Hi, everyone
I’m pretty new to mixing and mastering
I have a question
I’m in the process of mastering with Greg Wells MixCentric
I realized that it is recommended to add a limiter
Will a MV2 limiter be good together for mastering
I am looking to learn and get started
From friendly plug-in
Thank you
Eldad
There are no rules to how you use anything but I suspect there are other tools more suited for what you are looking for.
My personal favorite limiters, from Waves, are Waves L1+ Ultramaximizer and Waves WLM Plus. L2 has a lot of fans as well, but L1 is updated to have TruePeak and has the auto-release that people liked L2 for.
If you’re doing deep limiting, try Waves L1+.
The other tool I love is Waves WLM Plus. It’s a really good loudness meter with an integrated limiter in it. It supports truepeak.
If you could only have one tool I think I’d go for WLM Plus because it “just works” and it has all the loudness information right there so you can very easily make a group of songs have the same volume, for consistency.
Personally I like the “-14 LUFs (with peaks running to -1db” so-called standard. It’s recommended by Spotify & Youtube (there’s even a preset for that in WLM Plus.)
Many will yell and downvote because it’s “not an actual standard” and it’s much quieter than most… But the reason these companies attempted to standardize it is because it’s a sweet spot of loudness where you still have enough dynamic range to be punchy and clear.
The trend is to move away from squashing mixes, even if many mastering engineers are kicking and screaming about it. There’s just no reason to do it anymore, and whatever reasons that remain will go away over time. Even Soundcloud is testing something similar to Spotify’s -14 LUFs standard.
Someone will respond after me to advise you to ignore this advice. When that happens, be sure to do an honest equal-volume comparison of your squashed mix versus the -14 LUFs mix. Do a blind A/B comparison. If you are honest with yourself, you’ll find 100% of the time the less squashed version is more punchy, clearer, and less fatiguing. Always.
Anyhow, if you’re only going to -14 LUFs then Waves WLM Plus is a perfect solution. (Unless you need the dithering and noise shaping options which are offered in L1 Ultramaximizer+.)
There’s also L3 which applies limiting to bands, separately… Similar to a multiband compressor except for limiting but it can be a little more complex (although there is a simple version of L3 that feels like L1 and L2, in use.)
Try them all and see which ones work best for you. Start with WLM Plus and L1+ because I think those will solve your needs.
PS. If you do insist on going for extreme loudness, remember to use compression and limiting on your busses so the compressor/limiter on your master bus isn’t doing too much work. Per-bus compression/limiting is, indeed, the trick to making a clean loud master… because you’re doing a little bit everywhere instead of trying to do a single extreme effect it all at once.
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