Using limiters on Mix busses?!

Well......you're getting a lot of good advice here that should work to correct your issues. You seem to want the problem to be something different than what many of us are pointing out.

At this point....you're basically mixing and mastering at the same time....and that's not a good idea. Use automation and compression (properly adjusted) on your drum tracks to tame the peaks.....not a limiter. Make sure your drums are not too wide in the mix. Use an analyzer to look at your bass and snare sounds to see if you can carefully carve out or lower any offending frequencies. Then apply compression and see what that looks like.

There are a number of ways to approach your issues so try and try again.

Ozone is good...but it will point out issues in your mix if you have them....and Ozone can't really do too much to fix mix issues due to single tracks.

Mick
 
Svemir said:
I don't think this is about volume, the instruments are balanced and I have compared it with the reference track so the drums volume is ok.
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Umm, then what is the problem? If the mix is the same volume as the reference track then everything should be good.

Are you trying to line up the numbers on the meter with that of the reference track? The meters will get you close, but there are a lot of other factors that go into perceived loudness.

Don't look at the meters, listen to the mix.
 
Svemir said:
I don't think this is about volume, the instruments are balanced and I have compared it with the reference track so the drums volume is ok.
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The kick and snare are almost always what cause the biggest spikes in the mix, so any compression or limiting is going to squish them first and bring up everything else which ends up causing pumping.
One of the best way to reduce kick, snare and even bass peaks is to use parallel saturation and compression. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, setting up a stereo aux with sends from kick and snare, compressing to the point of saturation or adding overdriving/distorting that aux can actually reduce the peaks when added back to the drum bus in sparing amounts. There are hundreds of videos if you go to youtube and search "saturation on drums"
I like to use waves aural exciter and an 1176 or DBX compressor plugin together but the options are unlimited.
 
Gtoboy said:
The kick and snare are almost always what cause the biggest spikes in the mix, so any compression or limiting is going to squish them first and bring up everything else which ends up causing pumping.
One of the best way to reduce kick, snare and even bass peaks is to use parallel saturation and compression. Though it sounds counter-intuitive, setting up a stereo aux with sends from kick and snare, compressing to the point of saturation or adding overdriving/distorting that aux can actually reduce the peaks when added back to the drum bus in sparing amounts. There are hundreds of videos if you go to youtube and search "saturation on drums"
I like to use waves aural exciter and an 1176 or DBX compressor plugin together but the options are unlimited.
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I did already on the drums bus, I used saturation knob and it helped, I don't know if I saturated them enough, I stopped the knob where I saw that yellow led on the plugin turning on. More than that it will start distorting too much
 
You seem to be using your eyes not ears? Maybe I am old but my primary and perhaps ONLY use for limiters is when for some reason there is a chance I am accidentally going to make mistakes. Studio and live - I accept that distortion that is recorded is bad - but distortion in mix busses, sends, returns and effects is non-destructive and fixable. A limiter is a repair tool, not a use everyday tool. A limiter in the groups means the mix was bad - those peaks wrecking it needed management earlier. Squash the kick or whatever is causing it - don't try to fix the whole drum group. It just sounds horrible. I used a limiter in a live show over the weekend - being recorded for TV. A comedian, not music, but having worked with him before, I knew one of his jokes involved putting the mic to his lips and yelling aaaaagh into it. I'd heard it catch out sound folk loads of time. So, as supervisor, I had a quiet word with the guy mixing for the video and warned him. Digital desk so the limiter was slapped on the mic - and did nothing at all for 45 minutes, then the moment came and it caught it.

If I don't know how loud something might get, they are very useful. Great on individual sound sources, but, on a mixed group? For me that is the wrong place for a limiter.
 
rob aylestone said:
You seem to be using your eyes not ears? Maybe I am old but my primary and perhaps ONLY use for limiters is when for some reason there is a chance I am accidentally going to make mistakes. Studio and live - I accept that distortion that is recorded is bad - but distortion in mix busses, sends, returns and effects is non-destructive and fixable. A limiter is a repair tool, not a use everyday tool. A limiter in the groups means the mix was bad - those peaks wrecking it needed management earlier. Squash the kick or whatever is causing it - don't try to fix the whole drum group. It just sounds horrible. I used a limiter in a live show over the weekend - being recorded for TV. A comedian, not music, but having worked with him before, I knew one of his jokes involved putting the mic to his lips and yelling aaaaagh into it. I'd heard it catch out sound folk loads of time. So, as supervisor, I had a quiet word with the guy mixing for the video and warned him. Digital desk so the limiter was slapped on the mic - and did nothing at all for 45 minutes, then the moment came and it caught it.

If I don't know how loud something might get, they are very useful. Great on individual sound sources, but, on a mixed group? For me that is the wrong place for a limiter.
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Mm ok, to me it seems like everyone is putting limiters on busses. And on the master bus. The issue here is, if I have too high peaks , mostly caused by the drums, in the master I can’t raise the overall song volume to match that of the other songs out there without distortion, if I reduce the peaks I can raise the volume without causing distortion.
In my case I have used a mix of compressor, saturation and limiter on the drums bus to attenuate the transients, I used them carefully.
How can you fix this in the mix? I mean the hit of the snare for instance, how do you attenuate it in the mix in a way that doesn’t peak but maintaining the strength?
 
You don't you fix it at source - not when merged with everything else - that the trouble with dynamic compression. It's a terrible tool for everything that doesn't benefot from it. If your snare is uncontrolled - fix it properly. It's like slapping a 60 down to 30mph speed limit on an entire road to catch the occasional speeder. Speed cameras do the trick, and only penalise the guilty.
 
Svemir said:
I don't think this is about volume, the instruments are balanced and I have compared it with the reference track so the drums volume is ok.
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You've already been given advice about automation - and you chosen to ignore it to keep concentrating on the Ozone mix.
You aren't going to solve this in Ozone.
 
If you have too much chilli in your recipe - your only real solution is to increase the amount of everything else, then lose the excess that's wasted. Its so much simpler to not have put so many chillis in in the first place. Luckily with music, we can go back and reduce it simply.
 
Papanate said:
You've already been given advice about automation - and you chosen to ignore it to keep concentrating on the Ozone mix.
You aren't going to solve this in Ozone.
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I see I didn’t ignore it it’s just that if I have to go edit automating every kick and snare in my songs I will rather shoot myself 😂 anyway I’m doing it in my mix, ozone helped me a lot to understand what was wrong in my mix
 
rob aylestone said:
If you have too much chilli in your recipe - your only real solution is to increase the amount of everything else, then lose the excess that's wasted. Its so much simpler to not have put so many chillis in in the first place. Luckily with music, we can go back and reduce it simply.
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I’m not sure you got my point, the volume is well balanced, if I raise the volume of the other instruments the drums will disappear behind them, despite the volume is balanced the kick and snare were having too many high peaks, so to reduce those I used saturation knob plugin on drums bus, it helped a lot, and a little bit of limiter
 
The idea behind saturation is to increase the apparent volume while lowering the peak. If you add saturation to each kick and snare track individually it will work best. Add small amounts of saturation to each track and you should be able to see the peak average drop 4+ db while hearing the volume appear louder. Then you can reduce the track volume allowing more headroom for limiting if needed.
The reason you do the kick and snare separately is to get the proper amount of saturation for each, It just won't work as well if you do it on a bus.
 
Exactly. Control the individual drums separately with compression/limiting/saturation and use compression on the bus to glue the kit together.
 
Svemir, we do get your point, we just disagree that a bus is the appropriate place to sort individual issues with one or more of the sources on the bus. Your ‘cure’ for the snare also impacts on things like cymbals or things that ring. They suddenly jump, and people hear it. Get the components sorted for their dynamics then blend them. Doing it differently just gives you exactly the problems you’re having. Some things work great on busses or groups. In fact, this was one thing that really made people think when we moved to using VCAs rather than group busses. People couldn’t do it any more, and had to do it in the channel and I think it really improved things.
 
I realize this string is old, but . . . . A little less "mastering" and a lot more mixing should be the order of the day. The original advice from mjb stands--volume automation. It works on drum busses, vocal tracks, guitar tracks, everything, and I should know because I use it routinely and extensively, especially on vocals, though I do indeed use it on busses. The link to the music is not functional anymore, so I couldn't listen, but if the drums don't sound half-way decent with NO compressing or limiting, you're headed in the wrong direction from the get-go.
 
TimOD said:
I realize this string is old, but . . . . A little less "mastering" and a lot more mixing should be the order of the day. The original advice from mjb stands--volume automation. It works on drum busses, vocal tracks, guitar tracks, everything, and I should know because I use it routinely and extensively, especially on vocals, though I do indeed use it on busses. The link to the music is not functional anymore, so I couldn't listen, but if the drums don't sound half-way decent with NO compressing or limiting, you're headed in the wrong direction from the get-go.
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Thanks! The new link works now if you fancy giving a listen https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bo5N0Gdt7LIOJ-F8KlSrzxGx-x5h1pKU/view?usp=drivesdk
 
TimOD said:
It's Wednesday here and the link is not functional again.
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Does it sound squashed or hot to you? It measures -10 LUFS integrated, but for me I would make it a little bit louder, maybe 2 or 3 dbs louder, but I'm not sure whether is already hot or not. The master limiter ,as it is now, it's showing me a gain reduction of -2/-3 db on average, so if I raise the thrashold the gain reduction will go even further and that's not good.
 
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