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Thanks mate! I always love your videos and refer to them often. Such amazing resources for the community. I included Ozone Maximizer here mainly on your recommendation. It was fun to use it again. All the best!
Great video, man! A lot of the tracks on Delta Heavy’s Midnight Forever album are hitting around -4 to -2 LUFS, I always wonder how they do it, so this video's super helpful. Another cool thing is Sub Focus-one of the biggest names in DnB-doesn’t use a mastering chain at all. He’s is famous in not believing in master chains it and just relies on clipping and other mixing techniques to hit -6 to -4 LUFS, which is pretty wild. Erb N Dub did a great video on loudness in DnB at DB Institute too, definitely worth checking out!
Hey hey. Thanks for the solid comment. And yes, as I'd mentioned in this video, I do most of the "mastering" work on my Sub-Mixes. I could absolutely turn out at -6 LUFS mix without hitting a mastering chain at all. And you're 100% right, that it involves lots of clipping on tracks, sub-mixes, saturation, limiting at various stages in the mix etc. This is the routing structure and template I use: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cnQC0146TZg.html
Great comparison! I'm glad you called out the high end sounding to "compressed" in IRC 4 Maximizer vs. Limitless. Every time I try IRC 4 I do not like what it does to the high end, but I haven't heard anyone else talk about that until now. I usually use Newfangled Elevate on my masters, which is a 26 band (!) limiter that I think doesn't get a lot of love because it is intimidating and you really have to learn to use that limiter to get the most out of it (like Limitless). Then I have Pro-L2 for when 26 bands is 25 too many. The last few vids featuring Limitless have made me curious about that one too though, if I were to describe its sound compared to everything else on offer here it would be "effortless", which is how I think most mastering processors should sound. I might have to pick up Limitless so I can try it for myself against Elevate. I think the rest of the single-band limiters sound perfectly competent with slight variations on their tonal balance. I'd rank Pro L-2 the best because it feels the punchiest, then IRC 3 because it has a really good tonal balance, but feels slightly overcooked in the upper midrange, and then Smart Limit I'd rank last just because it feels a bit too mid-forward with both the lows and highs rolled off and the whole track is lacking a bit of oomph compared to the other limiters. That said, if I only had one of these I could see sending any of these masters out to a client and them being happy, so no real losers here (except for hard clipping).
Amazing stuff mate. Really appreciate your comments. I take it you’re an engineer? Sounds like it. Yeah all good things to consider. I’ve had a ton of people recommend Elevate. I do have a dialogue going with Newfangled so I’ll reach out to them and see if I can set up Elevate in my next shootout. I want to try Master Plan as well. That’s one that’s been highly recommended too. Hope to see you around the channel. Join up on our Discord server too (link in the video description). Would be nice to have experienced folks like yourself there. Cheers!
I tested 15 limiters and Voxengo Elephant came out on top. Proviously was biased against but i switched it into black mode for the GUI now its the best looking and best performing limiter I've found with the cleanest results both on tonal and rhythmic material
Hey hey. Thanks mate. Oxford Sonnox, I hear good things but honestly I've never had a relationship with that company. If I keep getting requests for it, perhaps I'll reach out. Cheers!
Hi. Did you watch the Limitless section of this video? You pretty much just watched how I set it up for mastering. At least for loud, aggressive music. I also have a full Mastering Sessions Playlist where I use Limitless a lot for various types of genres: ru-vid.com/group/PLsyXZjufQdPx4ITTwPhU6Bf_uxqXNHsxj
smart limit enforces upward compression under the hood, thereby manages to produce less distortion. But, this technique ends up lifting passages that are meant to be soft/relatively quiet to become obviously louder therefore altering the nature of the track itself.
Not sure if it was due to the 78/Hard setting on Smart Limit (which I own and have used) but it, to me, seemed to have the most contrast vs the others during the listening tests. Wasn't a fan of how it sounded in this context. Something about the high end... I recently grabbed the demo of DMG after watching one of your older vids on limiting, and used it in a project for a friend. I did about 12 versions of his master (for fun, trying different plugins and chains) and really got into DMG. I own all of the limiters except DMG, and it's definitely my fav now (Smart Limit takes #2 spot), although the demo has now expired... 😢😢
Great video. I noticed that when using a hard clipper you get extra low frequencies. A hard clipper before the limiter on the master; just reducing tiny peaks 0.5-1.0 dB is ok then ?
How does DMG compares to newfangled elevate, which is also multiband? And also, do u know if DMG has blackfriday sales for november? Awesome video bro!!
Thanks! Newfangled Elevate, I'll have to search my plugins as I think I have that one. I have Saturate and Punctuate and like them. In general I love Newfangled stuff, their Mel scale approach is solid. DMG never does sales, ever. I thought they might, and I waited 2 years ha! Finally I just ponied up and spent the cash. Never looked back. They are 100% worth full pop retail, and they know it ;)
@@warpacademy hahahah gotcha bro! I think ill just have to take the shot then! Also, my current final limiter is "master plan", you should check it out too cus I think its awesome for agressive style music!
@@warpacademy DMG hands down best plugins in the game imho. No sales but they have a loyalty program where your discount grows the more you purchase. Start with the cheaper ones if you can, TrackLimit is a simpler single-band version of Limitless, too, but you don't necessarily have to buy it since Limitless can be set up the same way as TrackLimit & presets saved
Ah, that's nice you have Master Plan. I have it too. I'm actually about to work with the Musik Hack guys. They reached out recently, so stay tuned on the channel!
Exactly. Good points all round. I use and LOVE DMG Track limit. Many reasons to use it vs Limitless, starting with the fact that Limitless will eat your CPU for lunch if you use many instances of it. Did you see this video I did? I used TrackLimit a lot in it: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bj7ZNvmfRwA.html. I also compared the CPU usage of TrackLimit with Orange Clip and Pro-L2 in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Xf9gVOKa_U4.html Cheers!
It’s like you pulled up my own limiter list 😂. I also use Newfangled Elevate and am warming up to Master Plan as well. Elevate is maybe my favorite, neck and neck with Limitless. I usually put Elevate up as my first limiter for a little GR, and can rebalance any EQ and transients within the plugin, and finish with one of the others. I don’t think Pro L2 has beaten out Limitless or Smart:Limit so I don’t tend to reach for it anymore, but if I got something that seemed too wide, maybe that or ozone is just the ticket.
Hey hey. Great points. I've heard from a ton of people that they're liking Master Plan. I have it. I think I also have Elevate, so I'll have to start testing them more and more. So many limiters! It's nice to have options. Thanks for the comments!
I produce dancefloor drum and bass and use FabFilter Pro-L 2 as my limiter of choice. I can typically achieve -3 RMS / -4 to -5 LUFS without any audible distortion resulting in a very clean sound. To manage the peaks, I place a clipper just before the limiter, allowing me to squeeze a few extra dB from the mix, however I’ve already frequency balanced prior to this and used clippers where necessary pre master. Could you clarify what is considered excessive gain reduction? I strive to avoid red gain reduction indicators, but this can be challenging with loud mixes. I often find myself balancing the mix and using clippers in an effort to achieve a sound with minimal gain reduction from the limiter. Equally, how much clipping is too much? I tend to use my ears and listen to how much I can clip before the clipper no longer sounds transparent, but introduces distortion, then pull back on the threshold. Once again, a great video from you - one of the best on RU-vid. Silly Q but do you offer a mastering service ? Thanks 🙏🏼
Hey hey. Thanks for the support and the kind words. So, when working in loud genres like drum n bass, you should achieve most of the loudness on individual sounds with saturation, clipping, compression, dynamic EQ etc. Then route things into a Sub-Mixing structure like this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cnQC0146TZg.html. On your Sub-Mixes, you can experiment with more clipping, mid-side saturation, and/or limiting. Doing pretty light touches with these. If you do all of this, then your master is basically done and you need very little on the actual master. So when I say you don't want excessive gain reduction, I'd say 4 dB of gain reduction or more, on your mastering limiter, you're really going to start hearing that. You should try out iZotope RX and this technique too: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xzujAhDVg6w.html. In terms of how much clipping is too much? It all depends on where clipping is used and the sound being clipped. If you're clipping your master, it better not be very much otherwise THIS happens: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0zTHis71jZI.html&pp=ygUXbWl4YnVzdHYgY2xpcHBlciBtYXN0ZXI%3D Clip harder on your individual tracks, less on your Sub-Mixes, and only a little touch here and there on your master IMO. And yes, I do offer mastering services. You can contact me for that at vespers.ca/work-with-me/. Cheers!
Thanks for the suggestion. I mean, I can answer that really quick here by pasting a post on Gearspace from Dave Gamble (from DMG) about the concept of Limitless. For reference, here's the post: Here goes: "Hi all, I've spent a long time thinking about multiband limiters, and why no-one likes them. There are two kinds of multiband limiters: multiband dynamics processors followed by a wideband limiter, and truly multiband limiters. Well... there was really only one truly multiband limiter, but now there's two. Waves L3 was groundbreaking... or, it should have been, but actually it's just really aggressive. I wanted a technical understanding of why I would consistently prefer L2 to L3. Sometime around august last year, I had an idea for the design of a multiband limiter - something to basically magic a set of gain-reduction signals into making a limited signal with the friendliest possible gain-reduction curves. I fully destroyed an A4 notepad with scribbling, ending up with a very chunky proof and something I could implement. Turns out, we don't like L3 because it *solves the wrong problem*. L3 tries to maximise gain at all costs. Don't do that; it makes s***** curves that impart distortion. Turns out (and here I'm somewhat giving the game away to anyone who wants to steal the idea) that the "right" strategy (based on weeks of listening tests) is to make the gain reduction curves as smooth as possible. If you stop worrying about maximal loudness and instead design for invisibility, then invisibility is what you get. Whilst for the same drive, you get a quieter result, the distortion is dramatically reduced. So you can drive harder and actually end up with a perceptually louder result. So, we built that and played with it loads and listened and listened and listened (to everything we could find, mastered or not). Then we found out that release really matters for limiters. I should expand on that. Obviously release is crucial, but there's more than one way to implement a release, and an infinity of ways to implement an autorelease. So, generally, you get one limiter to sort some peaks, with a fast release time (So you don't get dips in level after transients), and then maybe another one to flatten dynamics a little, and that one needs a slower release. There are a lot of limiters which have auto-releases which basically adjust the release time depending on whether they think they're seeing transients or dynamics. Aaaaand we listened. And it's a crapshoot. Some material works great with one, some with another, and it's always a bit of a compromise. So we had this idea we should basically just have two limiters that work together, to distribute the work between them. You get a dynamic limiter with configurable release time, which is in a "sane" range, like a few hundred ms, and a transient limiter with a configurable time which is a couple of ms at most. End result is, dynamics don't pay for transients, and everything still gets done. All multiband too! It's been a fun beta, and we're going to release on monday. If all goes well, we'll have a video introduction, and I might even make some videos explaining some concepts myself (though that's guaranteed to be weird). I'm going to invite some beta testers to pop up to help me explain things. Dave."
Listening thru Audeze Maxwell's, the Ozone created a bit more presence ("in your face") on IRC2. Possibly the spatial widening takes a little of that presence away? Choice would be more spatial vs more presence.
Thanks for the insights! If it's just presence, then that can be added / removed with EQ. Easy peasy. I'm mostly concerned with what's happening to the transients, stereo width, distortion, aliasing, release behaviour / pumping etc. How do you like the Maxwells? I love Audeze stuff. I use the LCD-5, MM-500, LCD-X & XC, and in cafes I use the Euclid IEMs. Cheers!
@@warpacademy With the Ozone, it seemed like there was a bit more transient response, which I was equating to more presence. The bass, especially the kick was more 'present' which might be representative of a better transient response. Ozone felt a little more 'in your face'. But this is a subjective area and to me, requires a bit of fettlementation to fit the song. As far as Audeze Maxwell's - I live in them pretty much all day long. Minimal ear fatigue and easy to switch between Teams calls, streaming music and reviewing tracks in Logic Pro or Ableton. Good choice for cost/benefit.
One clarification here, linear phase filters DO cause pre-ringing. Why it works here and doesn't do that, is because its a cross-over filter, which has 2 of them back to back, and basically the effect of one is reversed by the other, and in the end you get no effect to the phase, and no pre-ringing. But it only works in case of crossover filters, this doesn't mean that you can just EQ your mix with a linear phase eq and get no pre-ringing, regardless of which eq you use.
Hey Alex. Yes, you're 100% right. All filters causing ringing, linear phase filters just break causality and shift the ringing earlier in time - so to speak. What I said is that it's possible to design them in a way that doesn't cause "horrible" super audible pre-ringing. IE you can design and window them in such a way that it's actually not very noticeable at all, depending on the program material to which they're applied. People get freaked out by watching contrived examples and I've so. many times had people say "never use a linear phase filter" in comments, meanwhile I've watched Luca Pretolesi - Grammy winning engineer - slap a brickwall HPF in linear phase in Pro-Q3 just below a kick drum fundamental and move on. Pre-ringing may be there, but is it audible? If it's audible, is it bad? You're also right that you can compensate for phase shifts with a reversed filter of the same design so I'm with you there. However, in practice, there are many examples of minimum phase crossovers that have phase rotation at the crossover points, so simply having reversed filters doesn't always "correct" time domain shifts. My thinking is that pre-ringing has to do with the Gibbs phenomenon, not whether a filter is linear phase or not right? The ringing is always going to happen I would think. I'm not a DSP guy though, so I'll defer to the experts. Are you involved in plugin design? Maybe you have an insight here. Cheers!
@@warpacademy Sure, if you really know what you are doing, you can definatelly find the use for linear phase EQs, but many, if not most, do not, and it is funny to me how the trend became from "linear phase eq is supperior/better quality", to "they are the devil and you should never use them". I am really enjoying your latest videos, maybe you can have one for multi-stage clipping. Do you clip busses as well, like in a clipper cascade, or just individual tracks?
Hey Alex. Yeah, you make a good point. You do really need to know what you're doing. And also, yeah, linear phase is not synonymous with "quality" - quite the opposite. Only use it when you must to maintain the time-domain, such as parallel EQ on bass or drums. Glad to hear you're enjoying the videos. Regarding multi-stage clipping, already done! Watch this video on my routing structure where I show my Sub-Mixing structure: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-cnQC0146TZg.html. And then watch this video for a full 2.5 hour mixing session where I show clipping on individual sounds, clipping on Sub-Mixes, and clipping the master: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bj7ZNvmfRwA.html LMK if you have any questions after watching that. Cheers!
Side note; If you're making Heavy DnB, Don't be afraid to achieve louder results than -6 LUFS... Most Neuro/Dancefloor labels put out tracks that peak around -3 LUFS... This is why the mixdown stage is so important in modern bass music... So you can match other producers loudness without destroying your dynamics or distorting the track. Erb N Dub just put out a really cool series of videos on the topic if anyone out there is interested. Big ups man!
Hey hey. Thanks for the comment. Yes, I've seen the levels of loudness pushed in the genre. I always investigate claims that you can create a song and master it to -3 LUFS or louder and still have it sound "clean". I have never once heard a song that loud that I feel is loudness done well. It's always been a bit of a mess to my ears. I am open to changing my mind on this, so send examples please with links. Also, I'd love to check out the video series you mentioned. Link me to it? Cheers!
@@warpacademy Oh man... There are a few amazing Neurofunk producers that can push into -2 LUFS and sound absolutely amazing (Which I still wonder how tf they do it). Burr Oak, for example, have some of the cleanest and heaviest mixdowns in the genre at the moment: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YDtR1KYYGZM.html Also Mefjus and Camo & Krooked - Sientelo is a masterpiece: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gOpAr0UiT6Q.html The Erb n Dub video about loudness and mixdowns in DnB: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0n0HUQANlls.html Hope you enjoy what I sent bro! Cheers!
Thanks for the links. Now, to preface my comments, I'm not in the slightest trying to insinuate that I'm a better producer or mixer than any of these guys. I'll make observations based on my personal taste and experience. The Burr Oak track, while impeccably produced, sounds fatiguing to listen to and the drums are paying the price for the loudness. Listen to it. Do you hear how quiet sounding, how pushed back, and rather small the drums are? That's what I hear in most songs pushed this loud. That's the sound of a master that's been squeezed hard into a limiter and personally, I don't like it. I think it's chasing loudness rather than mastering the song to what sounds the best. The Mefjus and Camo and Krooked tune sounds better to me. The drums have more impact and the tune feels a bit more dynamic. Mefjus is an inspiration. Top notch producer there. I wonder which version I would like more though if it was mastered a little less loud and then you A/B compared the two versions with loudness normalized. Doing that type of test is important. Some food for thought. Skrillex used to have his songs mastered to -4 LUFS (more or less). Now he's having them mastered to be less loud. Consider why that is? He's capable of extremely loud mixes and masters, so why would he back that off? More food for thought. His song Rumble won the 2024 Grammy for best electronic / dance recording with Flowdan and Fred Again. He didn't master it, it was Lucas Pretolesi from Studio DMI. Luca is the top mastering engineer (and mix engineer ) in the world, IMO, for electronic music, and the Grammys agree with that statement. He's the top tog. Guess what that song was mastered to in the drops? -6 LUFS. Why would the world's top electronic engineer master to that, when he could have pushed it to -2, -3? Thanks for the link to the videos on DnB. I'm stoked to check those out. Cheers!
I wish you would have explained real quick what Channel linking is... Had to look it up, it treats mono/stereo loudness equally.... Please when you use terminology or mention a feature just give a 2 sentence description of it
Hey hey. I mean, I kind of did explain channel linking. Not sure if you saw the text box where I noted that unlinked limiters function like dual mono, where the L channel cannot induce gain reduction in the right. That's the explanation. When you have unlinked settings, you have 2 independent limiters for L and R. The way I do my videos is to focus on specific topics. Not each one is an exhaustive masterclass. This video is already 47 minutes long, can you imagine if I explained every piece of terminology and every feature? I cover as much ground as I can, but I often split up the lessons across multiple videos. In this case, I'm doing a full playlist series on limiters and rolling the videos out over time.
Thanks man. Yeah sometimes I miss explaining something in the video so I use the text boxes a lot in post. I realize how important it is to explain terminology but sometimes I goof and miss something. All the best and thanks for the kind words.
@@warpacademy their loyalty program is pretty decent if you start with the cheaper plugins, plus things like TrackComp have compressor models for all the classics, so you don't have to download another free LA2A or 76 plugin ever again knowing DMG's model is the best
![The Best Limiter for Loud, Aggressive Music? [DnB, EDM, Bass Music]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
