Mixing loud: Managing your dynamic range using limiters

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and welcome in video number two in our series on loudness and dynamic range in video number one we learned what dynamic range even was and now in this video i want to give you some tools on how to actually manage your dynamic range to be intentional about it the result of this is going to be that you have the tools to decide how compressed or how loud or how punchy your signal is going to be and you're going to see that with just one tool you can already get very very far in achieving this let's get into it [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and maybe sign up for one of our classes on underdog.brussels underdog is an online school not just a youtube channel so see if one of our classes are for you if you're looking for one-on-one coaching sign up for a one-on-one coaching with me in the link below now let's recap where we were so in the last video we learned about peak volume and rns volume peak volume being the loudest part that a signal gets and rms volume being the average level of the signal over the past half a second or so if a signal's peak volume and rms volume are far apart we say it has a large dynamic range and if they are close together we say it has a small dynamic range we also learned that if you have two different signals let's say two different songs and they both have the same peak volume but one's rms is higher than the others rms we're going to subjectively experience that one that second one the higher rms one as louder more punchy warmer all kinds of positive attributes because in general we tend to think that louder is better so how can you use all this in your own music well so maybe you followed the advice from the last video and you compared your track to a reference track at the same rms and that's all great and you feel like your track is now tonally balanced and well mixed etc but it's still more dynamic than the reference track the question now is what tools can you use to bring your dynamic range in to the same level as the dynamic range similar to your reference tracks okay so when we're dealing with dynamic range there are two processes that you need to be aware of compression and expansion we're either compressing our dynamic range or we're expanding our dynamic range that just means we're making the dynamic range smaller or we're making the dynamic range larger and in a practical world it actually looks a bit more like this what you do is you take your signal and you create a threshold somewhere inside that signal now depending on where the signal is you do a particular operation to it so let's first think about compression what you can do is you can set a threshold and then whenever a signal tries to go over that threshold you push it down towards that threshold and when the signal is below that threshold you leave it alone alternatively whenever the signal is below the threshold you can try pushing it up towards the threshold and leave it alone when it goes over these we would respectively call downward compression and upward compression we compress it down towards a threshold or up towards a threshold in either case the resulting signal will have less dynamic range than the previous signal on the other hand with an expander what we can do is also we start with the same threshold and we do something with the signal depending on whether it's above or below when the signal is above the threshold you can push it up further away from the threshold that's upward expansion and inversely whenever the signal is below the threshold you can push it down further away from the threshold in a process we call downward expansion sometimes also referred to as gating so these four processes exist upward and downward compression upward and downward expansion and honestly in ninety percent of the situations here we're going to use just one tool we're gonna be using downward compression master that one first before you think of any of these other ones they can be useful in certain situations but first master the thought process of doing downward compression and what are we going to use to achieve this well we're going to use a limiter now you might have immediately thought well why don't i use a compressor that's what it's called right it's a compressor well yes a compressor is probably the most versatile tool to achieve this however it's a bit complicated and if we're really just trying to reduce the dynamic range a limiter will usually be simpler and easier to learn for a beginner as well so let's look at what a limiter actually does in any limiter the first thing that you do is you set a threshold and like we described earlier any signal that tries to go over that threshold gets turned down quite drastically so imagine you have a signal that's looking very dynamic like this you set a threshold right here then the resulting signal that comes out of the limiter is going to look more like this you've basically given it a haircut the loudest parts have been brought down in volume but the quiet parts stay exactly where they are then the idea is that after the limiter you turn up the volume until the peak volume is the same as it was before the limiter and you'll notice that the quietest parts of the signal have come up as well in fact raising the rms you have now successfully compressed the dynamic range of your signal the distance between the peak and the rms has decreased your signal now is probably louder warmer punchier all these positive things as a rule of thumb as a beginner do be careful not to pump your limiter too hard because once a limiter starts to reduce let's say more than six decibels of gain reduction it starts to introduce quite a lot of distortion into the signal and maybe you have to ask yourself the question if it's not doing more harm than good so just pay attention to that like limiting a little bit is generally not a bad idea except when you're over doing it now with this tool where do you apply it well there's two places you want to apply it the first place is on every track of your mix you don't have to actually do it everywhere but you can apply it to individual tracks of your mix so that each of those elements become slightly less dynamic then overall when all of them get summed up together in the master bus they're already less dynamic and they will just naturally lead to a less dynamic signal then on the master bus that's the second place where you probably want to put a limiter at the very end of your signal chain on the master bus you probably want to shave off a few more decibels to further reduce the dynamic range of your track just to the point where you feel like it needs to be you'll also notice that if you've already applied a little bit of limiting on the most dynamic elements of your song the limiter that's on the master has to work a lot less hard which means that there's less chance of it introducing distortion or any kind of negative side effects that you want to avoid now i want to come back to one of the first things that i said in this video all of this is a tool so you can be intentional about your dynamic range that does not mean that you need to squish the life out of everything and bring the dynamic range down as low as humanly possible a dynamic signal can be very beautiful and loud sounds need quiet sounds to feel impactful if something is loud all the time it doesn't feel impactful so the rule of thumb that i would advise is learn from the other songs inside your genre look at what other people are bringing out in the genre that you love and look at where their peak level is versus their rms level and see if you can get your track to in the ballpark of that it can be still a little bit more dynamic because at the end of your music making process it's very likely that a mastering engineer is going to be involved and the mastering engineer is going to be the one who decides at the end how much to push the final limiter that the whole song is going into so a mastered track will usually have quite a lot of compression applied to it but in a way that the mastering engineer found tasteful or justifiable for the genre so having said that when in doubt maybe go a little bit lighter on the limiter don't push it quite as hard and then discuss with a mastering engineer quite how far it should be pushed now with all this you'll see that you can get very very far with a limiter but other tools that can achieve this are compressors it's kind of like a limiter but with more settings in a way and it's also a bit more complicated to get used to learning to listen to what a compressor is doing so that consider that like a a level two once you've mastered limiters then go into compressors also saturators they reduce the dynamic range and then finally even clipping like there are plugins that allow you to do controlled clipping of a signal which will again shave off the peaks in the same way that a limiter will but in a more drastic way let's say but really only start investigating that once you've sort of exhausted the possibilities of limiting and compression and other forms of distortion now before we end this video there's one more important concept that i want to give you if you've been applying all these ideas like getting your rms similar to a reference tracks rms and still you feel like you're sounding quieter or duller well one of the aspects that we haven't talked about yet is tonal balance rms is calculated based on the whole frequency spectrum of your music there is another measurement which is called l-u-f-s loudness units which is very similar to rms except it takes into account the frequencies that our ears are most sensitive to these frequencies the upper mid frequencies are the ones that our ears pick out the most and so if a signal has more of those frequencies compared to the low frequencies we'll still perceive it as louder so one of the things that you could do for everything that i've told you so far in these videos is you could substitute out rms for lufs and you will get even slightly closer to the intended result however if you are a beginner and that sounds a little bit too confusing don't worry about it first stick with rms until you've really understood that concept deeply and then ufs will come at a later stage the main thing to remember there is just that you want your signal to have the right level of low frequencies versus high frequencies so you don't have a really dark signal with a lot of low frequencies because they take up a lot of energy if you've been applying these techniques let me know in the comments share your experience with other producers on our discord channel check out some of our other music production videos here stay producing be good to one another and bye bye you

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 141,382

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Id: x6suaLQaTXk

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021