How to keep the bass stable with a limiter

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going a little more in depth in the topic of mixing with a limiter, and this article should be taken as an expansion of our "Should I put a limiter on each single track when I mix?" discussion.

My conclusion today of this whole discussion is that depends on the genre. 
There are genres in which the instruments with the biggest dynamic excursion (which are usually bass, vocals, maybe cymbals, clean or acoustic guitars and acoustic instruments in general), those in which the performer can really choose to play some part extremely quiet and extremely hard can use some track limiting, while in other genres like extreme metal, in which there is already a lot of distortion (which acts as natural compressor), drum samples etc, this is less useful and you can stick also just with the compression.

Let me elaborate more: 

If you have a song in which in the first half the singer sings with just a whisper and in the second half sings one octave higher, with very loud peaks, the first thing to do is to do some clip gain, then when the volumes are more or less consistent you can put some compression to make the track more coherent, and finally, since maybe in the highest and loudest parts there might remain some loud peak, instead of manually lowering every peak you can put a limiter with a threshold set only to check those, and bring them down.
In this case the limiter acts as final wall for the peaks that are so loud that still can't be properly tamed by a compressor, because if you would set the compressor hard enough to stop them, it would harm the rest of the vocal track, and the same concept applies to any other instrument.

The trick therefore, if you still hear some part in some track that is popping out too much, is first to try to see if you can solve in some other way, for example sometimes in palm mutings the low-end recoil can be solved simply lowering the bass on the amp or moving the microphone a couple of cm back from the speaker, but if you can't solve, the limiter with a high threshold, set just to stop those occasional peaks, can be a solution, just don't overdo it, like leaving it with a threshold that keeps it active all the time, or you will damage the sound of your instrument.

I hope this was helpful! 

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