Louder progressive house drop?
-
- KVRAF
- 8723 posts since 24 May, 2002 from Tutukaka, New Zealand
Probably an age thing, but in general I think progressive house should be played quieter, not louder. Quieter by about 40dB? Any compresser, clipper or limiter will do it...just turn the threshold to zero, main output dial to around -9 or so, and if your DAW has a main stereo output mute button, set it to "on". 
On a more serious note...you want a compressor and limiter. There are too many to choose from, and tbh your DAW will probably have reasonable compressors already. I personally like to use a compressor for around 1-2 dB of gentle compression, then a limiter for the real louderizing. Limiters vary a lot, and some make distortion obvious at lower levels than others. For a reasonable price you can't go too far wrong with Ozone and it has a few other mastering tricks up its sleeve...an all in one mastering tool, really.
But there are options. You could actually use a compressor for the real louderizing and just use a limiter for stopping peaks and setting a ceiling. You could use a clipper instead..I'm playing around with Fire the Clip currently and liking it (though it has horrendous CPU with the oversampling).
It seems some people throw everything at it...compressors, clippers, serial limiters. Beware that limiting and clipping = distortion. That's what it does - flattening peaks is exactly what distortion is, and if you crank up a limiter...you get a fuzz pedal. Easy to kill a mix if you overdo it. But TBH some limiters are good enough to get silly loudness nowadays. You can easy get a LUFS -8 mix to not sound too horrible.
On a more serious note...you want a compressor and limiter. There are too many to choose from, and tbh your DAW will probably have reasonable compressors already. I personally like to use a compressor for around 1-2 dB of gentle compression, then a limiter for the real louderizing. Limiters vary a lot, and some make distortion obvious at lower levels than others. For a reasonable price you can't go too far wrong with Ozone and it has a few other mastering tricks up its sleeve...an all in one mastering tool, really.
But there are options. You could actually use a compressor for the real louderizing and just use a limiter for stopping peaks and setting a ceiling. You could use a clipper instead..I'm playing around with Fire the Clip currently and liking it (though it has horrendous CPU with the oversampling).
It seems some people throw everything at it...compressors, clippers, serial limiters. Beware that limiting and clipping = distortion. That's what it does - flattening peaks is exactly what distortion is, and if you crank up a limiter...you get a fuzz pedal. Easy to kill a mix if you overdo it. But TBH some limiters are good enough to get silly loudness nowadays. You can easy get a LUFS -8 mix to not sound too horrible.
-
- KVRist
- 222 posts since 18 Aug, 2008
What I do to make a tune louder than should be is run the mix through a nice clipper such as k-clip then follow that with a good limiter, The clipper makes it so the limiter doesn't work as hard. You can get It ridiculously loud this way with close to zero rms dynamic range if you are so brutal without changing your mix too terribly much.
