I realize this may be different for every given situation, for now lets just say a 4 piece rock band..
No, you had it before. It's different for EVERY given situation. Every individual mix, on every individual project, number of musicians or genre has nothing to do with it. Some mixes fall apart immediately (especially those that were tracked too hot) some mixes can handle freakish amounts of abuse (almost universally the ones that were done with obscene amounts of headroom at every possible stage previously).
Why do we makeup the gain loss with a limiter in the mastering stage..?
You're not making up a gain loss -- You're adding gain and wrecking the mix's natural dynamics. We're not dealing with "normal" levels here -- We're wrecking the dynamics in order to participate in a pissing contest between other artists and labels. The listening public never asked for this (and personally, I think if they actually knew what they were missing, there would be an uproar -- Metallica's Death Magnetic release would've been the catalyst for change. Many of us were hoping and praying that those "demonstrations" by the public would've actually put the brakes on this nonsense).
why not just make our mixes slightly "hotter" (assuming we have mixed below 0db) to attenuate the overall mix?
ASSUMING by "0dB" you mean "-0.0dBFS" -- If people were dealing with 0dBVU and using *that* as a guide (which it always has been), then mixes would actually have the dynamics they were meant to have again.
A lot of people *do* make their mixes hotter. As mentioned before, a lot of people track way too hot right at the start -- Wrecks a lot of mixes from the get go and many times makes sure a mix will never be able to compete with the ridiculous levels some expect these days. Mixing too hot puts a shiv in the mastering phase (if you're going to do it, do it in the context of the entire project).
Assuming you DON'T "get it as hot as you can without clipping" when you're tracking (as that's an inherently terrible thing in many cases and I still can't believe it's actually in many instruction manuals and "how to" books), you have some amount of headroom at the early stages. If (and I can't believe I'm going there) you want mixes that can handle the abuse of "loud" then your point should be
protecting and cherishing that headroom at every possible point in every possible stage post-tracking. Every track, every buss, every aux send, group, effects return, etc. Make a mix with dynamics
that serve the mix and worry about volume at the very last step.
Sorry, I don't mean to "rant" this early on a Sunday. I mangled the hell out of a project yesterday (as I do most days it seems) because the client "loves it, but can you make it even louder like (this band's recording)?" So I did. And personally, I did a helluva job on it. It's loud as **** with very little "apparent
damage" due in no small part using a chain of processors that again,
has an absolutely obscene amount of usable headroom and a conversion chain calibrated specifically to work at those voltages equating to a specific digital reference level.
Now let's go back in time 15 years and ask me if I'd ever be calibrating my converters to a specific reference level just for the sake of volume...
Sorry - Ranting again... This isn't the job I wanted to do when I started this. I mean, it's exactly the job I wanted to do - I'm just not able to do it the way I used to.
