As i'm seeing this question over and over i made a short guide for people struggling to get their masters loud!

 

Thank you very much! Greatly appreciated for your time and effort!

 

That's nice, but shouldn't we compare tracks at the same volume? What the purpose of comparing at three different volume levels? How do we that a simple volume knob boost won't give the same (or better) results?

 

So the real good part of this tutorial is an advice to use a clipper before a true-peak limiter. Indeed, by clipping away transients up until you hear distortion, you make a limiter's job easier, reduce pumping effect and thus achieve greater and cleaner loudness, tho I'd still use a soft-ish (1-3 dB knee) clipper for that, to reduce most of distortion even further.

The rest is kinda mid tho. A saturator is just another, really soft, clipper (which does compress things further with no pumping but some distortion), and it's generally better to use a digital one because of hysteresis effects analog-modelling gear can produce (unless it's a really clean mastering-grade emulation). A compressor should be tuned by ear to the track's rhythm and transient contents so any pumping it introduces is musically pleasant. A VU meter is just useless, lower the volume if you're not sure, otherwise it's year 2025.

AND MOST OF ALL
Loudness starts at mixing stage. Technically even before it, if I'm being accurate.
The demo track the dude uses is properly mixed, it's easy to bring it to -6 LUFS just with a clipper and a limiter. If your track, or a track you're working with, isn't properly mixed - you'll either make all the rubbish louder or won't be able to achieve club loudness at all.
And there's no shortcut to loud mixing. You should control your instruments' and subgroups' dynamics. You should care for proper frequency balance. You should resolve masking.

When this tutorial doesn't work for you - get back to mixing stage, make sure your subs aren't too wide, your bass isn't jumping in volume, your instruments don't clash at highs, mids or God forbid lows, your mids and subs aren't overbearing, and your subgroups are properly limited.

 

True. This is about getting the loudness level up to the desired point. If a Track is not properly mixed then, well, the track is not properly mixed ;)

Also true is that saturation is optional, but as you dont want to push tonal content into the clipper ceiling this is another way to lift weight from the final limiter.

IMO the biggest problem that most people have is pushing limiters to achieve loudness and they either end up with a pumping effect at long release times or nasty artifacts at short releases.

But how is a VU meter useless when using analog emulation? If it models analog it will be modeled to sound best at 0 dBVU?

 

Last edited: Mar 27, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VU_meter
Under "Lead" the foundation is stated for why this is the case.

 

I understand that it is not accurate for measuring peak levels, but to quickly approximate the input level to a plugin this works doesn't it? one could use rms instead but i like that this stays open in the effect section in ableton because it's a max4live device.

i'm trying to remember where i got that practice from, i didn't come up with this myself, i think it was either waves or kush audio.

 

well all 3 in the end are at 0 dB, i thought its obvious that i normalized the original, the track display also got way bigger

 

Personally I would suggest to compress/clip individual elements during production already and to make sure to choose your drum samples/sounds wisely. If you are using a kick or snare, percussion that is mostly transient and only a relatively quiet body, you will end up with something that is rather unmixable. Sure you can compress and clip the hell out of it, but it will sound nothing like the sound you picked in the first place anymore. Plus, if you don't clip/compress it like that, you will most likely end up with a mix that will cause a lot of problems when you want to reach competitive loudness.
That's why I would argue sound selection is the first step to a good and loud mix. Reaching the loudness level you are after is not even all that difficult anymore, then.

 

Most modern analog emus have realistic digital headrooms, and input gain knobs. You just dial it down if it distorts too much.
Don't get me wrong, you're not losing anything other than time by using a VU meter in this way, but you don't gain anything special either.

Want to stress that for highly dynamic music (hi-fi smooth jazz or something) this is a completely viable choice all by itself.
And if you clip the transient and make it louder you can end up with something interesting either way. Otherwise agree.

 

Just put Apogee Soft Limiter on your master channel and crank it up, set output to -1dB. Easy. You could make it DR3 that way if you want.

But seriously, just make a nice sounding mix, then maybe put a quality EQ for slight corrections before ASL on the master and light up a cigar.