Ok, so you wanna join the loudness wars? Well, I guess we all have to, to some extent. The stakes have been raised, for better or worse (worse), and now if you don't play along, your mixes sound wimpy. Lost along the way, of course, was dynamics, until now what we have is a big square shaped waveform that starts loud, ends loud, and makes the ear lose interest along the way. But, alas, that's the state of things, so we have to deal with reality today. Myself, I refuse to push it all the way, just enough to compete, but not win and lose all the dynamics in the process.
So, mastering is where this loudness treatment usually gets applied, but if you wait till then to address it, you'll do more damage than if you think about it earlier in the mixing process. If you tame some dynamics on the individual tracks instead of the stereo master then you won't squish every other instrument in the process. Take a look at the waveform coming off your master buss, and if it's overly dynamic, figure out which tracks need a little compression to even things out a bit. As soon as you do, you'll be able to bring up the master fader a bit with no overs, and with a higher perceived level. Speaking of perceived level, frequency distribution also comes into play here, but I don't want to write a book here, nor am I qualified to.
When you do get to the mastering stage with a dynamically and spectrally balanced mix that's normalized , then you can go streight to the ultra-maximizer, or if you know what you're doing, break out the C4 multiband, followed by the maximizer. Be careful, and do a lot of A/b checks to make sure you're not screwing things up. If you came in with a good mix, then you should be able to squeeze out an extra few db or so without sucking the life out of it.
Good luck, RD
