The Limit

     A Limiter is a very vital piece when mastering music. Its main purpose it stop sound at a certain decibel of your choosing. For Example, say you have a synth in the back ground of your track, and you don't want it to reach over -10Db. Instead of just turning the volume down till the synth peaks at -10Db, you put a limiter on it, cause it to stay at a constant -10Db as long as a note is being played.

     Ok, now that you know what a limiter does, you need to know when you use them, and when not to. Limiters are great, but you dont want to use them in every single output channel in your track. Limiters are great for synths and basses, because they tend to fluctuate in loudness a lot. With bass, the lower you play a note, the softer it is heard, because the Hz are lowered. Now if you throw a limiter on that bad boy, lets say -8Db for this example, and move the threshold also down to -8Db, you will have a smooth sound, were every single note will have the same loudness and limit.

     Limiters are also used in the master channel, to make sure no sound spills over 0Db and clips the track. I like to set my Master Limiter at about -0.3Db, because when you burn something to a CD, it will raise the sound by 0.3Db. Also i like to take my threshold, and put it at about -3.0Db, this way the track will have an almost constant volume, and will bring in more softer parts of the track.

     Were there you have it. Now you may be thinking, Joe, all this Limiter talk is swell, but where do i get these things! Well, almost always they will come in your software of choice. FL Studio has Fruity Limiter, Ableton has a limiter already in its master channel, as well as most other software. Personally, I use L1+ UltraMaximizer from Waves, because it has Ultra wave shaping, and 24Bit rendering.

So yeah, thats limiters in a nut shell, hope you learned something today! and if you have, please drop a comment! cheers.

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