Yeah, he was staging the gain in VMR to get the levels right in the chains. But the tracks were all in the red

 

STOP MIXING TO A TARGET LOUDNESS.

Make songs with emotional impact and sway, make it catchy, make it good.

When you go for loudness right out the gate, you might as well be saying am shit, better do what I can to cover up how shit I am.

Stop using RMS a loudness measurement, Root Mean Square of different meters are not normalized. Window time and SQW, SSW, Window Function can not only vary between one meter and the next but most time the user is able to change them at will.

If you want to talk about loudness use LKFS or LUFS, they are not perfect and they have issues but at least you now the measurements are kind of standard.

 

I use LUFS metering on my final limiting chain looking for the average, but rms when mixing looking for peaks and overs. Its just the way my flow developed, no one said to do it that way, it just made sense to me at the time

 

The best advice you can give to anyone, really.
The sad thing is, the guy will not listen to actual advice.

 

You don't have to worry this much about clipping in mixing. As long as it's not your master bus, there is no problem. (except if it sounds bad). Why? Because in the digital world and esp in the modern one (->32 bit daws only), clipping still exist but is way above 0db on inner mixer tracks. The 32 floating point bits give a huge dynamic range, to really clearly hear clipping you'd have to push the fader at like +15db above 0. Having some peaks above 0 in mixer tracks? Dont run to your fader/limiter. Listen carefully, tweak it depending. Dont worry about clipping out of the master track/domain.