Mastering Question regarding limiters

4

4tracker

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I just finished mixing and my faders were very low (like 1/4 up) on the guitars. If I raised them higher they were too high in the mix, too loud. I think this is because I doubled 1 of the guitar tracks and it summed? (is this how it works?).

But other instruments (bass, vocals) were fine. So being a newbie to this I just went with it, but I feel something is intuitively wrong.

When I "mastered" I used a peak limiter to raise the volume of the track since I couldn't raise the guitars in the DAW without them getting offensively loud compared to the other instruments. When doing this (peak limiter -- just raised the level 12db) I imagine it's compressing the heck out of the mix to get that volume?

Can anyone inform me on how this works? Thanks!

The questions would be:

1. Does duplicating a guitar track (1 mono track that I just duplicated) cause it to sum and raise the volume? It sounded that way.
2. Does a typical peak limiter (e.g. wavelab peak limiter, l2, etc) just clip off peaks so you can raise volume, or is it squashing everything?
3. I can't figure out where it all went wrong.

Here is the track. It's just my lady and I doing home recordings so it's not a huge deal. I'd just like to get better at recording, mixing, mastering, etc.

-tracker-1/chavez-unreal-is-here
 
Last edited:
1. Yes, two copies of the same thing added together in phase is the same as turning one of them up.
2. Mostly, yes.
3. We need more information and there probably isnt a 'right answer'.
 
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