Limiter when mixing?

no, Ducking will give you an inaccurate dynamic range. If you are going anywhere near -6dB then just turn all your faders down and mix quieter maintain dynamic range is important
 
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no. If anything just use light compression and dont be an idiot with your levels. Its not rocket science keeping your output below a level that will blow your speakers.
 
No. First, -6dBFS seems somewhat arbitrary to me and I don't really understand the reason for it. But assuming you don't want your 2buss to peak beyond a certain point, and it is, you need to address it in the mix. Chances are, if you are running into this problem frequently, you are simply mixing too loud to begin with. Turn everything down. Most new folks are notorious for recording and mixing WAY too loud.
 
The tendency over the coarse of a mix is to usually keep pushing the faders up, ...because everything always sounds better when louder ; ) This overdrives your master bus/fader and results in bad gain staging practice.


The way to prevent the master overload from happening is to use calibrated monitoring, or more easily turn the volume knob on your monitor controller up "pretty loud" at the beginning when starting a mix. ..Louder than you anticipate going... you can then set you kick or bass level "if you want" ..and base everything around it.. That will help force to keep your individual faders down and maintain decent headroom accross the board . gl
 
Limiter as you mix? Sure.......go for it.

The most important thing is knowing "what the sound" that you are going for "sounds like". If you don't know then nothing matters anyway. Every mix will sound good....then listen to other folks rules and it sound better......then 10 years later you find out the mixes you had when you mixed into the limiter on the master sounded better......though you can't explain it....3 years later you learn to choose or record sounds to make your mix sound how you want and tell everybody to kiss yo ass........

Calibrate your set up.....you'll care less about looking at faders and shit.

If it sounds good....fuuck it....go for it!

Know what sound good sounds like though.....YOU....not others....
 
If you do put your limiter on, there's no need for it to be at -6dB. Just leave it at 0dB if you really need it to be on. There should be no gain reduction as you're working on your mix.

If there is, your levels are way too hot.
 
I'm relatively new to production so I don't have a very firm grip on mixing just yet, but I almost always put 0db limiters on my tracks in the pre-mixing stage, and then take them off later if they're hurting the overall sound.
 
only one thought to add: maybe instead of using a limiter in your daw get yourself a hardware one and place it between the output of your soundcard and your monitors - you get the in room benefit of not over-driving your monitors without the loss of dynamic range control by using it (perhaps incorrectly) in your daw
 
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