hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all
are doing well today I have a new tutorial where we're gonna talk about
how to get louder mixes this is probably the number one question I get many of
you are exporting your mixes and you're comparing them to other commercially
released records you're listening in the car you're listening on your Spotify and
your mixes sound really quiet compared to other commercially released tracks
now there's a whole other conversation about the difference between mixing and
mastering but nowadays those two processes are starting to become more
and more closely related and intertwined a lot of you myself included are
achieving your loudness in your mixing session and not relying so much on
stereo buss processing to get your levels. Now I'm a more stylistically
aggressive mixer, meaning that I like to push my faders and I'm not as concerned
about how hot I'm pushing things to the stereo bus and then in terms of any
processing on the master I'm just trying to keep things in check I want to keep
things from clipping and I'm putting any kind of icing on the cake just to make
sure that it's ready to go now the other approach is that you're
gonna want to be more conservative with your levels in the mixing process and
rely more on the heavy lifting to be done in the mastering or the stereo buss
processing and that is going to be relying on a limiter to be doing the
heavy lifting versus your faders and your actual levels in the mixing that's
being pushed to the stereo buss to do the heavy lifting
so let's talk about first just the kind of ideology or where this originated for
me was I was actually working with a an engineer in a studio who had a hardware
SSL console you know the big massive mixing console that you see in a lot of
studios and he would actually keep the G master buss compressor
that was on the ssl board he would leave this engaged and mix into it so and it
gave him a certain sound but it also kept everything controlled so no matter
how you know aggressively he was pushing things he was gonna know that it was
being run through that G master buss compressor and everything was kept in
check so we're not going to be using the the compressor today but the method in
the approach is very similar in that we're mixing into a limiter so first let
me just show you I've got this mix and what I did was I just bounced this
session down without any of our limiter or anything else on it and this is
probably what a lot of your mixes look like let me just play this back and keep
an eye on the rms level over here
all right so our rms has given us a reading of like -18 and you
see in logic we've got about 8dB of headroom it does get a little louder
over here so let's just say we've got 6 dB of headroom so plenty of headroom
there to work with and when we export this it is going to be quite a bit
quieter compared to a commercially released track
until we get to a more competitive level RMS wise which over here was like
-6 RMS that's going to be able to compete a lot better so the method
that I use is I actually mix into the limiter now this way you can actually
hear how the limiter is going to interact with your dynamics with your
transients and get a feel for what the mastering process is actually going to
do or maybe you want to just do it yourself and you want to be able to
release your track and have it compete level wise it's an easy way to do it and
you're not gonna have to worry about clipping or anything like that because
you can have conservative levels and again rely on this limiter more now the
catch to this is and one of the things that I've told you ought to be very
careful about is the limiter if you're gonna rely on it this heavily they do
have a different sound to each of them and they treat transients and drums
quite differently so if you send this to a mastering engineer the guesswork
becomes which limiter are they gonna use because it might come back and your
drums sound quite different because of the way they processed it so we want to
experiment or I encourage you to experiment with different limiters to
find out which one is the most transparent which one treats your
dynamics the best so for me personally I've been mixing into the ozone 8
Maximizer module which is just the Maximizer from the ozone advanced suite
and I just set it to any kind of you're really transparent transparent IRC which
these are just the different algorithms that the limiter is using there's also a
low latency mode now which is really helpful if you're using a limiter in
this fashion mixing into it because it's going to make sure that it's keeping
things efficient and you're not gonna have a lot of delay in terms of mixing
into it but it for transparency purposes I've been using the IRC IV and I'll
turn on true peak which this is going to take into account the clipping that
could happen when you're going from the digital domain into the analog domain
so then we can just set the threshold the same way we did with the l2
so now when you're mixing into it we can really focus on let's say you know our
kick where is our kick let me mute the mix or excuse me the bounce
and we'll go to the actual mix let's see
so you can really be listening to what that Maximizer or that limiter is going
is going to do to your drums so this is a really effective thing for those of
you who are reliant on having punchy drums these days that's most every genre
that's using something electronic and even the rock drums are really punchy
and you want to maintain those transients so this is going to be just a
lot less guesswork for you to mix in to it and it's a safer way to get level out
of your mix and be able to compete and not have to worry about clipping or
anything like that and the limiters and the Maximizer is on the market these
days are just flat-out better than they have been in the past this is going to
give you an effective way to get your mixes louder have them compete but also
be able to be more conservative with your levels keep everything in check and
then when you're done you have the freedom to just take that limiter off
and send it to a mastering engineer and you can say hey you know I was mixing
into the ozone 8 IRC 4 so I really want to maintain that sound if you do decide
to use a limiter like that that's my preference and you can tell them that
and then they can do what they need to do in addition to that but at least then
you're not leaving one of the most important aspects of really the mix and
the master and the levels in general to them to choose you know which one they
use you want to know what it's gonna sound like and tell them hey this is the
one we need to go with alright y'all so hope this is helpful if you have any
questions about getting louder mixes feel free to leave a comment below if
you learned anything in the video please like and subscribe and we'll talk to you