Ultimate Mastering LOUDNESS Tricks Tier-list! Which is the BEST? 

Spot on!

Thanks man! That’s a fun topic to dive into!! Leave me to it!!

Nice, thanks for sharing!

+1 for Inflator. It definitely has a sound and you have to SLAM it for it to work so it isn't subtle, but in certain situations it just adds magic. Have used it in parallel a couple of times as well to get the sound without the loudness.

Clipping is waveshaping ;)

Awesome! Thanks for watching!

My absolute pleasure; thanks for watching!

Amazing :D Thanks for watching and sharing your process too!

Thanks man! Much love!

Thanks mate!

Thanks mate!

Thank you!!!

thats a fact

Thanks mate!

Definitely!

Thanks man!

Ehi Marco! Thanks for sharing these thoughts and watching :)

A cop out and the truth!

Yes, he does!

I clipped your clippers clipper to clip the clip!

Thanks for watching! Just having some fun in the comments :)

@@panorama_mastering exactly!!

The only caviat would be using a clipper in-between earlier stages in the mastering chain. I've been toying around with having three or four clippers. One at the start before inflator, one between eq and compression if necessary, one before the limiter and one right at the end to act as a ceiling instead of using the true peak feature on ozone. I'm using soft clip pro on StandardCLIP for all but the very last one. It's pushed me to -6 lufs without noticeable distortion and seems work pretty well. None of them are doing more than 2 dB. I'm not sure if it's the most efficient way of doing it, but I've been liking the results.

Fair enough; and I understand that; IME the other methods mentioned have produced more consistent and favourable results in my sessions;

If you need to stack limiters in the first place, to hit a requested loudness level, it's a band-aid for a less than ideal mix. When all you have is the mix and you can't get a revision, tastefully, super precise stacking of limiters can get you there without distortion- as long as you known what you're doing. Exploiting the advanced parameters of Limitless and Elevate you can very transparently increase loudness, but it can be dangerous if in the wrong hands, granted. Manual limiting FTW btw.

I love using the Black Box too!

I suspect the Dynamic Diamond Saturator might be based on the Black Box as Luca has the hardware in his Studio DMI.

Thank you!

Spot on! You're right; I actually use the clipper earlier on in the chain too!

@@panorama_mastering sometimes I use a clipper at the very beginning and at the end before an eventual final limiter or directly clip the ad when I m otb. My go to is the tdr limit 6 clip module or the alpha comp plugin clipp module .

Thanks for watching mate! Nothing wrong with that if it works; my aim in this tier-list was to rank by way of most effective; I grade most effective by what allows us to improve loudness with the least impact on the audio fidelity/integrity from the original mix;

As a whole.

@@panorama_mastering Thanks for clarifying! xD

Everything in good results up!

Nice! Thanks for sharing!

Which one!? I'm curious!

Thanks mate!

Thanks for watching; No worries in the bottom toolbar there are three boxes denoting hori, vert and box highlighting; I define the threshold using the "declip" function; as it visually places a line in the waveform!

@@panorama_mastering Nice, thanks!

Correct!

No sweat; here's the answer ;) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZtijR8bWzpc.html

Nice! Thanks for sharing; I've had so many people consistently hit DMG into the comments on my videos; I will need to jump on them in the future!

@@panorama_mastering Am curious to see what you will come up with. I enjoy your approach on things

@@panorama_mastering ps2: regarding your manual limiting (though i would describe it as „non realtime gain riding editing“ ) , A long while back i discovered a tool that i use exactly for these rogue peaks . It saves you tons of time. Once you get faniliar with the plugin its a breeze to set. Its called Drum Leveler by Sound Radix. It pushes the peak down without compressing it (or better said without the „compressor sound“, it is compression in a way i guess) but more like a ultra fast manual volume leveling meaning it is almost perfectly transparent

Clarification CORRECT! Clipping the peaks off with a clipper; then applying a limiter! Thanks for asking! :)

Good point. De essing is huge with a lot of mastering engineers- those masselec HF limiter units are very popular. The HF compressor on the Fusion is popular as well. Good question

Multi-band distortion is a tool I use sparingly; And I'd rank on Be Careful to Good results; can't rely on it to get loud masters; but it will help shape the master along the way; As for dynamic EQ; the dynamic EQ vs multiband video will give you an insanely comprehensive look at both those tools and use cases;

@@panorama_mastering if you havent, try Spectre by Wavesfactory. Its an very very good sounding „multiband saturator thingy“ :-)

@@panorama_mastering that's interesting, i've been a firm believer in multiband saturation ever since doing my own diy masters back in ozone 4 - it can really help bring out lower level details so they're intelligable at lower volume levels (and tbh it's probably helping with things i could be doing better in my mixes) - i generally use it to do a similar job to the parrallel multiband compression... but it does take some careful setting up, it's really easy to overdo

Nice one!

It depends; I tend to clip upfront if there are a lot of offshoot peaks that need taming; I tend to clip just before the limiter; if the limiter is pumping and working too hard on its own; As for what is a good true peak; anything below 0 is perfect; it's important to audition your masters with an AAC codec to hear how the encoding to a lower bitrate will effect the highest sample points / any subsequent distortion; Delivering for spotify; LUFS, whatever sounds good; ;)

@@panorama_mastering Bet, thank you bro

Spot on!

LUFS uses two stage K-weighting filters to compensate for any tonal or EQ adjustments; so both EQ and saturation will change the overall read loudness;

Like this is the 1000th time someone has mentioned it and I'm needing to do a video on it in the future!

Good suggestion!

Going Home - MorningMaxwell, Jade Alice !

Interesting; what style of music are you producing?

@@panorama_mastering mainly hip hop/electronic. I guess it probably requires hard transients and lots of high end in order to be transparent enough. Big fan of the channel btw!

Going Home - MorningMaxwell, Jade Alice

Going Home - MorningMaxwell

Good technique for setting up processors; but those processors have to keep the phase coherency between the mid and side channels when it re-encodes back to L-R!

Okay thanks. Think I need to learn about the processors as I don’t know about that yet.

Nice! Thanks for sharing! please always repost the original comment whenever RU-vid deletes; I leave all comments up, good bad and ugly! This isn't the first time YT has deleted your comments automatically; and I don't know why :(

@@panorama_mastering They did it again, I wrote you a reply telling you no worries, I figured it was YT and not you. Wild stuff. No clue why they're doing that... but thanks for telling me you've seen it happen before.

im happy because this seems like an interesting tip

Its not, different envelopes and detectors

Ryan's correct; and I've done videos on this before; but in my opinion I just can't hold it in the same esteem as those processors in the top tiers

haha fair call!

Absolute gentleman!

Thanks for sharing!! Why M/S processing as much as you can?

​@@panorama_mastering fr, I need to know why too. Heavy M/S manipulation doesn't even sound right to me

@@panorama_mastering ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dD6_Bajj2DI.html&ab_channel=DanWorrall I think that he mean to turn on mid side mode in saturation/distortion plugins on master

I need a raise to afford all these mastering plugins bruh

ha ! Why is that always considered the gold standard ;)

Thank you! I actually don't follow Nico; but I've seen him before; but this whole video was inspired (Thumbnail & title too) by Clark Kegley!

FTW!

What do you mean?

@@panorama_mastering The tier list itself, I want to print it as a chart as I master. Also, hello!!!

Nice observation; I've done some videos in the past on serial limiting; but what I've found is a single limiter works best; namely because any harmonics introduced from the first limiter feed the second limiter and can start to stack additional IMD that otherwise could have been avoided if just using the single processor;

@@panorama_mastering very interesting! That type of content just really isn’t available on YT anywhere else, so I really do appreciate it. Going to check it out

@@Rhuggins No worries; it's a video that definitely needs updating though; because my research, testing and objective mesurement methods have improved drastically since;

MorningMaxwell ~ Going Home

@@panorama_masteringThank you!

Going Home - MorningMaxwell, Jade Alice!

@@panorama_mastering thank you!

Fair enough!

Haha you're not the first to mention it!

Wavefolder, Clipper, Saturator all basically the same thing. Saturation or better said, Distortion. He did mention clipping thus he mentioned waveshaping . Waveshaper is just a fancier word. Btw now that you mention Inflator, There is also a video somewhere on youtube where a guy Almost identically replicates Inflator with a free saturator plugin

@@saardean4481 oh yeah you’re right waveshaping is basically saturation.

@@saardean4481 I'm fairly sure there's a free plugin/preset that nulls perfectly with inflator even.👍🏻

@@_Alex_Sander yup it’s called mwaveshaper by melda

The trade-off; especially when it's not necessery;

It's trash for loud masters because it doesn't work. Try it yourself and watch the meters while you do it. At best, on Linear Phase mode, the HP will not significantly change peak level (at least not until you sweep up way beyond the bass area). At worst, it actually makes the audio peak louder. It's the worst tip from RU-vid fake producers. You can even watch the meters in their own videos and see that the technique is not doing what they're telling you it does. It caught on because it seems logical -- surely, less signal means less level, right? -- but it's a misunderstanding of how audio works.

@@joechapman8208 ok thanks ! I see ! And when high pass a synth or a lead sound, like around 100-200 hz, does it do the same as a bass cut on master about peak level ? Like should we never cut with eq on anything ?

@@Boaugustin If you high-pass an individual element, such as a synth, then you're only affecting that instrument. This is different to high-passing the master, assuming that other elements in the song go deeper than that synth. I'm not saying you shouldn't cut the lows. Absolutely, do it for the purpose of removing any bass information that you don't want to be there, but just don't do it thinking that you're making anything louder. You should be aware of the effect on phase (unless in Linear Phase mode), too, and remember that Low Shelf filters have less of an effect on phase and can be preferable. Again, I'm not saying you should never high-pass with a Zero Latency filter, either! Everything has its uses, but remember that you should re-examine the phase relationship after you do something that you know will change it. Another thing people will swear is true is that you need to clean the bass of everything that's not a kick drum or a bass instrument, and that by doing so you will be able to get your kick and bass louder. This also does not stand up to scrutiny. Yes, loud bass signals at the same frequency as others will cause a build-up, but quiet signals do not simply add on to whatever level your bass synth or bass guitar is producing. The definite bass signals will nuke quiet ones. Owen Palmer has a great video about this where he likens this fear to cancelling the takeoff of a plane until you've cleaned a leaf from the runway; in reality, the plane will rip through the leaf, and it's a similar thing with low-energy bass signal. This severe approach to audio hygiene is a tough one to argue against, because, yes: if you follow this principle of "cleaning" then you do get a very pin-sharp result, but sometimes all you have to do is turn those HPs off and the mix sounds better. Sometimes the HPs are sucking the soul out of non-bass instruments and robbing the music of some nice interplay. The joy of music tech is that it's so easy to A/B and see which is better, but we deny ourselves that if we get hung up on a hard rule such as "HP all non-bass".

@@joechapman8208 haha i see, the comparison is quiet good ! Thanks for you’re answer ! I’m actually just trying to deconstruct everything I saw on the internet about cleaning everything, I was a bit fuck up about that, it’s not easy to accept the fact quiet low bass from synth vocal or perc can coexist with bass ! I have another question, when we saturate a signal, there something happened in the ultra low, next to 0hz, like if a sound is going in the other direction after -0hz, what’s going on there and should we cut this ? I’m not really sure about what is it