Diving deeper into Mastering vs Mixing

[DCCougar]

Originally Posted by jim1960

The mastering engineer, coming at it with fresh ears and not having spent time focused on the individual tracks, can hear the song as a whole without being distracted by the individual parts and, again imo, can make better global decisions to bring the song to the next level.

Doing what exactly?

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by DCCougar

Doing what exactly?

Depends on what the song needs but, aside from limiting, it can include:
EQ, compression, multi-band compression, width, harmonics, distortion/saturation, rebalancing, etc.

[AcousticDreams]

Originally Posted by KevWind

I won't pretend to be an expert but this is a fairly good example of using the Elysia Alpha ( that Steve mentioned ) on a stereo track with both Compression and Some EQ ing going on He is using it in M/S mode for the most part

When I was deciding on which hardware compressor to purchase for my acoustic guitar, It was down to Elysia Expressor or Buzz Audio's Velox. It as a very tough decision as the Elysia seemed very transparent & super affordable. But I decided to go with the Buzz audio for the additional transformers, long knee and optical qualities.

The Alpha demo looks amazing. If I understand it correctly, it has compression followed by a soft clip limiter in an all in one package. Plus Side chain & mix functions and more.

It seems that Soft Clipping plugins has grown in popularity as of recent. However it also seems as there are some Pro's and Con's to Soft Clipping versus Limiting. Of which I have much to learn.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-a...g-and-limiting

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by AcousticDreams

When I was deciding on which hardware compressor to purchase for my acoustic guitar, It was down to Elysia Expressor or Buzz Audio's Velox. It as a very tough decision as the Elysia seemed very transparent & super affordable. But I decided to go with the Buzz audio for the additional transformers, long knee and optical qualities.

The Alpha demo looks amazing. If I understand it correctly, it has compression followed by a soft clip limiter in an all in one package. Plus Side chain & mix functions and more

It seems that Soft Clipping plugins has grown in popularity as of recent. However it also seems as there are some Pro's and Con's to Soft Clipping versus Limiting. Of which I have much to learn..

The S&S article mentions only that soft clipping is less aggressive.
Now my experience has been that in either peak limiting or soft clipping if you do too much it will begin to sound harsh and unmusical ( And is one of the reasons that the 2 less aggressive compressor approach has it's subscribers) particularly in the digital age ,,,


But it is my understanding another and perhaps the most important difference between hard clipping and soft clipping is this (lifted from an iZotope article on soft clipping) where the corner is rounding into the clip on soft clipping



Now IF you want to play around with a soft clipper ,, Massey plugins has one and agin you can download a functional (except saving the settings and bypassing ) demo version that does not have a time limit

This will download all Massey plugins https://www.masseyplugins.com/demo but when you launch the dMag you can choose which to install .. The lookahead brick wall limiter is the L2007 and soft clipper is called The Golden Master
The GUI looks like this