Most transparent/musical way to raise volume?

Here are a couple examples of hard, fast compression on drums.



What you end up doing is lengthening the decay of the drum. Fattening them up a bit.
 
Technical stuff aside, the limiter being used and the style of music are the two very important things next to 'the set of ears' being used. I used to be a big waves L2 fan. It makes things loud and looks nice. And it seems popular still. But it's a horrible horrible piece of garbage. It makes everything sound flat and crunchy along with loud. I suppose if you want flat and crunchy, then it's awesome. :facepalm:

I did some level matched A/B comparisons between the Waves L2, Fab Filter Pro-L and the Melda Limiter using a variety of music, which is what converted me away. The Fab Filter Pro-L was the best by far. It can be very transparent or you can tweak it to add character. The free Melda limiter was also really good. The L2 might as well of been a virus. It's that bad in comparison.

I wonder about other limiters. Most DAWs come with a stock one. I would do level matched A/B comparisons and see which limiter works the best to your ears on the music. The Level matched part is critical. TB pro audio makes a VST called AB_LM. the x64 version is great. And it's free, which is incredible.

Even 1/2 a db of overall gain difference between two references can trick you into thinking something sounds better than it does.
 
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