Thank you Charles, helpful video as always. A quick question: You mentioned using mastering meters to check if other artists clip their masters. Can you very briefly describe how to measure clipping in a commercially mastered song? Thank you!
You can do this using a peak meter! If a song is peaking anywhere above 0 dB, such as at 2 dB, it's clipping. Run some heavy and aggressive EDM tracks through a peak meter and you'll see that a lot of artists clip their masters. If I'm going to clip a song, I prefer to do so using a clipper plugin because I can still provide myself with some headroom to avoid extra distortion being added when I upload the song to streaming services. You can check out how I clip my masters by watching this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Phs51IiTSOo.html
Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. -18 dBU is a peak measurement value at a specific point in time, while an LUFS meter displays a measurement of perceived loudness over a period of time. That's why it's important to have both a peak meter and an LUFS meter.
