The reason why to EQ and the benefits of not using a limiter on your master bus

Steve Sancteria

Steve Sancteria

New member
So I´ve been watching the "In the studio with Armin Van Buuren" and "Martin Garrix" several times now and always get their suggestion "don´t use limiters on your master bus while producing" in my mind and started working it out, it really improved my EQing process.
Since I only knew what an EQ does but never found a reason to use an EQ when I´ve started producing, I´d like to share this basic knowledge to get yourself into advanced mixing to make your tracks sound better.

So for the beginners out there, with each sound that you add to your track, you add frequences.
If you add a Hi-Hat for example, which has its frequences in the mid, high and high-end...mostly :D, you add it to the stuff you already have in your track and if you add too much at a certain frequence, it starts clipping and sounds distorted. (If your EQ plugin that you use doesn´t show the frequences of your sample, synth or what sound you ever use, download a SpectrumAnalyzer such as the 7 phases Spectrum Analyzer, it´s freeware :D, put it on your master bus und solo the sound you want to check out for its frequences)

This happened to me a lot when I´ve started and became really frustrating, so the solution for this bad thing for most beginners and amateurs is a limiter on your master bus, it does limit your sound where ever you want, mostly you use it on 0db or slightly under that just to get rid of the distorded clipping sound while you produce your track.

The problem behind this is, you stop thinking about accurate EQing which is especially really important to EQ your kick drum and bassline so they don´t fight with each other, also a sidechain compression on your bassline helps improving this, you can use the SpectrumAnalyzer to make it more accurate since most beginners don´t have the world´s best studio monitors.

Also, a lot of people say, less is more and if it comes to adding too many sounds to your main track (I don´t mean the small little details no one on the dance floor will notice anyways) it becomes a melted piece of...something that has no defined sounds, it will look like a big sausage (during kick and bassline sections, this is actually not bad) and you lose a ton of something that´s called "dynamics" and you want to have this dynamics if you have melodies, different drum sounds and some vocals going on in your track so the ear can figure out what is loud and what quiet in a natural way.

If you stop using this instant limiter on your master bus, you avoid using way too much and then when your track is done, you can get a little bit of a multiband comproession on your master bus, or just your favorite mastering tool, such as iZotope Ozone to make it sound "directer"

So as a conclusion, try to define every single sound in it´s frequences by cutting away unwanted frequences with the EQ, I hope this will give you the "WHY" to use the EQ.

---if there might be something not 100% correct, just let me know, I am still kind of a beginner as well :D
 
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Steve Sancteria said:
So I´ve been watching the "In the studio with Armin Van Buuren" and "Martin Garrix" several times now and always get their suggestion "don´t use limiters on your master bus while producing" in my mind and started working it out, it really improved my EQing process.
Click to expand...

It's good advice, but do take things he says with a pinch of salt because whilst I like the music of Martin Garrix, his producing/audio engineering skills aren't amazing. The number of vengeance samples he uses in that video are cringeworthy.
The professionals aren't all knowing gods. They have pretty good ideas for what sounds good in a track, but that doesn't mean that they're amazing at producing. (some producers are, but not all)
 
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well, both of them do send their tracks to mastering guys that do the actual difficult mixing part, I am kind of disappointed that Armin Van Buuren is using loops to create his drums instead of creating his beats with a drum computer or step sequencer, but anything that leads to a nice cool track is legit. in my personal opinion.

deadmau5 did make a statement why he hates the sound of dubstep, duo people just put a limiter on the master bus and gain it up until you have a super loud sounding sausage, and he´s the best sound engineer that I know, so I think it´s really a very basic thing every "advanced" producer already knows but most beginners don´t start working on using accurate EQing at the first place, so my advice is only here to safe some time :D
 
On EQ:

- EQ is a tool to fix frequency problems in your audio. This is critical for recorded sound, but less relevant if all you use are samples and synths, because synths come through clear, and samples have already been EQed before they are sold. It's not surprising that a beginner electronic producer would skip over EQ, seeing as most electronic instruments don't need grand, sweeping EQ to sound decent.

- Boosting isn't the only thing you can do with EQ. Cutting can be much less distracting. And sometimes, all you need to do to accentuate one frequency is to cut a different, offending frequency.

- EQ can also be used to clean up elements of your track not because an instrument sounds bad and needs to be fixed, but because it is bumping into the space of another instrument. For example, maybe your snare drum has a lot of low frequency that you don't even notice. Removing the low frequencies from the snare drum won't make it sound smaller in the mix, but it will help the kick drum and bass sound cleaner.

- EQ is also very useful to control the overall tone of your track when it is getting closer to completion. But this will require a more subtle touch, and this is generally done in comparison to reference tracks.

- Like Sancteria said, using an EQ with a spectrum analyzer makes it significantly easier and quicker to use for all but the EQ masters (who don't need the help).

- Whatever your stage of learning, you can train yourself to be better with EQ through ear training. There are many free and paid software titles to help with ear training. How To Listen by Harman is one example of a free one.



On limiting, mastering, and gain-staging:

- Some producers say not to create a track into a limiter. Some say it actually is a good thing to do, to understand how the track sounds with a limiter from the beginning. In my opinion, creating a track into a limiter is a good way to train your ear to accept hyper-compressed sound and needless distortion. A bad thing.


- You shouldn't need to create a track into an EQ either. If you are using an EQ to reduce the volume of your entire song, to prevent clipping, you have serious gain staging issues to fix. I know it's annoying to have to turn down the volume on every single track, and then try to re-find the balance of your song, but if you produced and mixed that loud, it's all you can do.


- It's best to create quiet mixes, saving the volume adjustments for mastering. At a minimum, this saves a volume adjustment step before bouncing out the file. Or, depending on your plugins and DAW, this saves you from many, many layers of needless clipping and distortion.


- The best way to mix quieter is to turn your monitoring (or headphones) up louder. Seriously. When your volume control is high, adding a synth or kick sample at 0 dB is deafening. And it should be at 0 dB! The first thing you do is turn down the synth or kick volume until it sounds good. This way, when all your loud tracks are about -12 dB or -16 dB, you avoid clipping issues entirely and don't have to rebalance the song later unless you want to. Of course, there is room for quieter instruments to be turned up as loud as they need to be heard.

- If you send your mix out to a mastering engineer, send it without processing on the master bus. No EQ, no limiting, no compression. He/she will make better EQ decisions than you can (hopefully), and can can appropriately apply compression and limiting and volume adjustment to get your track where it needs to be.

- Mastering isn't a $10 or $20 or $30 process of somebody putting filters and plugins on your track all set to auto. Mastering is individual and unique per song, only fixing things when there are mistakes. Mastering serves as a quality control check, with an engineer more talented than you listening to higher quality monitors than you have, in order to gently tweak your track.

- If you have to master the track yourself, read guides by Ian Shepherd. He's very good and pretty open about how he does his work. He knows how to not completely crush a track, so it still sounds good after he makes it loud. Then, compare to many, many reference tracks to know how to improve your mix; and listen to it on many, many stereos to ensure it is transferable.
 
Mixing in a limiter/compressor more or less *is* the recent-to-modern sound of EDM in general. It makes things easy - you don't need to have a good mix, you just slam the f*ck out of everything and then balance things out a bit - and there's your mix. I'm not saying it can't work, but it definitely doesn't teach you to mix well and, well, it often sounds lazy and terrible.
 
Something Seamlessr said in one of his tutorials recently is a big part of the sausagy-ness can be avoided through arrangment even if the mixing/mastering is very sausagey.

Imagine something like martix garrix-animals, the main drop (I'm sure we've all heard it I don't need to post a link)

Because there are so few elements in the drop, literally just a kick and a pluck, the dynamic range is actually pretty big because all the beats which don't have either a kick or a pluck on are almost totally silent- and you can drive it into a limiter until your kicks are square waves, but the rests will still be silent rests, you can't compress it louder if there's nothing there to compress.

The worst tracks for low dynamic range are when you have a pad/supersaw/electric guitar in the background and it just plays chords the whole way through with no stopping, and also loads of compression on the mastering because there's no silence.

Dynamic range is as much about arrangement as it is mixing/mastering. Some tracks have lots of 'natural' dynamic range, others are crammed full of different elements and have no dynamic range even before mastering is started.
 
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