Tech house kick and clap

[abutler91]

I read that the master limiter should not engage more heavily when the clap drops with the kick, because the low end is then badly affected. What are your thoughts?

[_al_]

I read that the master limiter should not engage more heavily when the clap drops with the kick, because the low end is then badly affected. What are your thoughts?

Well this is a fact, but there are ways around it.
Try using two identical claps. Your main clap can be hipassed up to 400hz or whatever suits the track.
As it's hitting with the kick, you won't notice the low freq loss, and as a bonus, it won't interfere with the kick's punchiness.
In fact, you can often hipass over 1k, and the kick will still give it the illusion of punchiness.

If your kick is very subby, with not much punchiness, then you will need the clap to go a bit lower, obviously, but you can usually find a balance that allows the clap to sound "backed up" by the kick.
Soloing that clap will make it sound silly, so that's why you can use a second identical clap that you trigger when the kick is not playing. This clap can have a fuller body, and if all is balanced right, the hipassed clap will sound just as full, because it has the kick behind it.

Sound selection is also important when doing this.

Another method is to use something like Shaperbox to hipass just the initial transient of the clap, so it doesn't trigger the limiter so hard.

Honestly though, any sound with strong low freq content can cause the kick to duck slightly, but the sub always has a larger effect on the limiter, so it's not hard to make the kick win.
So if you just make a habit of hipassing sounds as much as feel comfortable with, you should be ok!

[Big DAW Audio]

When a kick and clap stack on top of each other, this always causes an increase in volume. There is no way around this. Using side chain, EQ filtering, and delaying the sample forwards / backwards can help minimize the increase in volume, but unless you clip or limit the kick and clap together before the master limiter, it will always cause the master limiter to react more heavily. You can't prevent it from happening - the goal is to minimize how much the volume increases using the previously mentioned tricks.

If you can get it so there's only 1-2 dB volume increase, that should be good enough and can be handled during the mastering stage.