FabFilter

Hi all, I have a question. I make electronic dance music. Underground but also more poppy stuff. When I set the Pro L2 as the final plugin on the master, and tune to -14 LUFS, I notice that in most cases the limiter is hardly doing anything. Just a few peaks, but the music does not hit the limiter a lot.

Is this normal? Any advice on this is welcome.

Richard

To add to that. I understand that the music coming does not have excessive dynamics, and thus the limiter is not doing a lot. However I have just 1 compressor on the master (Waves Abbey Road Mastering) and I feel I am not pushing that one very hard.

I am just trying to understand if my scenario is a good thing and other users recognise this?

Hi Richard,

It really depends on your tracks, and with how much dynamic range they are made. With -14LUFS, generally speaking you have a dynamic range of 14dB. Any peaks with a larger dynamic range will be cut off by the limiter. However, if your track already has a smaller dynamic range to begin with, it can happen that you will have an average of -14LUFS while not even reaching 0dBFS, so the track will not even trigger the limiter.

When creating electronic dance music, there's a fairly big chance you are using samples, synths and loops. A lot of these samples and loops are made to be "mix ready", basically meaning they already have some eq'ing and dynamic processing applied to them. The same goes for a lot of soft synths. When playing a soft synth, the output itself is usually quite hot, and often peak to closely 0dBFS.

When using a lot of different sources that are in an off themselves already quite loud, it's possible that your track will have a smaller dynamic range to begin with. Lowering your tracks or your master channel could decrease the overall volume, but if there is not a lot of limiting going on on the master channel, this will not have a lot of impact on the dynamic range of your track.

If you are noticing your mixes do not or barely have any limiting when you set them to a target loudness of -14LUFS, there's nothing wrong with your track. At least you know if will not clip the output, which can be a good thing. It also means you could possibly mix with more dynamics. However, if you are happy with your sound and dynamics, I would not worry about it.

I hope this answered your question.

Cheers,