limiting in mastering: is it always necessary
Here we are back again, decades later STILL discussing the loudness wars. Well, sort of…
I used to think that if I didn’t place a limiter at the end of every mastering chain, the world would explode and I would be publicly shamed for being a shit producer.
Both of those things still have a possibility of happening, of course, but what’s all this about limiters? Well, what this discussion is really about, is limiting vs. clipping - and believe it or not, you won’t go to producer jail for not using a limiter!
So yes - lately I’ve been experimenting with letting my song go into the red and saying ‘f*ck the limiter’. Now, that sentence is likely to make many producers vomit, cry, or a combination of both - hang with me for a sec.
Limiters are essentially compressors on steroids, they work very quickly, and most of the time with no mercy. They push down anything that goes over the threshold, creating a ‘squashed’, over-compressed sound if done too heavily. We use limiters to avoid digital clipping, for what seem to be obvious reasons; because usually, digital clipping sounds like shit!
But… always? NO! Hard clippers (I love Newfangled’s Saturate, but KClip, FreeClip and others do basically the same thing) force digital clipping like it would if you let your meter reach 0dB. This is really useful for shaving off unnecessary peaks, and its mostly used either on buses or before a limiter if you really want to squash your dynamic range, a practice that is perfectly acceptable in modern music production (so all you angry muso’s out there can now relax).
While this will get our mix loud, it might not be as clean and punchy as we want. Why? Transients.
Your limiter pushes down transients like they’re going out of style. While clipping will shave them off, and leave a bit of distortion in its place.
So if you’re making music that’s distortion heavy, think different forms of EDM (like dubstep, harder forms of house, anything with some guts to it) or even metal, sometimes letting things run into the red can sound absolutely amazing. Your mix can both be loud AND clean/punchy.
But I hear you ask, ‘why let the DAW run into the red, can’t I just use a dedicated clipper?’ You certainly can! It definitely gives you a bit more control, but your DAW is going to clip it anyways, so to me it’s just usually not worth the extra hassle and CPU usage. This is another reason I like the Saturate plugin I mentioned earlier, it’s mostly agreed in the EDM space that it sounds the closest to how Ableton would natively clip your track once you render it.
BUT - a few caveats to this, firstly it’s very genre dependent, please use a limiter on your jazz or ambient tracks. The distortion that’s introduced will sound bad if the genre does not suit it. Secondly, your mix has to be really solid. You want to essentially not need mastering because your mix has done all of the work. Get your sounds right before they hit the master, and you will thank yourself when you're excited bounce out the first of your 11 ‘final mixes’.
Ultimately, just experiment with it. There are pro producers out there who don’t use a limiter, and some who do. I know for a fact that No Mana, one of my biggest inspirations, does not use a limiter on his master (he actually doesn’t use anything except a Utility that turns the gain up, his mixes are that solid!).
