Hello, mixing and mastering Engineers. I hope y'all are doing marvellously well. I'm getting started with mixing and mastering and I recently started covering the topic of metering. What would You suggest is the wise way to check the level of a track and the master bus? Please choose the option and mention why you prefer that. Thanks a lot in advance. Good day.
Regards

 

i typically like vu metering for gain staging individual tracks and using lufs for bus groups and my mix bus

 

They meter different things. VU meter, due to its inertia and ballistics, represents the way we hear loudness better. "Fader" meters show accurate peak levels. It's not a matter of preference, if you gonna measure levels, you need both.
Ideally tho, you should strive to judge the relative levels in your mix by ear. Meters are no good for that one task.

 

I mainly stick to channels' level meters. I've never used a VU meter plugin ITB because it was just not necessary. OTOH, when a plugin provides one I have a look at it, ofc.

 

i agree about using lufs for mixing. I tend to use lufs for constructing mix from bottom to the top. it's good idea for balancing at least.

 

The main argument why VU is good in the digital realm is because analog plugins work best at a certain value, I think thats if you calibrate -18 dBFS to be 0 VU or so.
Well, or you just use your fucking ears instead, lol.
Same for Autogain, that's a nice feature for virtually every plugin, but you can work around easily by inserting 2 gain plugins.

If you can read Peak and RMS I feel like you are in the same ballpark of VU metering anyways, it's just a very specific algorithm you don't really need, but hey the meters look cool so that's like free advertisement for all plugin companies that sell them, right? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

One unit of measure I really like "number juggling" with is the crest factor, good to keep an eye on that to make drums sound consistently good, it's kinda like a measurement for punchiness if you could say so.

 

i've never understood why gain staging actually matters... like dont record so fucking hot and you wont have an issue?

 

Glad someone mentioned the crest factor. I found it [100 years ago] to sound the best around 10dBs on drums. Not 3, or 6, but 10. So the freaking drums can move the speaker driver instead of just keeping it stack out all the time.

 

i have no hand in recording a lot of the stuff i mix, so the levels i receive tend to be all over the place. gain staging gives me a good idea of how hot every signal within a particular session is and helps me start every mix at a standard place, similar to how it would be if i tracked it all myself. it also helps ensure that i'm close to the sweet spot on some of the analog modeled plugins + hardware that i like to use during the mix process. feels like a fair trade for just a few minutes of my time at the start of each session

 

utility gain plugin, daw meters and your own ears, this whole gain-staging thing is so cringe as it's literally just gaining to the levels you are comfortable working with and you don't distort master... I will never understand how can people depend on some dsp meters (at least exclusively) and not use ears we got from our beautiful god