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Saturation and clipping make such an insane difference. Even using them on an "invisible" level took my master's struggling to hit -10 without destroying dynamics to hitting -6 before I've even pushed the limiters output up.

I’ve never heard anyone showcase a mix that ended up sounding like what I can to do in the studio until you played the mix without saturation, which means you may have pinpointed an exact problem for me

More people should be doing videos on this topic. There is an absolute art to making mixes hold up to being slammed and still sound punchy. Thank you!

Build into the composition is best tip I ever learned. Some sounds just create massive peaks when stacked. Careful layering, ducking and delaying can create space, but loud mixes should seriously restrict sound placement choices from the very start, it only gets worse the more is added. And to know if those sounds work loud, gotta work with them loud. Some sounds fall apart when pushed/squashed, even more so when summed to a bus with other sounds. Like layering, if not paying attention to it from the very start, it only gets worse. Why hope it stays together when pushed at the end, when it's easy enough to find out first, and only use sounds that work.

Jordan you’re killing it with these videos as of late! Some real breakthroughs for me as a mixer happened when I dug into clipping and saturation.

You keep surprising me with extremely useful and practical content. The difference the midrange made was night and day.

There is no "loud" without soft. If everything hits the same ceiling, it's actually not loud and becomes fatiguing. Optimal compression of the '90s was better than smashing mixes today with digital plugins

This is one of those gold dust videos, similar to Marc Daniel Nelson's. Doesn't matter what the genre, the lessons apply everywhere and the way it is explained is so very helpful. Really timely for me too. I've only mixed my band's stuff up to now and whilst I do a lot of this, it's all accumulated knowledge and long term templates. Having just taken on mixes for someone else I was struggling to find this balance. This video gave me the palm to face moment I needed. I'm just not doing these fundamentals right. These are the very foundation blocks I've just not done. Went back and did them methodically.... Whadya know, the mix sounded better, more balanced and ultimately came up to mastered volume with way more loudness and no big issue. My goodness, thank you!

Totaly agree 100%...By using saturation and cliping(wisely) on tracks &busses can give you at least 6db more headroom on master buss with almost no unpleasant side effects

Shout out to Mike, he did a couple masters for me and absolutely nailed it!

I recently came across your channel and it has significantly changed the way I mix. Thank you for all of your knowledge! I feel as if the industry has been gate keeping this info for years and just recently I've been able to dig deep enough to find the answer to my mixing questions.

This is the ticket. My mixes started to get way louder when I started putting a lot of focus on the overall EQ curve on my mix. A lack of mids, specifically low mids will always leave your mix sounding hollow and quiet. This problem always happened to me when I boosted a lot of high and low end on my guitars, which sounded great in solo but left the whole mix sounding weak. A great tool to keep the curve of your mix in check is Tonal Balance Control by Izotope. This visual tool is amazing to check the balance of your mix and is extremely helpful when you are mixing on less than flat monitors or in a acoustically poor room. A total game changer in my opinion!

I knew these things and used them already, clipping on buses and saturation, only slight final clipping on the master. But you highlight some more dimensions and aspects with it, so I pick up a lot of useful stuff here.

Dude. This explanation is pure gold.

This is awesome, saturation is something I dont know very much of, I only know through the sound differences, not the theory, these vids are very reassuring while delving into the mixing world.

i found this album through your mentioning of it & it's soooo good. i listen regularly

Something I discovered just this week is that the more clean, in-key and digital the source material is, the less your advice seems to apply. I made a little experiment dnb demo with no samples, only synths just for fun, even the hi-hats were in key, and for the first time ever ended up with a tight loud slammer of a master peaking at -3.5 lufs when normalized to -1db. In that mix I tried adding saturation using FabFilter Saturn 2 but pretty much every time it ended up completely removing the punch and I ended up removing all instances of it. I also initially mastered the track to sound quite midrangy with a lot of 700hz energy but in the end decided to target a different reference track and changed a mid-range boost that I had on master to a high shelf and that gave me a whole +1 lu. Of course, maybe I am just really bad with Saturn and maybe my mix had too much midrange already so the original master just overcooked it but i find it surprising how much I want to agree with you and how much this advice would have not helped that experimental demo.

Great video! I agree that focusing on loudness in the mix is where it is at. Make's mastering so much easier.

To tie into some of your other lessons, balancing the mix for solid, exciting midrange does many beneficial things. For one, getting some low-mid/a little high-mid content going for your bass and kick adds a bit of clarity and definition to them and helps them be distinguishable in the wall of heavy guitars. Next, it also makes these instruments much more audible on bass-light speakers/headphones, which helps a lot with translation. Finally, that midrange content almost cues your brain into filling in the blanks as far as how loud the lower instruments are without those very low frequencies actually having high volume/amplitude (more bang for your buck)

I NEED USE YOUR TEMPLATE DEFINITELY , I LIKE HOW IT SOUNDS EVERYTHING

Perfect content for me!! Now please sell these drum samples 🫶🏻

I make mostly modern pop with some rock elements sometimes and I've learned so much from Jordan. Incredible video once again. ometimes

very helpful and clear - thanks!!

pure gold as usual!

Great content man, so helpful 👍🏻

Spot on! Thanks for this!! 👍🏻😊

Phenomenal channel. Thank you once again HCMS!

About Key 1, yes I've come to suspect that on my first home made mastering. My reference seemed to have a fair less amount of gain on the low end, and yet it sounded great, I have noticed that in the end it had the same LUFS as my track but still sounded louder and it was driving me crazy. Thanks for pointing that out, I still have to understand by how much am I supposed to level down that low end not for my mix to sound thin.

clipper at drum buss is great tip dude

Thank you, was just struggling with some dynamics last night and limiter on master track was too much, will go back and limit drum bus a little and i think it will make a big difference.

Thank you for this !!

Thank you so much!!!!

Thanks mate👏🏾👏🏾

excellent video

I like a scooped sound and a loud master. Fml

Awesomeeee!

Did he mention where he uses the saturation plugins? Is it one plugin for each bus or on all individual tracks? I currently only use a saturation plugin on snare, bass, and sometimes vocal tracks. Not sure if this matters but Im mainly recording with analog mic pres and compressors set for more grit and character before going into pro tools. Would it be overkill adding more saturation on top of that?

Nice video, really good tips and concept, the problem is that the beginners overdo and then the mix sound too harsh and flat because there is not dynamic. You need to do that with taste.

I don’t know what I did other than filter my guitars once, but once I took out the top end fizz it’s almost like the “desired notesy tone” just absolutely got louder and stood out more in the mix. This has happened only one time and I don’t even entirely know why

Or maybe we should just try to stop getting louder mixes in general. When people complain that their mixes aren't loud enough, usually the problem is that it's a crappy sounding mix to begin with.

I always make my lead guitar louder with a few db boost with the ssl around 700 I'm really surprised more people don't do that its amazing!

very nice infor

Scooping can be great on a Marshall amp but not ideal for mixes. 👍

what is the point to achieve -5db integrated LUFS for a mix out of studio, when Spotify later pushes it down to -14 LUFS ?

If I'm mixing an album of songs that would fit into the soft-rock or adult contemporary genres (think Beck, Morning Phase) would you still use clipping on the drums to control the transients?

Your videos are great the content absolue pro.... but for me its realy difficult to handle with the music genre.... ;-) i tryed some heavy metal music back in the 80s... but this is not my buisiness anyway thanks for your great work....

Taking the midrange out sounded better to me 😢

I have never done clipping, so it's totally new to me but i want to experiment. What would be good clipping plugins? Looks like I only have soft clippers in my arsenal, are they the same thing at all?

Omfg whats that song called? Sounds killer! Thanks for this awesome video once again..

Nice! But, where's the delay at 3:03 coming from?!

haha.... Love you work...

I guess nobody has a volume knob on their stereo system anymore. I prefer huge dynamics above ear fatiguing crushed mixes.

Hi how loud do you monitor with the CLA 10 ? SPL ? And what VTPC setting you ended up using ? Thanks.

I can’t seem to find many videos about this, but how does this work with submitting to Spotify? They want it around -9db to -14db. So they would have to be bringthing the master down by 4-5db. Any insight would be greatly appreciated

Loud and dynamic is what it should be all about. 1:52 That "Master" is overly compressed and horrible, no air, no room to breathe.

Do you ever use a transient shaper on your drums?

Wow

Hey Jordan, what’s your thoughts on the mix on the new blink album?

That’s superb! Let’s connect?

bitcrush everything.

what's in that external ssd??

What is this from?

I hate to be contrary, but it seems like all you've done is pre-master your mix without "actually" mastering it on the stereo mix. Is the secret just layering compression?

Gee.... I must totally be off here I do my mix's at -14.5 LUFS. Am I doing this wrong ? Mind you, looking at your track you seem to have almost zero dynamic so perhaps were on a different page.

Plot twist: EQ IS dynamics

-5 lufs? Wouldn't that mean your song will get turned down by -9 dbs on streaming services or am i missing something? 😅

you don't apply saturation on distorted guitars right?? Only drums/bass?

Too loud. Mixing engineers should shoot for -6 dB below Nyquist. While most mastering engineers don't mind it all the way to -3 below Nyquist it limits the room they have to make subtle changes, then push the integrated loudness to about =9.5 or so.. Going below that just really don't do very well for most tracks, taking in account True peek should stay always below zero dB. Oh well, just my thought.

Hey Jordan great video, I'm a little confused about how your masteringengineering - 5 LUFS. I thought that the goal is about -14 LUFS because the streaming services will normalize to that anyway. Can you say a bit more about your approach to this I think it might even be a good future video.

The track sounded better when you scooped the mids. Todays mixes are sounding terrible the new knocked loose, falling in reverse are some of the worst offenders terrible crunchy mids of just pure digital static

It’s too bad the louder a mix is, the more numbing and irritating it is to listen to for more than a few minutes. I wish this horrible trend of slammed audio would just stop. Loud mixes rob the music of feel and dynamics. It’s like being yelled at constantly.

As a listener if I hear over processed "loud" tracks like this (talking about the master) I skip it immediately or lower the volume if I really care about the band so it can be tolerable. It's just irritating and unpleasant to listen to.

All ur tutorials songs sounds aggressive

Good education for folks!…but, -5.5 LUFS is the absolute max and there is really no reason to have to tolerate the loss of fidelity that comes with this level. The loudness wars are over due to fact that streaming services turn down loud masters, and, for CDs, the idea that fans cared about average loudness was always bunk. No music fan would like an album more than another because it was smashed harder. That was some bunk that record labels were pushing. That said, some music, like metal, needs to sound up front and compressed but -7 or -8 is more than loud enough. Of course it depends on what the mix can handle as you’ve pointed out, but I would not recommend that any mixer really try to squeeze the last bits of dynamics out of their mix. Also, music that is mastered “loud” actually sounds worse in high fidelity playback systems and also worse when cranked up in volume compared to music with more dynamics. When you crank the volume knob up in your car to rock out, you will enjoy the more dynamic version of a song more than the less dynamic smashed version. Finally, I’m seeing folks who now know that the streaming services turn down music to -14 get this confused with the peak volume that a mastered track needs to be set to. You don’t want to set your mastering peak limiter to -14!!! Set your output level to -0.2 peak or so and then set your LUFS average level to what the track wants to sit at maxing out at something like -7 or -8 or so for metal music like the example here. The tighter the mix, the easier to get loud, but most mix engineers won’t have the skills so they should be happy with -8 or -9 max. Of course folk music or other styles will be different. -12 LUFS would be “plenty” loud for a folk acoustic song. Cheers!

THIS SOUNDS LIKE THE DEVILS MUSIC... ALL THAT NOISE SHOUTING... IS THIS ACTUAL MUSIC OR NOISE

I couldn't listen to that music for even two minutes, let alone mix it.

On Smartphone the difference is minimal

I’m sorry your mix is great. But that master is trash. Sounds scooped and oddly out of phase. Hit me up and I give you a master that will knock your socks off.

didnt you have crappier "music" to use?