Logic Tips - Adaptive Limiter

[Music] i'm johna buchanan and in this video we're going to look at logic's adaptive limiter now once upon a time there were many stages of making music you'd have dedicated programmers who would come in and do the midi programming you'd have engineers who'd be responsible for recording vocals or parts that needed to be recorded through microphones you'd have a mix engineer who'd come and balance all of those parts individually and then at the end of the stage you'd have a mastering engineer whose job was to take not only this particular track but the other ones associated with the project and to create some balances so that the overall program material sort of made more sense as a whole body of work and these days nearly all of those tasks potentially fall to you as the producer of your music you program midi you record the parts you need to you mix as you go and maybe you even dabble in mastering at the end of the process and the adaptive limiter is very much a tool that exists in that final stage of balancing your tracks and trying to make them finished if you like it's a what we call loudness maximizer which allows you to take the average volume of your track and boost it so that it's kind of competitive with other pieces of music and the genres in which you're working but also maybe to give your whole track a bit of a volume lift at the last minute so that you're maximizing the potential and dynamic range of your track so what we're going to do within this project is to begin to see how we can apply the adaptive limiter but before i go any further it's worth me saying that broadly speaking we should try and see mastering tools as mastering tools i'm going to add the adaptive limiter to a project that's kind of still in progress and if possible you should try and resist that try and see this tool that we're about to experiment with it's something that you're going to add once you've created a final mix of your project and you've bounced it down as a wav file it's something to come later we're going to slightly cheat and do it within this project that's ongoing at the moment let's just hear it [Music] now as you probably know when you play through a track in logic the output channel which is down here in the bottom left-hand corner will update you with the summed uh volume of your track to date what that basically means is the volume that's reached as a result of all of these tracks playing together at the same time and having played my project through i can see that i've got nearly more or less six decibels of headroom here minus 5.9 db is where this track has peaked now above 0 db tracks distort they start to break up and we don't want any of that we don't want any digital distortion but similarly i've now got 6 db of what we call headroom within this project which i could be using i could be boosting the volume of my track by that amount and certainly if i was to play this track alongside commercial tracks i discovered this one was considerably quieter and the adaptive limiter as a mastering tool is going to allow us to take some of that volume potential and boost our track so that it's operating at a slightly higher level or in fact at a lot higher level if we push the settings far enough so where do i find the adaptive limiter well as ever i can click here and if i've used it recently i'll find it in my list here otherwise you'll find it in the dynamics folder and it's right up here at the top of the list and this is a processor that we're going to put on the output channel we want every single part of the mix to pass through the adaptive limiter so it doesn't go on one track it goes on the output channel so that everything is affected by its controls so what are we looking at here well firstly what we have a chance to do is to set the amount of additional gain we want to add to the project now moments ago we discovered that i had minus 5.9 db was the peak level so i've got nearly six decibels of extra volume that i could add to this project so i'm going to remember that number in a minute by default logic wants to add up to three decibels of gain now why am i saying up to three decibels of gain the way the adaptive limiter works is that it's an intelligent what we call look ahead limiter so let's propose for a moment what i did was to say right i'm going to turn the volume up by 7.5 decibels well that's more volume than i've actually got room for the maximum volume i could add here would be 5.9 however my track isn't a consistent volume there are moments where it gets to minus 5.9 db of maximum and there are going to be other intermediate moments maybe between the drums or in the slightly quieter moments where the track isn't going to be anywhere near as loud as minus 5.9 db so what the gain dial does is it allows me to add the amount of gain that is shown here up to a maximum of that number so what it's going to do is to say okay this moment here only has six decibels of potential headroom so i'm only going to add 6 db the next moment in the audio file which is a little bit quieter can absolutely cope with an additional 7.5 decibels of gain so i'm going to boost by that much so effectively what we're doing is we're changing the dynamic relationship between the quietest moments and the loudest moments and we're adding a maximum potential gain here which of course is going to considerably boost the entire track but it's going to go through the program material of the track and it's going to make intelligent decisions about how much gain it can add now the reason why we call the adaptive limiter a look ahead limiter is that in order to do that to go through that process and make value judgments about how much volume to add what it needs to do is to buffer the audio that's coming through so in other words as the track comes down the line it needs to be in a position where it can calculate and do the maths of the potential additional volume gain that we can be adding so what the look ahead option means is how much time do we want to give logic to do that processor and in the bottom right hand corner you can see that there's an optimal lookahead value which is given here which i can apply by default when i open this up it's giving me 50 milliseconds but if i want to logic seems to think that the optimal look ahead value will be 20 milliseconds so i can change that if i want to in practice it doesn't really make that much difference it's just giving your cpu your computer's processor more time to figure out what value it needs to change okay so this dial in the middle is an interesting one too what this is going to do is to set what we call an output ceiling it simply says above this volume we can't go now by default that's going to be set at 0 db the point at which digital distortion occurs but what's quite interesting about digital distortion is that for some devices the first step on the ladder to digital distortion is 0db and for others it's a little lower than that so i always think it's a little bit safer to back this off by one tenth of a decibel you're never going to hear that volume difference it's one tenth of a db but what it ensures is the loudest possible moment within your track is just one tiny step below zero it's just a little quirk of mine perhaps but i think that's quite a good practice to get into and we've got a couple of other controls here if we've got or if we've been using analog hardware and there's just the possibility that we've got something like mains hum within this project what i'm able to do is to enable a high pass filter admittedly it's still going to retain all of the frequency content we need and that option is down here in the bottom left hand corner and i can also from a monitoring point of view switch on true peak detection now there are various ways of looking at volume do you look at just the moments that peak at the loudest points or in other words the sort of transients if you like within the audio or do you take a sort of slightly more general view of the way that the audio is unfolding and we've got an opportunity to look at those individual peaks if we want to or not so in practice the most important dials are the ones up here at the top how much volume do you want to add and where do you want to set the output ceiling and what we can do is i'm going to play the track through twice once adding 3 db of gain and then a little more and we'll see the effect that it has on the audio okay you can see now our track is peaking at -2 db so we've added that extra volume let's push a little harder now of course effectively we're talking about the idea of reducing or changing the dynamic range of the project that we're listening to a bit like compression in that regard and as a result as you might expect you'll probably find that the frequency relationship between bass and mid-range and treble changes depending on the settings you use here so mastering engineers don't just put an adaptive limiter or an equivalent limiter on the outputs of tracks that they're processing they'll balance this or put it at the end of a chain that might include an eq to help you change the tone back to maybe something um that might be more fitting for the project that you're working on and maybe they'll also put a compressor or a multi-band compressor before the adaptive limiter just to make sure that the track is behaving exactly as they want to across different frequency bands but in this video we focused exclusively on the adaptive limiter learning what happens or how we can add additional volume to a project whilst making sure that it never overloads you

Channel: MusicTech

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Keywords: MusicTech, Music Production, MusicTech Magazine, logic pro, logic pro x, adaptive limiter, audio mastering, logic x, logic pro x tutorial, logic pro x 10.5, logic pro x mixing and mastering, logic pro 10.5, adaptive limiter logic pro x, adaptive limiter logic pro, adaptive limiter logic, adaptive limiter plugin, adaptive limiter lookahead

Id: WwResKaCwWI

Length: 10min 8sec (608 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020