Premier Rock Forum

I recently came across a comment that kind of surprised me and looked up the technique and didn't realize how common this is. The idea that in your mastering chain, you use two limiters to help retain dynamics and not push one limiter too hard.

Can someone with more experience explain this better and what two limiters they would use in this technique.

I got a LAAL from Plugin Alliance for nearly pennies to try this out, and I wanted to use it with the Sonible Smart Limiter. I am going in with the idea that the LAAL could do some really fine-grained things, and the Sonible would be more of the end polish.

cakes wrote: Mon May 12, 2025 10:20 am I recently came across a comment that kind of surprised me and looked up the technique and didn't realize how common this is. The idea that in your mastering chain, you use two limiters to help retain dynamics and not push one limiter too hard.

Can someone with more experience explain this better and what two limiters they would use in this technique.

I got a LAAL from Plugin Alliance for nearly pennies to try this out, and I wanted to use it with the Sonible Smart Limiter. I am going in with the idea that the LAAL could do some really fine-grained things, and the Sonible would be more of the end polish.

I've never done this with two limiters specifically, but my normal mastering chain at the moment has a compressor, a multi band compressor, and a final limiter.

The compressor is generally set quite slow to even out louder parts and quiet parts.

The multi band is more of a mid-time attacks and release. This will be used in one of two ways. One way is utilitarian; taming hi-hats, gluing the low end together between the bass guitar and the kick drum, or just anything where I need dynamics in one frequency area. If I don't need that, I might set up the multi-band as one wide band and do a full band, mid-speed compressor. Or maybe not, it depends on the material.

Then I have the maximizer/limiter at the end to chop out the peaks and make it as loud as the client* wants it.

For me, the idea is that there are diferent creative reasons for compressing at different attack/release times. Trying to get leveling between quieter verse and a louder chorus with a peak limiter will never work. However, each type of compression/limiting will raise the RMS level of the signal. So yeah, no one device has to work as hard to bring the RMS level up. In most cases, trying to bring the level up as much as is desired with only one device/plug in would cause unwanted distortion or coloration.

Of course, this now opens up the discussion of wanted vs. unwanted coloration and distortion, which is a topic for another time.

* Client!?! Who am I kidding? I only do about two mastering jobs a year for friends. This is not how I earn a living anymore.

I'll often put a peak limiter or dynamic EQ before my compressor to tame peaks before hitting a slower and easier compression. Keeps it from pumping. I'll follow it all with a limiter maximizer thing to get it to the deliverable target. I vastly prefer several dynamics processors doing very little to few doing a lot. If I think I can "hear" dynamics working during Mastering, I feel like I'm doing it wrong.

I posted this in the Reaper thread but it is basically a Mastering thing so Ill rpt. it here. You can open several song Projects.RPP files INSIDE a Reaper timeline and it has become my standard Mix Finalization/Mastering workflow. It's great.

Open a fresh Reaper project, and drag any Reaper Project file (.RPP) into the time line, a prompt will open and ask if you want to insert as Media Item. You do. You will see the project you dragged in open in another project tab and start rendering. When it is done it will close and you will have a render of your project in the new project. Now, the cool part... double click on that audio file and it will open the full session of that audio in another tab, you can make changes to the mix and when you SAVE the session, it will auto-magically start rendering it out again and when you go back the New project the render will reflect your changes. Putting in markers named =START and =END will determine the render area.

This is a cool thing if you are doing Masters like me where I load all the tracks in one session and strap Izotope on every track, and on the Master. Now if you need to jump in and fix one little thing in the project you can easily.

Maybe not useful at all but it is wild that Reaper can do this.

Reaper is King

I've used a clipper before a limiter, as a maximizer. Usually have some light saturation before that, with a compressor at the beginning of the chain. But I love this discussion already about doing a little bit of dynamics control with multiple units so one thing isn't pulling all the weight and crushing dynamics.

cakes wrote: Mon May 12, 2025 11:19 am I've used a clipper before a limiter, as a maximizer. Usually have some light saturation before that, with a compressor at the beginning of the chain. But I love this discussion already about doing a little bit of dynamics control with multiple units so one thing isn't pulling all the weight and crushing dynamics.

I've tried to be very careful with clippers in my mastering chain because I can hear that it is becoming extremely overused these days. Mixes are so saturated and it makes everything sound like its being blasted out of a bluetooth speaker, my suspicion is that people are doing it because it sort of normalizes the mix when it IS being playing out of say, an iphone.

I've been using a multiband saturation (I like Kazrog Kclip) before the eq so I can add a little harmonic content, this gives the eq more to bite into and I tend to make less dramatic eq moves if say, I can fuzz up the mids a little and boost them a little less. It can help a mix that was a little over gutted in the low mids and sounds hollow. But dude, there are some people out there just meat fisting a saturation as a final limiter stage and i can't get on board with it.

Kniferide wrote: Mon May 12, 2025 12:08 pm

cakes wrote: Mon May 12, 2025 11:19 am I've used a clipper before a limiter, as a maximizer. Usually have some light saturation before that, with a compressor at the beginning of the chain. But I love this discussion already about doing a little bit of dynamics control with multiple units so one thing isn't pulling all the weight and crushing dynamics.

I've tried to be very careful with clippers in my mastering chain because I can hear that it is becoming extremely overused these days. Mixes are so saturated and it makes everything sound like its being blasted out of a bluetooth speaker, my suspicion is that people are doing it because it sort of normalizes the mix when it IS being playing out of say, an iphone.

I've been using a multiband saturation (I like Kazrog Kclip) before the eq so I can add a little harmonic content, this gives the eq more to bite into and I tend to make less dramatic eq moves if say, I can fuzz up the mids a little and boost them a little less. It can help a mix that was a little over gutted in the low mids and sounds hollow. But dude, there are some people out there just meat fisting a saturation as a final limiter stage and i can't get on board with it.

I have been using The Oven, it's like EQing with saturation. It's very subtle. I like the bx_clipper because you can give the appearance of loudness without compression, but I keep it light because a hard clip gets distorted and I'm already using saturation. In retrospect, I believe it was taking some of the edge off the limiter.

It begs the question, though. Since saturation is a kind of compression, and clipping has a similar effect to limiting... is there still a good reason to use two limiters? Or, when are things just too much? Saturation, clipping, and compression/limiting are all so similar in their applications.

cakes wrote: Mon May 12, 2025 1:57 pm
It begs the question, though. Since saturation is a kind of compression, and clipping has a similar effect to limiting... is there still a good reason to use two limiters? Or, when are things just too much? Saturation, clipping, and compression/limiting are all so similar in their applications.

my guess is that a saturator/clipper algorithm is made to add a bunch of harmonic content and a standard limiter is made to stop peaks without adding a bunch of added harmonics.

FWIW I almost never have two limiters going, but a clipper before the limiter is pretty common. The clipper is just shaving off the biggest peaks, which if you zoom way in you'll find that a lot of these peaks are literally fractions of a millisecond long, i.e. real fucking short. That stuff can be clipped very transparently and it'll ease the burden on the limiter.

Basically, short percussive peaks can be clipped no problem (up to a point obviously). Where clipping gets super nasty is when it hits sustained sounds: piano, pedal steel, vocals, organ, etc.

But as has been said, the idea is that it usually sounds better with a few things all doing a little bit rather than one thing doing a lot. I don't really want my limiter swinging wildly from moment to moment, I want it just kind of tickling along, knocking peaks back a db or two. Modern limiters can do way more GR than that and still sound good, and sometimes that's what I do but generally I find it works best to smooth things out as much as possible before they get to the limiter. I.E. Don't rely on the limiter to fix problems, fix them before they get there, Just use the limiter to hit the peaks and bring up the overall level.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Tue May 13, 2025 10:38 am I.E. Don't rely on the limiter to fix problems, fix them before they get there, Just use the limiter to hit the peaks and bring up the overall level.

This is probably the most sound advice to get out of this.

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Tue May 13, 2025 10:38 am FWIW I almost never have two limiters going, but a clipper before the limiter is pretty common. The clipper is just shaving off the biggest peaks, which if you zoom way in you'll find that a lot of these peaks are literally fractions of a millisecond long, i.e. real fucking short. That stuff can be clipped very transparently and it'll ease the burden on the limiter.

Basically, short percussive peaks can be clipped no problem (up to a point obviously). Where clipping gets super nasty is when it hits sustained sounds: piano, pedal steel, vocals, organ, etc.

But as has been said, the idea is that it usually sounds better with a few things all doing a little bit rather than one thing doing a lot. I don't really want my limiter swinging wildly from moment to moment, I want it just kind of tickling along, knocking peaks back a db or two. Modern limiters can do way more GR than that and still sound good, and sometimes that's what I do but generally I find it works best to smooth things out as much as possible before they get to the limiter. I.E. Don't rely on the limiter to fix problems, fix them before they get there, Just use the limiter to hit the peaks and bring up the overall level.

Do you ever have an ordinary compressor working across the whole track. Like, is a mixing style 3:01 with 0-5db reduction a thing in mastering?