If TDR x1 mode has a shoulder tat like Werner Herzog and Oxford Limiter has a bunch of random tats over the arms, Elevate is a full on horrible Ben Affleck drunken phoenix back tattoo that looks like a Pokemon.

Maor Appelbaum’s The Oven plugin is really awesome. The new Soundtheory Kraftur is absolutely amazing.

not really a "suggestion" as this is just what I've been using...  Amek 200 or BAX EQ, Slate VBC (or sometimes Townhouse), Slate FG-X2.  of course that's for something that resemble some form of rock.   other types of music get something else. 

edit: I should also mention that many of the projects I work on are very low budget so I mix into the mastering chain the whole time because it's never going anywhere else (i.e. to another mastering engineer) and this way the client gets to hear what the final version will sound like as we go along.  When they approve, it's done and can be distributed immediately thereafter... (or as soon as I bounce the correct format of files).

This is a weirdly accurate way of describing what I like about Sonnox Limiter. Haha. Just a little crack is nice sometimes...I swear I'm not addicted, I can stop any time I want.