How To Use A Limiter On Vocals

one of my subscribers left me a really great comment the other day and it asked some very key questions that even i myself was wondering early on in my mixing career and those questions were specifically why and how do some mix engineers use a limiter as a vocal insert why if you could give a few reasons and how if you could demonstrate i'd love to do all three and i'm going to do that in today's video so if you're somebody who is wondering if you should be using a limiter directly on your vocals or how to use a limiter on your vocals you've come to the right place are you ready let's go [Music] five what's going on ladies and gentlemen this is your boy five piece producer and engineer extraordinaire thank you for checking out today's video we're gonna talk all about limiters and how you should be thinking about using a limiter on an individual vocal track or channel now this is going to be different than if you were to approach using it on say a vocal group or even a master of a track which is very common in terms of using a limiter you're going to always use one of these scenarios most likely but you're not always going to want to use one on an individual channel but don't you worry i'm going to break down how you should be thinking about this so let's get into it so i've got a session open as always and i have a limiter directly on one of the tracks here the main vocal track really and we're going to talk about how i set this up and how i think about this in the first place now first of all the thing you need to realize is a limiter is essentially an extreme form of compression in fact you can take a compressor and dial the settings up to a 10 to 1 ratio and that compressor is now essentially functioning as a limiter so a limiter very much light compression does a few things and what it does is it specifically limits or reduces dynamic range it reduces the difference between the loud and quiet parts in a track and bridges the gap between them because you're going to ultimately be able to add some gain and what ends up happening is the really loud stuff essentially gets cut and reduced right but then the quiet stuff the stuff that isn't too loud and doesn't pass the built-in threshold in the limiter in this case is going to essentially benefit from just a volume boost it's not going to get reduced at all it's just going to come up in volume and that's why when you see tracks that have been limited they look kind of like sausages they're just sort of flat there's less dynamics there's less movement and that can of course be a problem in some scenarios but let me really break down how i'm going to think about using it here on this individual vocal channel so first question you're probably wondering is why would i be using a limiter in the first place and really the answer is simple what you want to do is you're going to want to use the limiter to essentially increase the gain or the volume or the presence of the track that you're applying it to but at the same time you're going to want to do that while mitigating or preventing it from clipping right because we don't want to be clipping we don't want to be entering the red that'll be creating all kinds of distortion and noise and other problems that we usually want to avoid but we're going to use a limiter for this because the limiter will essentially allow us to add this volume up in a clean sort of way where it's not negatively impacting things and at the same time it is going to prevent the worst case scenario which is clipping now you might be wondering why wouldn't i just take the channel and increase the volume of it why would i actually put a limiter on what's the difference well the difference is when you turn up the volume on the track you run the risk of clipping right you're going to be adding more volume and then you might actually start entering that red zone and introducing some distortion and other artifacts that you want to avoid the limiter is essentially a clean way to do that exact same thing while preventing the downside or the worst case scenario as i mentioned now the way i would use this is i would approach it the same way as compression i use compression very delicately i don't go crazy with my compression i don't squash the hell out of things that i'm working on instead i do a little gentle boost or nudge or reduction depending on what it is and if you're doing this right chances are the limiter isn't really going to be doing anything at all it's not going to be even reducing at all all it's going to be doing is adding a little bit of a boost and that's it while of course once again preventing that worst case scenario of clipping so what do i mean by that well let's just dial in these settings first first of all i'm going to go to the out ceiling and as you can tell i'm using a fab filter pro l it has certain features that other limiters may not don't worry about that just focus on what i'm trying to do and most of the common things that i'm doing here are going to apply to all limiters that you know whether you're using a waves or something else it's always going to work out the same way so the first thing we want to do is we want to set the out ceiling i like to set the lc like so that i have headroom right and it could really depend on what you want but let's say i want to have at least 1 db of headroom so i'm going to set my output ceiling to minus one that's going to give me a full db from the top if i want to be maybe a little bit more generous i could go to like maybe a point two so point two db of headroom that means we're gonna get really loud but just shy of zero and any time it gets to point two it's going to start limiting and reducing the volume hopefully that makes sense but of course if i were to set that to minus one now that limit is a bit lower that ceiling is a little bit lower and therefore it's more likely to start limiting early as you know it may not be uh hitting -2 anymore minus 0.2 anymore it's going to be hitting minus 1. hopefully that makes sense but depending on your out ceiling that's where this limiter is really going to start to work i recommend setting it anywhere from minus 0.2 like you saw to -1 at the end of the day this is just the headroom that we are essentially preserving and guaranteeing ourselves by using this limiter so that's the first thing i'm going to avoid using dither and over sampling dither is just adding noise and over sampling is something that's become really popular in music but i do find that sometimes it negatively affects things and i don't really want to use it for that it might affect transients and articulation and stuff like that it really depends but for the intensive purpose of this tutorial i'm not going to use it now this limiter does give me access to an attack and release option and i'm going to set it the same way that i set my compressors when i put it directly onto a vocal and that's going to be transparently that's going to be with a slow attack and a fast release it's going to take some time to react and then it's going to let go of it right away that should be perceived as the most transparent usually so in that case i'm going to go to my release and i'll set it to about 50 milliseconds this is pretty quick right you can also set it in line with the tempo of your track it all depends but 50 milliseconds i find is usually pretty alright and i'm going to set the attack to let's say 5000 milliseconds so pretty slow right you can see we're almost at you know three and nine o'clock here now in terms of look ahead if you have this option i'm going to give myself a full millisecond of look ahead time this might introduce latency and some other problems so you want to be careful when using look ahead but i usually just add a little bit to just anticipate any sort of loud parts or peaks or anything coming down the pipeline in terms of the audio performance now the style of course you could change it to whatever i'm going to put it just to transparent so that we're not really adding any color or saturation or anything noticeable right now again these are some specific features to the pro l2 you may not have access to all of these but just want to call it out in case you are using the same uh plug-in as i am now all we're going to do to make this super transparent is i say add 1 to 2 db max okay 1 to 2 db of volume on the gain should be more than enough to get a noticeably louder track in this case a louder vocal but without adding too much to the point where it's going to start limiting things like crazy because as we add more gain it's going to now push us closer to that ceiling and as we get closer to that ceiling or past that ceiling the more aggressive this limiter is now going to react right and we don't want that we want to just add a touch of loudness some subtle loudness on this track so that it cuts a little bit better and again to do that so that we can avoid clipping at the same time that's why obviously we're not using the gain or the volume button itself within the track so let's go up to 1db and i'm gonna maybe just solo this vocal and let's just hear what it's doing and i'll play it a and b and see if there's enough of a difference there just solo then we could do the same thing in context so here we go i'll take it out and then put it in yeah i didn't want to take control i didn't wanted my soul i didn't wanted my clothes i didn't want to take my dog i didn't wanna leave me alone leave me you i didn't want him my joy i didn't want him my toy i didn't want in my voice i'mma keep making noise i'mma keep making those so that was it out of context obviously soloed let's do it one more time in full context i'll bypass it first and then put it in [Music] [Music] might have been tougher to notice at the end there we are only adding 1 db this is a very subtle amount of volume to be adding here and that's why i like to do it i want to do this transparently i'm not going to rely on the limiter to do all the heavy lifting i'm going to use it just to drive up the level a little bit right and as you can tell when more vocals came in you know more background vocals came in it might have been a little bit more difficult to notice the difference but in the first part that it was playing you should have noticed that the vocal just came up a smidge right just came out a little bit more forward now if you want to really pronounce this i could take this up to let's say 2 db which i would say is close to the max that you want to do here right we don't want to go too much farther than this because you know again it might add a lot technically speaking you can add as much gain as you have headroom so if i have 6 db of headroom from 0 i can add 6 db and really add that but what that's going to end up doing is it's going to require that we probably have to remix and rebalance the channel the overall volume of the channel in the context of the other tracks in the mix right the instrumental the background vocals all that stuff and i'm not really trying to do that what i'm trying to do is again use this as sort of a final step to just drive loudness and prevent clipping i know i've repeated it a few times but it's important to wrap your head around it because i think a lot of you out there might be thinking that the limiter is something to be fully relied on when that's not really the case it's just sort of that little touch of sauce you're gonna add that little sprinkle of basil on the sauce i should really say as an italian you know before you're gonna serve the plate of pasta right that's how we're sort of looking at this so now that i've dialed it up to 2 db as opposed to one let's hear the difference there i'll do the solo again i'll take it out and we'll put it in here we go yeah i didn't want to take control i didn't want to take my soul i didn't want in my clothes i didn't want to tape my door i didn't wanna leave me alone leave me you i didn't wanting my joy i didn't want him my toy i didn't want him my voice imma keep making noise imma keep making those so you should have been able to hear that's a pretty significant difference at least much more so than the previous example let's do it in context once again yeah i didn't wanna take control i didn't wanna take my soul i didn't wanna take my clothes i didn't wanna [Music] so that 2db boost really helps especially with those backgrounds that come in right it really helps that main vocal that ocean singing here just pop out a little bit more especially compared to when i have it bypassed and again there really is no difference between using this limiter the way that i have here to dial up the gain by 2 db or adding 2 db on the volume channel right there might be some slight differences because of like you know the plug-in might impart some sort of color or saturation sometimes but in terms of the actual goal of what we're doing it's really the same thing we're just adding that volume but again the added benefit of using the limiter is to catch any peaks that maybe don't need that volume boost right and just making sure that we keep the vocal sort of line and then level and prevent it from peaking clipping and creating that distorted sound that we want to avoid now the question is should you be doing this every single time no the answer is no you should be doing this in select scenarios where you feel like you want to add more volume to the vocal but then you're running into some issues where you know you're clipping by adding it manually the other way i was suggesting right so you obviously are going to reach for the limiter here or if you want to do it in a much more controlled way where you know you want to add some more volume to something that you've already blended pretty much perfectly where all the levels and everything are good the instrumental level the background vocals the mains they're all great and matching up and sounding good and in unison together but you want to just get a little bit more out of maybe one or more vocal tracks so that it just cuts a little bit better such as you heard here with the backgrounds happening at the same time on the hook hopefully this makes sense but i definitely am not using a limiter all the time and i'm definitely limiting in stages doing something called serial limiting this is something i've talked about in other videos i'll leave a link to a video about that right now if you want to check it out i definitely recommend it it works for mastering it works for individual tracks and it really helps add up over time whether you're doing it on an individual track doing some limiting and then going to the vocal bus or the vocal group and doing some additional limiting and then doing some final limiting and the mastering stage all of these limits or limiting plugins will add up at different levels to essentially create that nice cohesive loud and full sound that most of us are after so there you have it this is how i like to use a limiter on my vocal tracks when i do again this is not something i'm going to do all the time but in certain circumstances and i hope this helped you if it did please smash that like button that would really help my channel grow and help this video reach more people that it could also help much like yourself and if you haven't done so already please smash that subscribe button as well i drop a new piece of content every single week always focused on helping you sound better and helping you make more money with your music i'd love to help you with these areas but i definitely recommend that you subscribe so you can see my content the second that it goes live alright if you want to see anything in a future video leave it in the comments below and i'm looking forward to helping you again on the next one peace out y'all

Channel: 5piece

Views: 1,047

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Id: GLUuBIkxqi0

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021