There are plenty of occasions where it's useful to be able to loudness-process a mix -- for instance, when referencing your work against mastered commercial releases. For beat-driven music, however, it can be a challenge to do this without compromising the sound of the main drum hits. Take this mix, for instance.

[example]

Now let's drive that mix into a mastering-style limiter, and I'm going to use Letimix's GainMatch to compensate for the gain-change through that limiter, so that all we hear are the side-effects of the limiting, not the loudness boost.

[example]

As you push the limiter harder, you can hear its fast-acting gain reduction is increasingly affecting the subjective balance of the drums against the rest of the track, as well as making them sound rather soft-edged into the bargain.

So let's try driving the mix into a simple digital clipper instead, again using GainMatch to compensate for the gain-change, so we're focusing our hearing on the processing side-effects.

[example]

With the clipper, the subjective balance of the drums seems to change less relative to the rest of the track as you drive it harder. But what you get instead are side-effects of tonal change and audible distortion. However, for moderate amounts of headroom reduction within beat-driven music styles, I actually prefer the side-effects of clipping to those of limiting. Let's compare those two approaches, for instance, where each one's removing 9dB of headroom.

[example]

I think the drums just feel more present and punchy with the clipping than with the limiting here. That said, if you use clipping to try and push the loudness to the point where it compares with the most heavily loudness-maximised commercial tracks, there usually comes a point where the distortion side-effects of the clipping really do become overbearing. Have a listen to how it sounds, for example, if I try to clip 14dB of headroom off this mix.

[example]

So my solution to this is to use a clipper followed by a limiter. The clipper removes most of the headroom, just up until the point where I feel the distortion side-effects become too obtrusive. Then the limiter takes up any remaining slack, and impacts on the perceived drum levels less because the clipping has left it with less gain-reduction work to do. Let's now compare this hybrid processing scheme, using 9dB of clipping and 5dB of limiting, with the sound of the same headroom-reduction achieved by either clipping or limiting on their own.

[example]

Clearly, the critical question here is how much clipping and how much limiting to use for a given target headroom reduction, and the only way to make that judgement is by ear for each different mix. It really isn't possible to generalise about this. Just make sure that you keep gain-compensating the processing chain while auditioning, so that you're always focusing your attention on the processing side-effects while making your decision.

Now, for the sake of demonstration in this video, I've used quite a simple mastering limiter, but even when using a more sophisticated limiter design, I still find that it usually gives punchier-sounding results when I precede the limiter with a separate clipping stage. For example, here's the difference it makes in conjunction with Fabfilter's Pro-L.

[example]