Clipping Techniques for Dynamic Mixing in Music Production

Bathmetrics demonstrates how to adjust loudness and dynamics in mixing using a single VCA knob for consistent results.

### Mastering for Loudness and Dynamics Using the CTZ Strategy with Blue Cat's Free Plugin
* 🔊 Bathmetrics demonstrates how to use the CTZ (Clip to Zero) strategy to **adjust loudness and dynamics in a mix**, focusing on a **single knob control**.
* 🎚 The CTZ approach involves using **DP Meter 5 to normalize peaks**, **K-Clip to clip peaks at 0dBFS**, and a free Blue Cat plugin as a **VCA to control gain into and out of the clipper**.
* The Blue Cat plugin is set to **-1dB on individual tracks** to reduce RMS and overall loudness, while a **reverse VCA on the master** compensates to maintain overall loudness.
* 🎧 The VCA trick allows for quick adjustments to test different loudness levels, such as comparing **-6.3 LUFS (default)** to **-9 LUFS** for a chill song in a set of loud bangers.
* 🎚 In a real project demo, Bathmetrics shows the CTZ setup on a song, emphasizing the **importance of context and subjective taste** in mastering decisions.
* 🔊 The VCA trick is especially useful for quickly testing different loudness targets, such as **-9 LUFS**, to see how a mix fits within a **set or album**.
* 🎵 Bathmetrics also explains the concept of a "**listen bus**" in DAWs, which allows for monitoring without affecting the master output, useful for mastering tools like the **CTZ VCA**.
* 🎚 The video concludes with a discussion on LUFS measurement, emphasizing the **importance of measuring the loudest part of the song** for mastering decisions.

### Dynamic Range Management for Loudness Optimization in Music Production
* 🔊 The text discusses a method for **managing dynamic range in music production** to optimize loudness levels while preserving audio quality.
* 📏 The process involves measuring the loudness of the loudest section of a track and determining how much to **reduce the gain to reach a target loudness level** (e.g., **-9 LUFS**).
* 🎚 By using VCA knobs to **reduce the gain of all tracks simultaneously**, the text demonstrates how to **adjust the dynamic range of a mix without changing the individual track levels**.
* 👂 A critical aspect of the method is **compensating for perceived loudness differences** when comparing the original mix to the dynamically reduced version.
* 🎛 The text explains how to use a **reference level** and a **DP meter** to match the perceived loudness of the original mix with the dynamically reduced mix.
* 🥁 The text emphasizes the impact of **dynamic range** on the perceived quality of certain elements in the mix, such as the **kick and snare**.
* 🎶 It also highlights the importance of considering **genre and context** when determining the **optimal loudness level** for a track.
* 📊 The method allows for easy A/B comparison between different loudness levels, making it useful for **adjusting the overall loudness of a mix** based on specific requirements.

hey everyone, this is bathmetrics. Welcome to episode eight of mixing loud with clip to zero. [Applause] [Music] [Music] In this video, I'm going to show you how easy it is to adjust your entire clipper cascade with one single knob. This is going to let you test what your mix sounds like at any loudness target. Do you want to hear what the mix is going to sound like if you give it more dynamics and less loudness? Twist a knob. Do you want to hear what the mix is going to sound like if you clip it even harder, giving it more loudness and less dynamics? Twist a single knob. The ctz approach is going to make this trick super easy and 100 percent consistent and predictable. Now, for those of you that are dropping in on this episode for the first time, just be aware this is part of an entire playlist explaining how to do this mixing approach that I call the ctz strategy, the clip to zero strategy, and um, this is a dedicated playlist on my

channel. You can catch up with the earlier episodes. I'm gonna presume you've seen these earlier episodes, so I may be throwing around terms you're not familiar with if this is the first video you've dropped in on in this series. All right, so if you remember back in episode three and four, I recommended some specific plugins that would make this approach easy, and I know not everyone has the budget to buy lots of plugins. One of the plugins I recommended in episode four was by Blue Cat Audio, and it was this one called Gain Suite right here. Now, fortunately, this is a totally free plugin, so there's no reason not to have it, and hopefully, you've already downloaded it by now. But this is where you find it if you need it, and the trick revolves around using that plugin in the way that I'm about to show you. What I have here is a dummy project, just a quick and dirty demo. I have two groups or two buses, and the first group has three tracks inside it. The second group has one track.

inside it, and as you know from all my previous videos up to now, I recommend using a pair of plugins on the individual source tracks where your audio starts. Every one of your different sounds originates. You use DP Meter 5 to first normalize the peaks of that signal up to the zero dBFS ceiling, and then, if you still need to make the sound louder after that point, you use K-Clip to drive the signal peaks up past zero, which shaves them off flat at zero because the threshold of the clipper is set at zero dBFS. That's only if you need to make it louder. The point is, you always have this CTZ pair on your source tracks, and on your busses, you have only a clipper, and it's just a passive clipper. You never actually touch these dials; you never change the settings. It's just meant to passively clip everything at zero. Alright, so the trick, the VCA trick, revolves around using this Blue Cat plugin only on your source tracks. What you do is come in and find it.

you want to use the stereo version if you work in live or bit wig because we only have stereo tracks in those two daws. Now other daws have mono tracks, and if you're using mono tracks, that's great, but remember you'll need to use the mono version of the blue cat gain on a mono track. So once you put this plug-in on the first track in your project, I recommend you rename it if your daw allows you to rename plugins. I like to give it a name that makes it stand out as a little vca thing, vca. Right now it's got this very visible kind of label in my channel inserts, and you want to put it in between the dp meter and the k clip, okay? Because what we're going to use it for is to control the gain of the signal into and out of the clipper, just like that. And the next thing you do, oh, and by the way, the reason we call this vca, it harkens back to a type of special fader that is

present on a lot of analog mixing consoles, big mixing desks. A lot of times, um, during recording or mixing, you'll have an assistant helping the main engineer or a couple of assistants to do some automation on the faders. And you may take a whole little track, a whole little group of faders that aren't necessarily part of a bus or a group the way we think of it normally. It could just be random faders all over the mixing desk. And you assign any random set of faders to a single red-colored VCA fader. Usually, it's a red-colored fader. And then you can just, with one finger, push that single VCA fader up and down, and those other, you know, whatever mix of faders you've assigned to it, move up and down in tandem with that VCA fader. So, it's like the idea is you use one knob or one fader to control a whole bunch of other faders. And there are certain DAWs that have that built-in, like Studio One has VCA.

faders in it, but the problem is we don't want to adjust faders up and down with one knob. We want to adjust the gain staging inside of our insert channels up and down, and we want to adjust that gain equally right in front of all the clippers on our source tracks. So, that's what we're going to do here. We've made this first VCA fader, and in addition to renaming it so you can recognize it and know what it is, you also need to set it up before we duplicate this across our tracks. So, the first thing you do is click not connected and assign this to group A. Doesn't really matter which group, but let's just use group A. Next thing you want to do is make sure that nothing is activated in this link options section. Make sure these are both cleared out. Don't let one of them be blue, okay? So now what we're saying is this particular fader belongs to group A, and well, this trim control belongs to group A, and now we're going to duplicate

this most dolls allow you to have some sort of shortcut to duplicate. So in a bit, way gets hold down the control key while you drag and drop things. So I'm just going to take this and drag and drop it here, drag and drop it here, drag and drop it here. And now we have a set of um trim controls. Here's the one on track one, here's the one on track two, here's the one on track three. These are all in the first group, and then here's track four over in a second group. And if I take any one of these and twist it because they're grouped together and they're all talking to each other through your DAW, right? They all move in exact tandem with each other, and that's exactly what we want. This is a VCA trick. This is a ganged set of trim controls. Okay, so now that we have these working, we have the ability now to say, Okay, whatever I've set my clippers out on all these four different tracks, I could take the signal going into each.

clipper and just pull it down by exactly one dB, and that's going to literally take all of the signals on all the tracks and pull those peaks down out of the clipper. Or if they weren't even in the clipper in the first place because the peaks were right at zero but not going over zero, it's just going to pull the peaks even farther down away from zero. So we're reducing the RMS of our entire project. We're literally taking this entire little set of four tracks, whatever RMS they were at before, I just dropped it by one dB. Now I'm dropping it by 2 dB or 4 dB or whatever, right? And with Blue Cat, if you right-click, it resets it to 0. And if you hold down Shift while you're dragging, instead of moving in even increments of 1 dB, it now moves in increments of a tenth of a dB. So you hold down Shift when you want to do fine adjustment, right-click to reset to zero, or just

drag it without any shift modifiers to move exactly one db at a time. Okay, so now that we've done this, if you're astute, you're going, Well, but that's going to make your whole mix quieter. So, how can you tell if it sounds any better? Because when these things are set at zero, you know your original gain staging that you set up, your original clipping that you set up, if there is zero, everything is going to be a lot louder than if you turn them down by 4 db, because you're dropping the rms of the track by 4 whole db at least, right? Well, that's true. So, we have to put one more vca fader over here on our master track. So, let's do the trick again where we duplicate it over here. Now, we don't want this fader going down when any of the other faders are going up or vice versa. So, here's one of the faders from my track group over here, and if this goes down, we don't want the one on the master also

going down. We want it to go in the opposite direction so that as we make the whole project quieter, the master gets louder to compensate. Okay, so we do that by simply on the one that you put on the master, click the reverse knob or button rather. And now if I take it down over here on the tracks, it goes up by the same amount over on the master. And that's roughly trying to keep them at an equal loudness. If I push it up on the tracks, it goes down on the master and so on. Now, this isn't perfect because the way clipping works and in a real project. If I take the entire set of source tracks and drag them down by, you know, three or four dB, the way that the clippings sums and adds up, the way the math works, it won't exactly be a three decibel difference over on the master where everything finally rolls up and sums together and ends up on the master. So there is one other plug-in we're going to have to add to make it actually be the same.

equal loudness, but I'll show you that in the real project in a second. I'm showing you kind of the first half of the trick here. This is the basic first part of the trick, but then there's a little nuance we have to do on the master when we get to doing this for real. So hold that thought. Now, the other thing that's important to talk about, especially since we're going to be demoing this in my projects, I use a listen bus, and not every DAW supports a listen bus, and some of you may not even know what a listen bus is, and this is the first time you're getting exposed to the concept. So let me explain it to you real quick so you're going to understand what you see when I start demoing this for you on a real song. Some DAWs, like Studio One, for example, they give you a listen bus right out of the box, right next to your master. And what a listen bus is, it's a carbon copy of the master track.

master in every DAW is where when you export your final WAVs or AIFFs or whatever or FLACs. When you export files, when you print all the sounds in your DAW, they're printed at the master. Okay, they're always printed on the master track. That's the signal that gets printed to your WAV or your FLAC or whatever. And you typically don't want to be cluttering up your master with things that change the sound. Like those of us who used to use Sonarworks audio correction, and if you put Sonarworks, like I still have it even though I don't use it anymore. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you use something like Sonarworks to do EQ correction, if you put it on your master bus, you have to constantly remember to turn this off before you print your masters, or else this EQ correction is going to be burned into your masters. And you don't want that because this is just for your local headphones or monitors, right? Um, or these days, I don't use Sonarworks.

anymore. I use something called Slate VSX, which is this kind of audio emulation environment that works through headphones, and it's excellent. It's wonderful. I love it to death. But again, it very much changes the EQ and phase and all kinds of things about your sound because it's emulating all these different famous speakers and monitors and headphones and environments and mixing rooms and stuff like that. So you don't want that printed into your master. So a listen bus lets you have a copy of the master. Let me show you how this would work in Bitwig. If you have Bitwig, you can set it up this way. If you have Ableton, I'm sorry, they don't support being able to do this. Now, Bitwig has very, very flexible routing. You can see that my master bus is going to something called Studio. Studio is this thing, and it's defined over here in my settings and audio, right? I'm basically saying I use an SEO sound card. It's a Mo2 M4, and I have these various channel

configurations set up in it. And what I've done down here in this bottom section is I've said, Look, I have an output bus called monitors and headphones, and I have another output bus that is an auxiliary pair that might go to some external hardware, right? Because I have four outs on a MO2 M4, and these are configured in this studio section as, Okay, well, you could set up cue mixes, you could do all these sorts of things, but my studio I/O is currently going to the output that I call monitors and headphones, which was set over in preferences. And so, this is what actually sends the signal from my master to my audio card and my speakers and my headphones. That's called studio in this set of outputs right here. This is a default output in Bitwig. Now, if I want to make a listen bus, all I have to do is make a new track or even a new aux return track. I used to do it with aux returns, but now I don't anymore. I'll show it using an effect track. So

let's say I've added an effect. Where are you? I've got them turned off. Let's say I add an effect track. I added one I didn't need to add, so let's delete that. Let's say I've added an effect track, and I want to make this be my listen bus. And I used to do it on this because it's stuck next to all these aux returns hanging over by the master and separate from the rest of the track. So, it was just easy to keep my listen bus stuck right next to the master. So, if I say on my master bus, Don't actually send this to my studio outs. Don't send it anywhere except over to some other track. Now, I don't have this aux return called S1 effect. And let me rename it so it's a little more clear. Okay, if I try to assign my master bus to go to the listen bus, I don't see listen bus here yet. That's because the listen bus is also set to go to the master by default. So, what I need to do is come here and

say I want the listen bus to go to my studio out. And as soon as I do that, it becomes an option in my master to send the audio over to my listen bus right here. So here's what's happening: all my tracks and groups hit my master. This is where all the printed exports happen. But the master isn't going directly to my sound card and my headphones. It's going over to the listen bus, and it's the listen bus that goes out to my headphones and speakers and so on. So now I could put, for example, this utility that's changing the sound of my, you know, it changes the sound very much for my specific headphones. It's over here on this separate bus so that now it won't accidentally get printed into my master because I forgot to turn it off before burning exports, right? That's why we have listen buses. And that you can also use this to put all your monitoring tools and a bunch of other things. So you're going to see I always have a listen bus, and it's always loaded.

up with all kinds of stuff. You can even set the volume of your list and bus differently from your master. You can keep your master at full volume all the time so you can read what the signal is really hitting at, even if you want to listen to things at a more quiet level for some reason or adjust or change the level. So, there's a lot of good reasons to have a listen bus. You can certainly build this easily a bit wig. I'm sure in Reaper you can do something like this. I know that in Ableton Live you can't. Sorry. Um, so depending on your DAW, if you have the ability to make a listen bus, you would want to put, let me get rid of this so it's not confusing you, you want to put this final VCA on the listen bus, not on your master, because again, this is changing the actual volume of your project at the master. If it's on the master, right? If I change this in any way, it's making the master louder.

or quieter, and you don't want that if you're going to print the master. So, that's why if you have a listen bus, put this final little reverse VCA on the listen bus somewhere, and that's what you're going to see me doing in the following demos. So, a little side trip about listen buses so you understand what's happening, and now let's go see this in action. Another, I guess, one other trick I should tell you is, you know, now we've got three inserts we're routinely using on our tracks, and in some DAWs, you can't avoid this. But in DAWs like Bitwig, Ableton, Studio One, FL Studio, it's relatively easy, certainly in between Ableton, it's super easy to make a bunch of really complex processing racks of all different kinds. And so, you know, typically in between or Ableton, you would just select these three things and group them together and then give this rack a name like, and then now it's got a name, and you can condense it up and just see it in your

insert channel as this is my ctz for tracks, right, um, and then you can usually save this to your library, your user library for the daw, and make it reusable. And in fact, that's exactly what I have. I'm just going to delete this one. I have a ctz for buses and a ctz for tracks. And if I drag this over and drop it here, it's called track ctz. And if I open it up, you're going to see inside of it dp meter, this little blue cat vca thing already grouped to a and ready to go. And then I have another internal rack that lets me choose between three different types of clippers, which I haven't talked about yet. Um, I always start with k-clip early on in a project. Later and final mix down, I might replace k-clip with different types of clippers, but that's a subject for another video. So you're gonna see in my uh project template that I often show, that's where you see all these bus ctz things and then on individual tracks where

sounds originate. You see these track ctz things, and these are just those racks right here on serum. This is my track ct ctz, and it's already got dp meter, this vca thing, and the clipper all built into it. Okay, so moving on, let's talk about a real project. So, this is a song I did a month or two ago in a couple of videos that were a bit of a rebuttal to Dan Warrell's video about DJs or idiots. I felt like something needed to be said about that, so I said something about that, and I used this song as a demo. Now, a little bit of context: this is a very chill, mellow song, but the reason I wrote it in this hypothetical scenario to explain something to Dan: I, I'm a DJ, a producer DJ. I do play live sets of my own music mixed in with music from other artists, and I play heavy bangers. I play festival-oriented EDM music, festival-oriented bass music specifically, really heavy, loud bangers, and most of my songs are also

loud bangers, okay, but every DJ needs to have chill-out songs in their set. You need to bring the energy down at points, especially if you're still working in smaller clubs. Clubs don't like it if you keep people out on the floor and away from the bar. Sometimes you need to play songs that take the energy down, not only to give people a break if they've been dancing but also to give them an excuse to go to the bar and get some drinks, right? So, chill-out songs are kind of important when you're an up-and-coming performer. You know, big festivals, you don't bother with that stuff; you just keep the energy up all the time. But if you're a working DJ in smaller clubs, you need chill-out songs, right? So, the problem is I'm going to be playing this song in the middle of a set full of bangers. I'm going to be mixing a huge loud banger into this quiet chill song, and that's not going to work really well.

if the song is mastered in a very dynamic way with lots of dynamics and is therefore not actually that loud in terms of luff's, it's not going to be as hot and as bright as it needs to be spectrally to sound like it belongs in the same set playlist as all your big bangers. Okay, so the point I was trying to make to Dan without those other two videos is, look, there's a spectral balance, and if you don't, if you're making your mixes too quiet and too, the spectral balance is off, and it doesn't sound right when you're mixing and out of other more intense aggressive tracks that have been squeezed into a small dynamic range. So this song was meant to demonstrate that. So this song, in its loudest section, which is the solo crescendo section, it's hitting negative 6.3 left by default. So if we look at the mixing attributes of my project, you can see I've got clippers at the end of all my source tracks, and you can see

I've got a VCA thing in front of them, and that VCA thing is, let's activate the audio engine so you can see it. Every one of these VCA things is that Blue Cat plug-in, right? And at zero gain on the VCA group, the loudest section of the song is hitting negative 0.3 dB. It's ridiculously loud. It's louder than, much louder than it needs to be. Now, this is a pretty chill song. Let me play for you the kind of the fade-up intro into the intro and verse just so you can level set and hear what the song is all about. This is my mix in part, and I could ask a million questions that would leave me wanting more. That's why I let you do the talking. Maybe that's what talking's for. I do my best to learn to listen since you have so much to say. [Music] If I connect with your position, I will learn so much that way. [Music] [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] okay so you get the idea now you listen to that you've never heard it before sounds great and it now it's a demo song. It's not fully finished. I wasn't going to put in that much effort for a video rebuttal to download right out front base nice and thick and full. If we were looking at the auto waveform it does not look like a sausage at all uh even in the louder sections and there's plenty of punch and dynamic feel for this genre of music. It's got a lot of feel to it right it sounds fine at negative 6.3 loves and that's one of the points I was trying to make and it doesn't have ridiculous horrendous clipping all over it in the waveform which was another point I was trying to make. Now this is a chill song though. If I were a down tempo artist like zero seven or something right

and I wanted to make a whole album full of this type of music. I would not be mastering this at negative six on three loves, right? This is where context is everything, and subjective taste is everything. If I'm making the song to fit into a set full of loud bangers, it needs to conform to some different rules than if I'm making a quiet down-tempo album, you know, like Zero Seven or many other down-tempo artists that are great, right? I love down-tempo. I listen to a lot of down-tempo. I would master this much closer to like negative nine left, maybe even negative ten loves, if I were making a whole album of this, because that suits the music of this style perhaps a little better. Let's give it some breathing room. Let's give it more dynamics. Let's give it more nuance. Why pinch it up so tight just to get it into a small dynamic range and make it loud? So depending on my goals, I might not want this to be super loud at negative 6.3 loves.

now this VCA trick lets me actually quickly see and test and hear and even decide I like it better and keep it there. Let's see what this sounds like at negative nine LUFS. Okay, that's a number I hear Luca Pratalesi throw out a lot for his um videos, and it's little. It can be a little misleading when people talk about LUFS values for their songs and what they master at because there's three different LUFS values. There's momentary, short-term, and integrated. Integrated means averaged over a certain section of time, and often people aren't very precise about what they mean when they talk about oh my song hits ex LUFS. I think it's important you always want to measure the loudest part of your song. So in this song, there's this sort of crescendo at the end, and it's got a big noisy um annoying kind of pseudo guitar thing in it. Sounds like this. Now that section's hitting negative 6.3. When I measure the LUFS across the

entire length of this block, this 8-bar block, um, 16-bar block, sorry, it's negative 6.3. So, if I want to bring this down to negative 9 in this loudest section, of course, everything else that's quieter will be even quieter than negative 9. What I need to do is measure this and figure out how far to move these VCA knobs to make that loud section hit negative 9. Okay, so let's do that real quick. And there's another little trick I use. If you've noticed, I always have this kind of weird track at the top of my project that just has empty blocks with the names of sections in it. I find that's easier than putting track markers up here in the timeline. And if you look carefully over here, there's no input to this track. There's no output to this track. The faders all the way down at zero. It's just for these empty clips that I can put section names in. And over on the mixer side, you'll also

see, it has another one of these same VCA knobs as everywhere else. That's because no matter which buses I've collapsed upright, no matter, you know, I may not even see if I've got a collapsed view like this. I don't even see any of those VCA faders, VCA gain knobs on any of my tracks to actually grab and change, right? I don't necessarily want to have the project open to do that, so I just keep one by default hiding over here on my structure track too. And if I shift this down by 4 dB, and we go look at any one of the other ones like this one, see, it's also down to 4 dB. So this just makes it easy for me to get to the one knob that controls the VCA across the whole project. And the other thing you'll notice is, again, I have a listen bus, and here's that final reverse VCA fader over on the listen bus. So if I pull this one down, this one goes

up all right, so it's set up just like I showed you in that little dummy project. And I'm going to do one other thing and turn that off because this is the second part of the trick I have to show you. All right, so here's the basic process. Now that you've got the setup in the background and understand the mechanics of this trick, we're going to open up this bus. We're also going to measure what level the master is hitting over here on the loudest section, this solo crescendo. We're going to play it all the way through, and we're going to measure how loud it is in terms of loudness. So over here on my listen bus, right at the very start, I have a DP meter. It could just as easily be sitting here on my master track saying, What does my master measure? But remember, the listen bus is a carbon copy of the master, so I'm just going to put it back here instead. Um, so this is hearing the loudness of my master.

Before anything else that's happening on my listen bus, so it's happening before this one might be turning up or down based on, you know, where I'm setting this VCA stuff. It's before that, so this is truly measuring whatever the loudness is on my master. So, I'm going to keep this one right here on the bottom. This is the special reverse VCA. This is the normal VCA. And first, we're going to, um, just pay attention to what the master reads. So, with sync on, this will automatically reset every time I start and stop playback, so I don't need to go manually click the reset button here. And we're just going to measure what's the integrated loudness across this entire track, across this section. [Music] Okay, negative 6, 2, 6, 3, whatever ballpark. Um, now I want to make this negative 9 less, and I want to hear what it sounds like at negative 9. And to do that, I'm going to need to pull everything down by how much.

if it's a negative 6.2 now, that means I need to drop the gain by about 2.8 total dB. That'll take us to negative nine. Right now, the way the math works out, again, just because I relax my clipper down to two and then hold down the shift key and drag it, another not the clipper, the VCA. Just because I dropped this by 2.8, that's not gonna land me exactly on negative nine because there's all this weird summing and addition happening. All I'm doing is pulling all of the source tracks down by 2.8 dB, but because of the way clipping works and bus summing works and all the other processing I've got in my whole project, it's not going to add up exactly to make this final result be negative 9. It's going to be close, so I'm going to start with that. But let's see what we land on if we drop the gain out of, if we pull all the signal, the original sources out of their

immediate track clippers by 2.8 dB. We're going to give it that much more breathing room and that much less clipping and that much more dynamics. Let's see what we end up with now. [Music] Okay, so we're still a whole dB short, so let's try taking this down to something like four. And I usually start with whole increments like this and get close, and then I'll do some fine adjustment with the shift key. Let's try negative four and see where we land now one more time. [Music] So, and boom, there we are at negative 9 loves. So now the big question is, does this sound better than before? Does this sound different? If I decided, you know, I don't want to use this in my EDM stuff. I want to make, I've decided I want to make a whole solo album of down tempo stuff. So let's see, this was a good song. How does it sound if I give it a little more dynamics, make it a

little less loud. Make it a little more like other down-tempo tracks tend to be right in that same general loudness range they tend to live. Does it sound better? This is a good candidate for that album. I don't know. Let's find out. But I need some way to compare how it sounds at this loudness and this dynamics versus the original way that I wrote it and mixed it. Okay, so to do that, we need to be able to go back and forth, back and forth quickly. More importantly, we need to be able to hear the two different mixes at the same exact perceived loudness. And because of the math, it gets a little tricky. And if you were really paying attention, you'll notice this new quieter mix in terms of dynamics and measured loudness actually sounds louder to our ears than the original at negative 6.3. And let me prove that to you real quick. Now that we know negative 4 on the gain knob on the VCA set will get us to negative 9. We're just

going to right-click and go back to the original, and I can simply play you a short snippet here and then take it back to negative 4 and play you a short snippet and then set it back to 0 and back and forth really quickly and just notice that the quieter version at negative nine left to your ears is actually going to sound louder. Okay, so this is the thing we have to fix, and that's the second part of this trick I'll be demoing in that. But first, let me show you that this happens. Here's the original [Music]. Here's the quieter version [Music]. Hear how it sounds just a little bit louder, and that's going to fake you out because we always think louder is better. We always think brighter is better, but is it really better? Okay, we can't tell unless we normalize the perceived loudness between the two things we're a-be comparing. This is a really important principle in production. Most of you have already encountered this and probably have gain

matching plug-ins you use to do this when you're trying to make decisions, but we definitely need to apply it to this kind of situation. So here's how we do that. Here's exactly how we do that. First, set everything back to no adjustment on your VCA group. And then after this special reverse VCA knob here on your master or listen bus, after it, right after it, put another instance of DP meter. So this is the special DP meter that's going to let us do the second part of the trick. Now, if you remember when we play this at negative 0 dot with no adjustment on the VCA, the song is measuring negative 6.1 LUFF's integrated. But let's do it one more time just to show you mechanically how to easily do this without thinking about it. The second DP meter is measuring the signal after this VCA adjustment. Now, right now, there is no adjustment, so I would expect this meter and this meter down here to read exactly the same, and they will watch. Also, let me

not confuse you by zeroing both of these out just for now, okay? So, you know, just for granted, I'll zero this one out too just so you're not worried what that one means. Okay, here we go. [Music] All right, see negative 6.1. So, here's the second part of the trick. Pay close attention. First, you measure with both of these sets at no change on the VCA group and on this second DP meter that's coming after this VCA adjustment. You set the reference level to match the perceived loudness of your original mix with no VCA adjustment. You just double-click on this and set it to negative 6.1, and you'll see why we do this in a minute. Now, go ahead and set the VCA group to drop it down to the left. You want to test, and you want to be able to A-B compare, so we're going to drop this one down to negative 4 again so that the actual mix is hitting negative 9, and we're going to watch what happens.

down here [Music] see how this says negative five. Suddenly, this adjusted result, this compensated result for dropping the real lefts at the master down to negative nine. The compensation, the rough quick and dirty compensation here is actually making the final result negative five lefts, not negative 6.1, negative five. So, it's a whole 1.1 dB louder than before, and that's why I say it can be hard to hear a dB of loudness unless you've got a really critical ear, but I could tell it was louder, right? And so, we don't want to hear it a whole dB louder because that's going to fool our brain and make us go, Oh my God, that's just so much better. So, what we do now that we've got this reference level that we measured with no change, no VCA adjustment, we have the reference level, and DP meter is great because I can just come over here and click this little match loudness button, and what it's going to do is put a negative 1.1 gain on this.

automatically to match my measured loudness has been now matching the reference level. I want it to hit negative 6.1. So now that I've clicked this button to automatically set the right amount of gain adjustment in addition to this rough adjustment being done by our quick and dirty reverse VCA trick. Now if I play that section, you're going to see that it actually measures at the same loudness as before at negative 6.1. Watch [Music]. So [Music]. Okay, so now between this adjustment and this adjustment, I now have an apples-to-apples equal loudness comparison in my headphones ready to go. So now I can more accurately listen to what does it sound like at negative nine left versus what does it sound like at negative 6.1 loves right. So here's how you do it. Now I just have to turn this DP meter on and off as I adjust this. If I set this back to zero and I turn the DP, the second DP meter here off, it's now

I'm hearing it at negative 6.1 left, and then if I set this down to negative 4, and I turn this one back on so that this gain adjustment is being factored in with this gain adjustment. Now I'm still hearing it at negative 6.1 left, but I'm hearing the new differently clipped signal that's actually truly much quieter, the negative 6.1, but it's equal loudness to my ear, so I'm going to be able to hear the differences accurately. So let's pop back and forth a few times and show you what that's like. Here's the original clipped mix, the less dynamic mix [Music], and then if I turn this on, here's the quieter mix [Music]. Turn this off, set this back to zero [Music]. Set this back to negative four, turn this on [Music]. Now some of you may be hearing the differences. The difference is the kick is a little more rounder and fatter. It's a little less squash sounding. The snare has just a tiny bit more

snap to it, but all that mid-frequency noise, you know, happening there is obscuring things a little bit. So, let's do this again, but let's do it in a quieter section of the song where the character of the kick and the snare will be a lot more obvious to your ears because it's not getting masked by all that high-frequency wishy-sweepy sounds, right? So, let's flip back over to our arrangement view. Let's pick a verse, like verse two, and we're going to redo this process just to help you really understand it and burn in the mechanics in your brain. We're going to redo the process by resetting this to zero. So, I can control-click to set it to zero. I can control-click this to set it to its default, which is irrelevant at this point, right? Um, and these are already zero, so they're fine. So, now what we're going to do is reset the VC8 to neutral, no change, and let's measure how loud this verse section was originally at the

at the more clipped louder mix level, and we're leaving dp meter on this dp meter on so we can get a measurement to mark in our reference level [Music]. Much to say if I connect with your position, I will learn [Music]. Okay, negative 8.1 is what that verse measures at the louder original mixing of the song. So, what do I need to do? Double-click the reference level, set it to negative 8.1, and now we know to bring it back down the whole song, the loudest part of the song, to negative 9. We need to drop this to negative four, bring our whole vca group down by that much. Now we're going to measure one more [Music]. You time so much to say if I connect with your position, I will [Music]. Okay, negative 7.3, which isn't negative 8.1, because remember it's never going to add up exactly because of the way clipping works and cascades of clipping across multiple buses. So, we just click the magic m button here.

and now it's put in the right adjustment to make this actually hit negative 7.3 by the time we're done one more time [Music] if I connect with your opposition I will learn so much that okay negative 8.1 so now it's exactly the same as my louder less dynamic version and all I have to do is toggle this on or off to do the right amount of you know full loudness adjustment or compensation when I make the quieter version the more dynamic negative nine left version so now let's hear this quieter section in an A B back and forth manner and what I want you to really listen for is the difference in the kick and the sub you're not going to hear much difference in that Rhodes piano sound in the background you're not going to hear that much difference in the vocals you're going to mostly hear it in the kick and the snare because those are always the loudest things in my mixes and so they're the ones that are getting

hit hardest by any clippers. Check it out. My best to learn to listen since I do my best to learn to listen since you. I do my best. [Music] [Music] Hear how the kick has a little more weight, a little more thump, sounds a little more like a real acoustic kick instead of a thinner, knockier, slightly more splatty kind of kick. Now again, in the original song, in the original mix, at its loudest, negative 6.3, you didn't notice that there was anything wrong with the kick, right? It was still a perfectly okay kick for that mix of that loudness. But now that you're hearing it in this more relaxed state, you can hear what some of the people who don't like loudness complain about. It is absolutely true that if you give yourself more dynamics to work with, more dynamic range to work with, and if you're willing to give up loudness, you can bring back a lot more nuanced feel. You don't have to choke drums right up.

to their breaking point. You can have a lot more nuance and dynamics, and a little bit more punch and a little bit more pokiness on your arps and transients. And you know, depending on the genre you're producing, that may be exactly what you want. Don't mix aloud just to be loud. Mix loud because you have a reason to, because the genre demands it, or competitiveness demands it. Um, for DJs, the big problem is, you know, if I mix a quiet dynamic song into a set full of loud hot crushed bangers, that quiet dynamic song is going to sound dark and thin and wimpy, and all the energy is gone from the dance floor when I play that dark song. And no amount of trying to turn up the volume on the mixing, you know, channel is going to work. No amount of trying to add in some mids and highs on the DJ EQ is going to work, because then I'm crushing into the front of house limiter, and everything's getting squashed by the limiter now.

because I'm trying to make everything louder manually, and you can't do that in a DJ environment—not easily, not in most venues where it's kind of a fixed situation, and there's not a front-of-house guy compensating for what you're doing. So, um, sometimes you need to be loud; you need to make your songs loud, and loudness always involves compromises. I make that point over and over. I am not a proponent of loudness for loudness's sake, and I'll be the first to tell you working loud will compromise your sound. This is a song that objectively sounds better at less LUFS than I originally mixed it, but I had a reason to mix it that loud because I was making a point. I'm going to use it in DJ sets. It's a chill-out song, so it has to have that same slightly hot, slightly crushed feel as everything else, or it won't spectrally match, and it'll feel like the energy is dropping out of things. But if I were making a chill-out album,

uh a down-tempo album of nothing but songs like this. Oh hell no, I wouldn't master this at negative 6.3 or even negative 7 or even negative 8. Even negative 9 might be too loud. And now here's the cool thing about this method. I'm dying to show you this. Let's take it down even further. Let's go down towards like YouTube levels. Let's get this down to negative 11 or negative 12 left. So I'm just going to eyeball that. You know if I'm hitting negative 9 with this much reduction. Let's just take it down to negative 6. Another 2 dB and the whole clipping cascade. Now what's cool is I'm in the same section I originally measured from my reference level and I don't have to re-measure that. But I do need to see what it's falling out at this new even lower amount of clipping. So let's see where this ends up being in the integrated loudness scale. [Music] Um you have so

much to say if I connect with your position. [Music] [Music] All right, so again, we have to make a slight adjustment because now it's different than the originally measured negative 8.1. So we just click this magic button one more time. It makes a slight change to the gain adjustment here, and now it's now we're truly hearing it again in an a b comparison of the same loudness. So now let's jump back and forth between no compensation versus negative 6 db of compensation. Let's see how it sounds now. Here's the original. Whoops, I have to remember to turn off this dp meter so it's not changing it by that. [Music] Much shoes. [Music] I do my best. [Music] I do my best to learn to listen. [Music] I do my best to learn to listen. Hear how the kick and the snare have a totally different feel and weight in this much more dynamic version of the song. It's much better. If I were making this a

whole album of songs like this. I would totally pick probably this loudness level, and I wonder what it sits at. Let's measure it. I'm going to go back to the loud solo crescendo and just measure it real quick at this level right here [Music]. Okay, so we're coming out a little bit louder than negative 11. Negative 10.7 is what it measures now. Now, I think you're seeing with the clip-to-zero method, not only is it possible to get loud as cleanly as possible by doing lots of micro-clipping on every single track and every single bus all the way up for all the reasons I said, because you're clipping on the buses, you're hearing problems as soon as they occur, and you're fixing the problems as soon as they occur. It's just a much, much, much cleaner-sounding result than if I tried to do this same mix and cram it all into a master, a single mastering limiter at the end, and crush

the hell out of it. It would sound really horrible compared to doing it this way. But not only does this let you work intelligently and intentionally at really loud genres and hit very loud targets as cleanly as possible, but it also lets you use this trick to say, Yeah, do I need to be that loud? Do I want it to be less loud? And the converse is true too. If you originally said, I think I want to make a kind of quiet song for whatever reason. I want to hit negative eight loves or negative nine left. So when I start, and you build your whole mix around a negative eight or negative nine bluffs dynamic range, and then you get to the end of it, and you go test it out in a playlist somewhere, and you go, Gosh, you know, it still sounds a little thin and dark compared to all the other songs that are in the same playlist as it. And I kind of made a mistake. I didn't really, I thought I wanted to make it this quiet. I

thought I'd see what it sounded like this quiet if I mixed it this way. More dynamic, more quiet. Um, but now that I'm testing it in a real playlist, I don't like it. It's too quiet. I need it to be a little hotter, a little brighter, a little louder. So, I need to crush it a little more. And with the CTZ method, instead of having to redo your mix all the way from top to bottom and reset every single clipper individually to try to somehow magically get to a light, slightly more crushed sound, a slightly louder sound, instead of doing all that, you just use this VCA trick to go in the other direction. You say, Okay, well at zero, it's too quiet. So, let me see what happens if I push it up by 2 dB. If I take every single track and push those peaks 2 dB harder into the clippers, which is going to make everything come up in RMS, it's going to put a little more crushed distortion edge on top of everything, therefore making it a little brighter.

and hotter sounding. Let me see what that sounds like. Maybe I'll like it better. And so, you do the same trick, just in reverse, but it's the same mechanics. Push this up. This is compensating. You measure. You do the quick, you know, extra additional adjustment with the match loudness button so you can A-B compare it. And then you just go back to zero. And then you go back to two. And then you go back to zero. You go back to two. And whenever you're in the plus two mode over here, you're also making sure to turn off this final bit of adjustment, right? And you do the same exact A-B comparison, the same exact mechanics, the same simple approach, whether you're trying to make it louder than your original mix or quieter than your original mix. It's a great, great, great technique. So, I think that's all I need to say about this one, and I will see you in the next episode. [Music] You

Mixing LOUD with CTZ - Ep. 8 - Hitting ANY loudness target with "the VCA trick"

Baphometrix

Adjusting Your Clipper Cascade with One Knob

The video demonstrates how to use a single knob to adjust the entire clipper cascade, allowing for quick testing of different loudness and dynamics in a mix.

The CTZ strategy is introduced as a consistent and predictable approach to mixing.

The Blue Cat Audio Gain Suite plugin is recommended for free, and the VCA trick is explained for controlling the gain staging of multiple tracks in tandem.

Adjusting Track Levels and Master Fader in Mixing

The process involves pulling down the peaks of all tracks by a specific dB to reduce the RMS of the project.

A VCA fader is used on the master track to compensate for the overall decrease in track levels, ensuring equal loudness.

The concept of a listen bus is introduced as a way to create a copy of the master track, allowing for changes without affecting the final export.

Setting Up a Listen Bus in Music Production

The listen bus is used to route audio from the master bus to headphones and speakers, allowing for monitoring without affecting the master output.

It is important to set the listen bus to go to the studio out, making it an option in the master bus.

Using a listen bus allows for separate volume control and the placement of monitoring tools, helping to avoid accidental printing of effects into the master.

The Importance of Spectral Balance in Mixing

Dynamic mastering can lead to a song sounding less bright and hot, affecting its placement in a playlist with more aggressive tracks.

The loudest section of the demo song hits negative 0.

3 dB, demonstrating the impact of clippers and VCA settings.

Context and subjective taste are crucial in determining the ideal LUFS for a song, with quieter down-tempo music benefiting from a lower LUFS value.

The VCA knob is used to control the gain across multiple tracks, making it easy to adjust the overall project volume.

The setup includes a listen bus that mirrors the master track's loudness, allowing for accurate measurement of the integrated loudness.

By adjusting the VCA gain, the mix's dynamics and loudness can be altered, providing a way to compare different mixes at the same perceived loudness.

Normalizing Perceived Loudness in Music Production

The quieter version of a track can sound louder, creating a misleading perception of quality.

To address this, it's important to normalize the perceived loudness between different versions.

Using a VCA group and a DP meter, you can measure and adjust the loudness, ensuring an equal comparison and accurate listening to the differences in the mix.

Adjusting Dynamics and Loudness in Mixing

The speaker demonstrates how to adjust the dynamics and loudness of a song by resetting levels and measuring sections.

They emphasize the importance of the kick and snare in the mix, as they are often the loudest elements.

The speaker discusses the trade-offs of mixing loud versus allowing for dynamic range, highlighting the need for intentional loudness in certain genres or DJ settings.

Mastering Loudness with the Clip-to-Zero Method

The speaker demonstrates a unique method for mastering loudness by using micro-clipping on each track and bus, allowing for a cleaner sound.

They explore different loudness levels, adjusting the gain and using a VCA trick to easily switch between louder and quieter mixes.

This technique offers flexibility in achieving the desired loudness without having to redo the entire mix.