BONUS MODULE: Maintaining Drums Punch During Loudness Processing

In this video, I demonstrate how you can balance the side-effects of clipping and limiting to maintain the subjective punch of your main drum hits when applying mastering-style loudness processing.

(If you have trouble downloading or playing this video, here’s a mirror file on an alternate server.)

Although loudness-normalised streaming is increasingly becoming the norm for consumer music listening, many commercial releases are still being mastered very loud, and if you wish to compete with that degress of loudness (perhaps when submitting mix files to clients for approval where you can’t guarantee that they’ll do the necessary loudness matching), then the techniques in this video should allow you to achieve the loudness you need with a minimum of side-effects as far as drums punch is concerned. However, if you’re planning to have your mix mastered professionally, then you should remove all such loudness processing from the file you send to the mastering engineer, as they will likely be able to get even better loudness-processing results with their specialist gear and experience.

DOWNLOADS

• Demo Project: The Reaper demo project used for this video.

• Demo Screenshots: Screenshots of all the plug-ins in my demo project.

• Test Yourself: Six different mix excerpts in different styles, all featuring prominent drums, for you to try loudness processing using the techniques mentioned in this module’s video. In each case, I’ve created ‘solution’ versions at both -7dBLUFS and -5dBLUFS loudness levels to compare against your own settings to develop your ears and skills. Remember to make sure that you compare files at equal loudness so that you focus your hearing on the processing side-effects without being biased by any loudness differences.

• Video Transcript: A rich-text file of the video’s full voiceover script.

FURTHER RESOURCES

I’ve only used excerpts of each mix for the Test Yourself exercises, but if you’d like to work with the full-length mixes (or indeed mix those multitracks for yourself), you can find those projects in the ‘Mixing Secrets’ Free Multitrack Download Library here:

• Tom McKenzie: ‘Directions’ – For more mixing tips, check out Mix Rescue April 2013.

• North To Alaska: ‘All The Same’ – For more mixing tips, check out the July 2022 Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast and Mix Rescue December 2009.

• Chris Durban: ‘Celebrate’ – For more mixing tips, check out Mix Rescue May 2009.

• Kangoro: ‘Easy Tiger’

• Trafficker: ‘My Father Never Loved Me’ – For more mixing tips, check out the August 2020 Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast and Mix Rescue July 2018.

• Hannes Keseberg: ‘You Know Better’ – For more mixing tips, check out the December 2018 Cambridge-MT Patrons Podcast.