Master level or limiter ?

[Poukav]

Hi everyone !

I was asking myself one question. Maybe Stupid.

When your master level is going on red at the end of your production, before mastering. You can use a limiter to set the maximum level at 0db for example. But what's about changing the master level (I'm using ableton live) ? Is there any difference for the mastering ?
That's happened in one of my old, old, old production not finalize yet.
Concretely what is the better solution (okey don't put your level in red, but when it happen a little bit, sometimes it's hard to manage..) ? I think limiter will be better, but maybe I'm wrong.

Quick and simple question. Maybe a simple explanation ?

Thanks all !

[Tarekith]

If you're not trying to master it yourself, just lower the master fader until the master channel is no longer red. Using a Limiter will do this too sometimes, but you're going to be permanently affecting the audio with that method, and really limiting the options for anyone mastering your work (even if that's you too). Here's a few ways I suggest approaching gain staging for mixing and mastering so you don't need to worry about that kind of stuff while writing:

http://tarekith.com/assets/pdfs/Mixdowns.pdf

http://tarekith.com/assets/pdfs/Mastering.pdf

[R01]

+1 Tarekith.

In my experience you never want to run audio channels that hot, just lower the master fader if you're getting to that point. Ideally you're mixing as closely to 0dB as possible without clipping, this gives you a good signal to noise ratio. You want don't want to kill all the dynamics, so just make sure your peaks aren't going in the red.

In the mastering stage some compression will glue the tracks a little more, as well as control dynamics a tiny bit, but that's about it. I personally try to avoid limiters at all costs.

[Poukav]

Thanks for your response, help a lot !

[Negatron]

Using a limiter to compensate for bad mixing should never be the answer. If you want the best quality sound you should not put a limiter on your master before its actually mastered for a variety of reasons.

1. Before you enter the mastering stage your going to want at least 3 to 6 decibels of headroom to give yourself or the mastering engineer space to work with.
2. Your mix will sound cleaner and there wont be and sonic distortion due to clipping. Clipping is when your level peaks and red appears.
3. People who master HATE when people send them tracks to master with a limiter on it.

R01 has the right idea by lowering your entire projects level to avoid clipping. Either by selecting them all and lowering them all by a certain decibel. Or the pain in the ass way depending if you have automation, by manually lowering each tracks automation.

phew. But thats all in IMHO

[Polygon]

Buy the sausage fattener, turn all the knobs to the right and voila, your perfect limiter.


On a more serious note, limiters are useful as a last-resort technique to make your track sound "louder" and "fuller". There are many great free limiters out there, but i personally prefer the PSP xenon.

If you are still in the early process of producing the track, i'd say try to mix it before, getting everything sounding great and not clipping without a limiter, because you can always push your volume up a notch and lower the dynamic range, but you almost always cannot do the opposite.