with over 40,000 artists uploading their music to Spotify daily, it can be difficult for your music to stand out, let alone fit in. You may have received advice on YouTube, but how do you know who to trust? As the only professional mastering engineer on YouTube, I can provide you with the actual settings and systems that I have used for my clients over the past 25 years. You can trust me to guide you in the right direction. Let me start by telling you the exact settings to use for the FabFilter Pro-L 2 before you upload your music to Spotify. So, going across the bottom here with these settings here, first of all, True Peak limiting. I have that turned off. The main reason for that being that I don't like the way that it hits the transients. It makes everything sound a little bit numb, and I want it really punching. And I'm usually going for something that's loud, so I turn the True Peak limiting off. You may have heard people say you need to keep that on. It's not true. If you look at anybody

that is uploading on Spotify. All the main mastering guys, like myself, if you look at any of the meters, you'll see that it's going over in true Peak. It's not really needed, so I don't use that. Next long is oversampling. When it comes to oversampling, I want the max I can get. This makes it super clean and clear. So if your computer is strong enough, then use 32x, but definitely use at least 16x. It does make a massive difference to the quality of the limiter. Next up, I've got dither off. I'm going at 24 bit. I don't need to be dithering for the output. I put that to minus 0.1, so I'm just coming a little bit below the full Peak. It's just to give us a little bit of Headroom, but not too much. Now let's move on to the advanced settings. In here, we have style. Now, my go-to first of all is all round, but I will use the a b feature at the top here to test Dynamic and Punchy.

but those three are the main three that I'm using. But all round kind of does the job on most tracks. The Punchy one is good for getting a transients a little bit sharper. So on some music, if I do want that little bit extra, then I'll listen to that. But then check that against the all round. So do that on the a b, and then you'll see track dependent. So with the look ahead, it is trying to look ahead as it says and preempt what it's going to do when it comes, when it gets its input signal. So I want that to be quite quick. I found that when I have that on longer, it takes away from the transients and things don't sound as sharp and is bitey. So I don't really have that on too much. But what you have to watch with it is if you don't have it on a tool, you can get some Distortion. So I have it on a little bit, and I will try and listen for that on different tracks because some tracks, if it's classical

music, for example, you can get away with a bit more, but when it's something like a hip-hop track or a dance track, then I'll have it on super quick. So, next is the attack and release times. Now, this doesn't work the same way as a normal compressor. The attack time is for when the release starts working, so I usually have this on fully all the way around so that the release isn't getting hit at all. So, basically, all the transients are coming through. I'm not using any release time to kind of hold on to the signal because I don't really want to do that. Now, if there is some distortion, I will bring the release time up, and I'll give it a little bit more of attack to say on classical music that might happen, but usually dance music, hip-hop, pop music, it's better just to have this all the way around on full level so that you haven't got any release going in, and you're just getting really quick transients, and it makes the track really

really loud and clean. And something else to get that loudness is channel linking, which is next. So I always have these at zero. What this does, it means that it's reacting differently on the left and right. And this is a real game changer when the limiter is just working on the left and right independently rather than both of them together because you just get extra loudness. It's like having two a limiter on left and right rather than one just on the whole stereo signal. So that is a really good little top tip there for you to put those on zero and check out how they sound on your mixes. You can download this FabFilter Pro-L preset from the link in the description. So now you have my exact limiter settings. Would you like to know the system and methods I use for every track that I master? Well, this month is mastering me at streaky.com and I'm offering 75% discount on all of my mastering courses. So if you're uploading your music to Spotify, then you might

like to try my mastering for Spotify course. Alternatively, if you have ozone 10, then I've got a course where I run through every single module, and I also show you how to master from start to finish with ozone 10. If you want to go deep into mastering every single aspect, then you'll want my ultimate mastering course. That's on an 80% discount. I've left all the links in the description below for you to get these discounts, or you can go to streaky.com. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe. See you next time.

Limiter Trick They All Use

Limiter Trick They All Use

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