Can Someone Explain the basics

JDOD

therecordingrebels.com
Never really tried anything do with "mastering" before. I just leave my master fader in Reaper well alone.

Anyway, I just added the standard Reaper "JS:Master Limter" to my master FX. Left all the presets well alone. I've now applied it to a few different projects and it just makes everything sound a bit better and a bit louder.

Can someone explain to me what the parameters I have control over mean and what I can expect from messing about with them. Here's a pic of my default which I'm using.
Capture Master Limiter.JPG
 
If you think about the name of each parameter...it pretty much tells you what it does.

Threshold - the point where the input signal activates the limiter circuit.
Attack - How fast/slow you want the limiter to act on the signal. It can affect the transients.
Release - How fast/slow you want the limiter to let go of the signal.

Those are the three important ones.

Look Ahead - Digital processing is very capable of analyzing your input "ahead" in time before it acts on it. Since you have a track recorded, the limiter is able to anticipate the incoming signal, and it can fine-tune it's action based on that.


The best, first use is to apply it to a track or mix...and move only one parameter at a time, and....LISTEN. :)
Keep in mind that if you raise the threshold real high, beyond your input signal levels...the rest of the parameters will do nothing.
Also...the parameters DO work in tandem...so it becomes a balancing act...where to set the Threshold VS how ffast to set the Attack...etc...etc.
It's really about you playing with it on a lot of sources and learning how it affects them...same as with comps....and, they are all not the same, so the setting you use on one model may not work on another.

AFA it sounding "better" with the limiter...well, if it makes it louder, you will always perceive it as better.
What you need to do is A/B and don't just listen to the loudness...listen to what it also does to the mix balance, and the mix EQ.
 
Click that Edit button and you can see exactly what each of those sliders does. ;) Course, you'd need to be able to read code and understand something about DSP...
 
If you think about the name of each parameter...it pretty much tells you what it does.

Threshold - the point where the input signal activates the limiter circuit.
Attack - How fast/slow you want the limiter to act on the signal. It can affect the transients.
Release - How fast/slow you want the limiter to let go of the signal.

Those are the three important ones.

Look Ahead - Digital processing is very capable of analyzing your input "ahead" in time before it acts on it. Since you have a track recorded, the limiter is able to anticipate the incoming signal, and it can fine-tune it's action based on that.


The best, first use is to apply it to a track or mix...and move only one parameter at a time, and....LISTEN. :)
Keep in mind that if you raise the threshold real high, beyond your input signal levels...the rest of the parameters will do nothing.
Also...the parameters DO work in tandem...so it becomes a balancing act...where to set the Threshold VS how ffast to set the Attack...etc...etc.
It's really about you playing with it on a lot of sources and learning how it affects them...same as with comps....and, they are all not the same, so the setting you use on one model may not work on another.

AFA it sounding "better" with the limiter...well, if it makes it louder, you will always perceive it as better.
What you need to do is A/B and don't just listen to the loudness...listen to what it also does to the mix balance, and the mix EQ.
Cheers, Miro. Yeah, as well as it sounding slightly louder it also seemed to bring everything together a bit, just made it all feel more cohesive. Dunno why. First time I've tried "mastering " so it's quite interesting. I'll have a fiddle with the parameters and see if I can work them out.

Greg, I can't remember what ratio means on a compressor. I didn't learn this at one point but I've never quite got my head around compressors.
 
Greg, I can't remember what ratio means on a compressor. I didn't learn this at one point but I've never quite got my head around compressors.

The ratio is is how far back the comp/limiter will pull anything that goes over the threshold.
If 10db over, pull back to 1.....If 5db over, pull back to 1.....whatever.
Most comps will only let you go so far. Say, 20:1. After that you're pretty much limiting, I think.

Look for a compressor with visual representation to really get a grasp on what's going on.
A youtube video of avid DYN3 would be perfect.

In that one I linked, look at the diagonal line.
A marker flies up and down that line to show amplitude as the music plays- just like a fader meter.
As the ratio is turned up, that line gets bent down meaning amplitude has to 'try harder' to get as high as it would with no ratio set. See?

The point at which the line bends is the threshold.
Wether the bend is a sharp hard angle of a soft gentle transition is dependent on your knee settings, if you have them.

Attack and release aren't represented but if you play with them at their extremes on some drums, you'll get it.
Slow attack lets the transients through.
 
The ratio is is how far back the comp/limiter will pull anything that goes over the threshold.
If 10db over, pull back to 1.....If 5db over, pull back to 1.....whatever.
Most comps will only let you go so far. Say, 20:1. After that you're pretty much limiting, I think.
It's actually the opposite of this. With ratio of 10:1, it would be that an input signal that exceeds the threshold by 10db would result in an output that's 1db over the threshold. The way you've described it, the output would be 9db over threshold, and bigger ratios would actually yield less gain reduction.
Edit - No. You had it right. It's just worded a little funny and I'm super tired and at work and have plenty of other excuses too. ;)

If this is was a real limiter, the ratio would be infinite, so that the output just won't go over the threshold. I think I looked at this limiter at one point, but I don't remember exactly what it's got going on for ratio. Sometimes they're curvy. I really don't know about this one and can't check right now.

The thing is, that if you do this on a sample-for-sample basis, it's called distortion, you have to kind of smear the response in such a way that the reduction being applied RTFN is based on the average of the last however many samples. That's pretty much what the attack, hold, and release settings do. When the signal goes over the threshold, the compressor starts heading toward an appropriate amount of gain reduction, but almost never actually gets there before it drops again and the release starts heading back toward unity after the hold time.

Now, of course, that means that it's always playing catch up. In the extreme case where it goes from silence to super loud instantaneously, the compressor (/limiter) isn't going to know that it needs to turn down until it's at least a little too late, and depending on your attack time, you'll get some spike that could in fact go way the fuck over the threshold. In a mastering limiter, we really want to know for sure that nothing will every be louder than whatever limit we've decided on, else it's kinda not a limit, right? If we only had some way of maybe knowing that it was going to get loud before it actually gets loud so we could get that attack time part out of the way before the spike has gone by... That's what lookahead does. The detector circuit is "looking into the future"* and reacting at least somewhat to things that are going to happen. Basically, it's to try to catch fast transients without adding too much distortion. Unfortunately, it pretty much has to fail at one of those things.

The only way to be absolutely sure you're not going to overshoot the limit is set a hard limit and clip off anything that goes over. You can round of the transistion, but if you're not responding on a sample-for-sample basis, you must overshoot at least every so often. This might have something like that as a safety for things that sneak past too quick, but again, I'd have to crack it open to find out.



*Actually, what these things do is the detector circuit looks at the input signal right now, the gain reduction is applied to a delayed copy of that signal (delayed by the amount of the lookahead), and then it tells the DAW that it has that much latency, so the delay compensation kicks in and delays everydamnotherthing by the same amount. Works out the same on playback, but if you try to do this to live audio, it's gonna fuck you up pretty good.
 
ashcat has a way of using a lot of words to complicate simple things.

Haha, this reminds me of the post about output volatages of distortion pedals. Cheers though, ashcat. I will try and get my head into it.
 
Yes. If you look at the waveform of a single guitar note, you can split it up into three pieces
1. Transient/attack. This is the spike at the beginning of the note. It is really loud (tall) compared to the rest of the waveform.
2. Sustain. This is the length of the note
3. Decay. This is the end of the note as it fades out into silence. (Or as it is stopped).

What you are doing with the limiter is turning down the transients so that you can turn up the mix. The "volume" of the mix will be the level of the sustain of notes, so the louder you can get that without clipping, the louder the mix.
 
OK, this should be a simple question (there might be a few of these). What exactly is a transient? Is it the thinks like the initial pick attack?

That's right.
Sometimes if I have an acoustic guitar track with distracting pick sounds, I'll use a limiter instead of an eq or compressor.
I find it's the most transparent way to catch those pick sounds without really affecting the rest.
 
So to catch the transients and push the level of the mix up you would need a quick attack to catch the transients and push them down to the level of the sustain?
 
Push the down toward the level of the sustain. If you push them too far, it will start to sound unnatural or start to pump.

I think some of what is making it hard for you is the limiter you chose to use. The type of mastering limiter that gets used the most only has two adjustments, threshold and ceiling. If you don't have your head firmly wrapped around compression, these other parameters are just more rope to hang yourself with.
 
So to catch the transients and push the level of the mix up you would need a quick attack to catch the transients and push them down to the level of the sustain?
Yes, but if you make the attack too fast it can start to sound like distortion, so you use lookahead and then the attack can be a little longer and still catch those transients. Like I said in amongst all those words above. ;)
 
Yes, but if you make the attack too fast it can start to sound like distortion, so you use lookahead and then the attack can be a little longer and still catch those transients. Like I said in amongst all those words above. ;)

Lol, now you're speaking English. Before you were speaking engineer.
 
Lol, now you're speaking English. Before you were speaking engineer.
Not so much, no. There really isn't a lot of jargon or anything. Pretty well dummed down for laymen. You folks just don't have enough attention span or interest in actually understanding the things you're asking about. Why ask at all then? The right answer in most cases is "Turn the knobs til it sounds good" and that really is all you need to know.
 
Not so much, no. There really isn't a lot of jargon or anything. Pretty well dummed down for laymen. You folks just don't have enough attention span or interest in actually understanding the things you're asking about. Why ask at all then? The right answer in most cases is "Turn the knobs til it sounds good" and that really is all you need to know.

Then just say that instead of trying to impress everyone by writing a rambling book of mostly useless information.

P.S. It's "dumbed".
 
Fuck IDK dude!

I thought somebody asked what the knobs did and at least implied the question of why he might want to turn them. Like, so you might have some idea of which knob to turn to get the sound you want or something.

I thought the real basics of what they do were pretty well handled, and tried to add a little bit to the how and why part. Not trying to impress anybody. Thought I was helping.
 
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