Mastering levels

danny.guitar said:
Is it dumb to use volume envelopes to tame big peaks and then just normalizing to get it louder?

That's what I do. :o

I hate making a really nice, open, mix and then messing it all up with compression/limiting. But I also don't have much of an idea on what I'm doing when it comes to that.

I usually get an average RMS of about -14 to -12.
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No that is not a dumb idea atall. Its whatever works that is a good idea, doesnt matter how dumb it may sound. :)
I usually cut and paste more consistent drum hits inplace of the lower and higher hits which helps bring my RMS up a bit.

Eck
 
ecktronic said:
Sounds interesting, but I cant see how that would bring any transients back if you need to limit the 2 signals after adding them together. You would need to limit a second time to acheive the same RMS average you were looking for in the first place. Is that right?

Eck
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No, you would be mixing together the limited material (to raise the overall level) with the unlimited. The combination should not exceed 0 dBFS when doing this (my ceiling is actually -.5 or -.2 dBFS). You will need to lower the limited track a bit to compensate for adding the unlimited version. Yes, by lowering the limited version the original RMS level is brought down, but by adding the unlimited version you are bring it back up again to a given degree.

Coincidentally I was reading this month's article in Mix mag about mastering. One of the engineers, I believe Douches, was talking about this very thing.
 
I found the Oxford Inflator plug-in to be a good sub for the L2/L3 when the Waves kills all the transients. I usually have to add an EQ across the master to add some high end sparkle too, but in terms of loudness, it does the same job without killing the drums
 
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