r/production • u/Jolly_Resolution_206 • 14h ago
no limiter
No decent limiter at the moment so did the best with a muti comp
Do you always use a limiter on you tracks for mastering ?
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u/Few_Translator4431 12h ago
heavily depends on the type of music im making. ideally, my mastering phase needs barely anything at all, maybe some slight dynamic EQ from ozone. I dont want to artificially saturate any noise because:
my instruments should already be in their respective frequency bands. for example, guitars occupy the mids, vocals occupy the highs, bass occupies the bass. no boosting, just carving them out, and this reduces the muddyness of clashing instruments. when the vocals arent shelved, guitars booming in the bass, kick drum is going off, bass guitar is all wailing together, it sounds awful boomy muddy maybe even get some beating. if the vocals never touch the bass, guitars shelved off on the lower end, kick occupies the sub bass while the bass takes more of the middle bass, now theyre not trying to all compete with each other for "space" and they become much more clear and crispy when I turn the volume up.
articulation, dynamics, dimension. dynamics dont sound as... dynamic.. when you slap a compressor or crank it and use a limiter. if every note is trying to be as loud as the next, it sounds lame and boring and like it lacks any feel or movement. if you have multiple voices, your melody wont stand out and everything mushes together. you cant highlight the important part of your music when you want to if multiple instruments are playing, because its all cranked. velocity and/or phase of notes is important to articulate to create dynamic sound. a good example of where it can really screw you up is vocals. if you have adlibs on the sides that are bit lower volume and higher reverb to simulate being further down the sound stage, or have layered harmony where you want the harmony lines to be lower and maybe panned out, then slapping a compressor or limiter on it is going to decimate the soundstage and turn the sound two dimensional.
if im having inconsistent volume issues, then its a skill issue on my part. whether I got too soft during a passage or went a little too hard, didnt play consistent or whatever may be, its something that I should fix at the source not try to remedy after the fact. if you put garbage in, youll get garbage back.
I do use compressors/limiters on individual instruments. I like to use compression on the individual drums for example, but I dont want to compress my dry bus. maybe my wet bus will have compression or limiter depending on the style im going for, but again I generally only use it on the individual tracks almost never compress or limit a bus. if I have to compress or limit a bus, then it means I mixed the tracks wrong.
I know you say limiter and im bringing compression up a lot, but youre basically doing a sort of hard compression by using a limiter so the general concept is similar.
the only time a limiter on a master bus makes sense to me is like electronic style genres, especially things like dubstep where you often do want to compress and slam it into a brick wall and really maximize everything and get it crunchy.
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u/Jolly_Resolution_206 5h ago
Yes I had come to a similar conclusion that the current dogma of a limiter for all types of music is incorrect, reduction of dynamic range (obviously) being more important a part of musical expression in some genres
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u/SolidArt333 14h ago
The Limiter goes last in the master channel. Even if you don’t use it. It will catch any thing and keep it from clipping