TRY LIMITING LIKE THIS!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

Welcome back. I'm Streaky. Today, I'm going to show you the limiting secret. Now the limiting secret. It's not about me personally, obviously. This is what I'm asked in the comments a lot. What I get asked is how do you get something super loud and putting it through a limiter, it always distorts and I can't get it loud myself? I thought I'd do a video today just to explain to you exactly how that's done so that you're not just smashing it through one limiter. And then it all sounds distorted and you can't get the kind of level you need. Let's get inside the computer and I'll show you the little secret I'm trying to sell you. We're inside of Pro Tools and this is a track I've been sent in by one of the viewers. If you want to send your track in, then send them to demos@streaky and I'll put them on my video and link them below. So this is a soundtrack even track. (Music playing).

Just so we get an idea of what we're playing with. And what I'm going to show you is something that I do quite often. And it's when you're moving a track to get it from a level that's quite low like this. (Music playing). You want to get it a lot louder. Instead of a lot of people will do, they'll just smash a limiter on and they'll get it loud by just having something like the FabFilter, which can handle this, don't get me wrong. You don't really want something like this smashing that much level through because it's doing a lot of gain reduction as you can see there. And I'd rather share that weight, share that load across a few different plugins. The reason I do this is because each plugin has a certain sound, certain color or certain vibe. So basically, what you're doing is you're manipulating it just by sprinkling a little bit of color across from the different types of the limiters. So that you're not just getting one smash sound, you're gain staging it through a few different limiters. The ones that I like to use this for, and I'll show you why, is I like this old school Massey L2007 Mastering Limiter. It sounds really good.

I love these modes fast and loud there. And I usually have the output about -0.1, 0.17 for Jean, if he's watching. Threshold is around, wherever I need it to be where I'm just shaving off around 1dB. Now I wouldn't push too much through this limiter. What I'm trying to do is just build the gain up through these. I don't really want to be reducing the gain too much. So I'll tickle it. Let's say rather than smash it through. What's going to take the weight. Is this at the end? So this is doing the heavy lifting at the end. But what we're doing, we're just lifting it through. It's not going to be doing 10dB of gain on there. It's going to be doing like 3 or something like that. This can handle it. It sounds really fast and really clean, but we're getting flavor from these. So I love this Massey L2007. It sounds really great. Let's just keep that on. (Music playing).

So you can see I’m going to get about a dB gain now. About dB gain reduction. I'm adding 4dB in the level. I've got another one, which I really like. This is cool. This is from Goodhertz. This is the Faraday Limiter. Now the good thing about this one, which I really like is you've got this link mode here, which sounds really good when you have it in M/S. It just really opens it up. It sounds like the compressor's not pulling it together into the middle of the sound. When you get limiter, a lot of the time, they drag things into the center where with this, it opens it up a little bit because it's separate in the midst and side. So I really liked that. And also, it has this vibe thing here. It has a color and a warmth, and it's got this irony sound. It's really cool sounding. So again, I'm not going to take too much off. I just want to be streaming about a dB off. Let's play this. (Music playing).

I just want to be taking about a dB of gain reduction. Again, set this for about -1. Not going totally over so I'm adding a little bit. I'm getting another 2.5 dB of gain from this. So from the L2007 I had 4. Then I'm adding another 2, I've got 6. So that means I'm not going to have to put 10 on here. So now, I'm going to start with zero on this one and let's go through. (Music playing). Now I can get about 3dB and you can hear how much cleaner it sounds.  (Music playing).

I've added say 4dB here. 4 dB on the L2007 and another 2.5dB there. So my math says 4+4 is 8 plus 2 is 10 and a half. Rather than smashing 10.5. Let's just turn these off and then you can hear what 10.5 sounds like on here. (Music playing).

No way as clear. (Music playing). Let’s just play that then. Let’s put that back down to 4 and then let's just turn these on again. (Music playing).

What I'll do now is I'll do something funky in the editing where it will change it from this set up with the triple. Let's call this the Streaky Triple Limiter trick, and then we will turn these off so that we've just got this doing 10.5, which is the same gain difference. We'll start with this one. (Music playing).

There you have it. That is how you limit things to get them sounding super clean and to gain stage it up with limiting. Not saying you should do this all the time, but occasionally it works really well. If you're finding it hard to push something straight through a limiter. Until the next video. See you next time.