Help needed to get to required LUFs

[georginasaint]

Hi all,
I'm in the process of delivering a load of tracks to a library and they want all the tracks to -11 LUFs. I'm having great difficulty achieving this. I've used the limiter to get to about -14 LUFs, sometimes even up to -12, but I can't get that last little bit without hitting distortion and clipping. Up until now I always went for 0.01dB and that's always worked well, but I'm new to LUFs and finding this challenging. I've got the Youlean meter to see what's happening. Nearly all my music is basically orchestral (light orchestral) although I'm using percussion. I usually do as little as possible to my tracks and they have done really well, so this is very frustrating. Can anyone throw me any ideas? Many thanks. Georgina

[gitanosoy]

Well it is harder to achieve it because it is a classical piece and not Hip-Hop. I have a mastering chain template. Try this. Assuming that you have bounced your mix at -6.0 db on your limiter set your out ceiling to -1.db, match you gain on your limiter to the bounce mixed(at-6.0 db) then on top of you mastering plugins add a gain plugin and keep increasing the gain until your highest transient hits -11.db LUFS don't raise the gain on your limiter.

I use Logic so the plugins for one of my mastering template are:
GAIN
EQ
MULTIPRESSOR
ADAPTIVE LIMITER
LEVEL METER- set to TRUE PEAK & RMS (check with this if your levels are way up in the red)
LOUDNESSMETER -Check LUFS
MULTIMETER -Check for frequency balance

[cosmicdolphin]

Hi all,
I'm in the process of delivering a load of tracks to a library and they want all the tracks to -11 LUFs. I'm having great difficulty achieving this. I've used the limiter to get to about -14 LUFs, sometimes even up to -12, but I can't get that last little bit without hitting distortion and clipping. Up until now I always went for 0.01dB and that's always worked well, but I'm new to LUFs and finding this challenging. I've got the Youlean meter to see what's happening. Nearly all my music is basically orchestral (light orchestral) although I'm using percussion. I usually do as little as possible to my tracks and they have done really well, so this is very frustrating. Can anyone throw me any ideas? Many thanks. Georgina

Try doing it in stages by splitting the track across mutliple busses ( instrument groups ) and using the most transparent limiter you have ( I use Fabfilter Pro L2 which can be very clean ) and then treat each buss individually to eke out a little more level from each group and then have them all feed into the master buss with your final limiter on.

Think of it like applying layers of varnish rather than doing it all in one big dollop- you might end up with half a dozen limiters all shaving a little off but none of them doing too much heavy lifting and clipping. If your limiter has oversampling , engaging this might help as well. The prime candidate for distortion is often the bass end of the frequency spectrum so you might need to spend more time dealing with this - making sure there's no inaudible sub frequenies etc and tweaking the attcak/ release times on the limiter.

Mark

[douglasricketts]

Try doing it in stages by splitting the track across mutliple busses ( instrument groups ) and using the most transparent limiter you have ( I use Fabfilter Pro L2 which can be very clean ) and then treat each buss individually to eke out a little more level from each group and then have them all feed into the master buss with your final limiter on.

EXACTLY RIGHT. I tried it with some of my own cuts. You should teach a master class!