An Example of Loud Mastering

Okay, so you may have read my post called: To Limit or not to Limit. Well, I´m afraid I´m going to have to admit I was slightly wrong in that one. However, it still has some good points about limiting too harshly. Let me explain how I saw the light...

Below is a screen shot of a song I recorded. Take a listen Ain´t no Rock Old.mp3 (This is the same as the one posted in To Limit or not to Limit)

For this song the limiter in JAMin was bypassed. This allows the peaks their maximum amplitude, which is good because no sound quality is lost. The problem is that the track is far quieter than any commercial song. Trust me, this is a big problem - no one is going to take you seriously with a quiet track.

Below is a picture of the same track mastered loudly using the limiter to reduce the higher peaks. Take a listen to this track: Ain´t no Rock New.mp3

So in this track, as you can hear, it is much louder and competes with professional recording volumes. The cost: sound quality... As you can see the peaks have been hard limited to bring the big blob of sound closer to 0 dB. This means, your song can become less punchy. This is because the peaks are mostly from the bass drum and other percussive sounds. However, you regain punch in the fact that it will be played louder.

It´s a real toss-up and mastering professionals will debate this till the cows come home. I will make your decision easier, by saying that if you do not go for the louder mix, your songs are just not going to stand up to professional tracks.

Alrighty, with that all said, how do you get the louder mix using JAMin. This is where I apologise, you MUST use the limiter. Take a look at the screenshot of my limiter setup below.

You can see that I set the boost to the maximum - remember that we are trying to achieve a LOUD mix. Next, and most importantly, the Limit is set to -0.2 dB, this is the value at which the peaks will be cut off (you can play around with this, but only between values of -0.3 dB to 0 dB). I set the Release to round 400 ms, you want quite a long release otherwise the sharp peaks will not be cut. Lastly, we fine tune the limiter by adjusting the Input level. We do this by observing the Output level meter on the right-hand side of the JAMin window. You want your loudest parts of the track (i.e. chorus) to stay between about -2 dB and -0.2 dB, without hearing any distortion in the slightest. Make sure your track does not merely sit on the -0.2 dB mark - this means the limiter input is too high and you are limiting too much!

That´s the gist of it... give it a try and please don´t forget to rate this post.