It’s not uncommon to spend hours on a mix, only to play it back on your phone or car stereo and find out that the volume wasn’t as loud as you thought. It’s also not uncommon to walk back into the studio, recall your mix and insert a compressor or limiter across the master bus in an effort to “crank up” the volume. The problem is that adding master bus compression or limiting will change your mix — the volume will certainly go up but the mix can get turned upside down. Louder elements of the mix become softer, softer sections become louder and distortion might even be introduced. In a sense, it solves one problem while creating a bunch of others.

Whether you’re using a simple limiter with a couple of decibels of compression or an entire plug-in suite that uses EQ, compression, expansion, dither, etc., the key is to incorporate this master bus processing early on in the mixing stage. In short: mix with bus compression or limiting instead of using it as an after thought.

After you have started a rough mix, insert the 2-mix processing (such as bus compression) and mix through it. This way, individual track processing, automation, and all other mix decisions are made with this processing in the chain.

If the project you’re working on will be mastered by someone else, consult with them to make sure you’re leaving them enough headroom to work. They might request that you back off the compression before sending them the high-resolution mix files for mastering.

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