Manual
19 MD3 NATIVE User Manual
6.2 Limiter
The Limiter is actually yet another compressor. It uses a very fast attack time and
has a ratio of 1 to innity. But why is the Limiter necessary?
For the compressor to be used as a musical tool, the set attack times are relatively
long (from 1 to 100 ms). This gives the disadvantage that certain peaks can pass.
Therefore a limiter with an attack time of as little as 0.1 ms and a ratio of 1 to
innity prevents nearly all overshoots.
You may want to use the Limiter carefully, as a limiter is always a somewhat
“drastic” tool to apply to your audio. If on a full mix, just a couple of dB should be
enough to limit strong peaks. If on a channel, feel free to sculpt your sound but
beware that the more compressed and limited it is, then the less “life” and more
“ear-fatiguing” it will most likely sound.
As an example, you could chose a threshold of -6 dB. The release time could be
set to a value that could avoid unwanted pumping (0.3 s).
6.3 Gate/Expander
By compressing the signal, we made it sound louder due to the auto make-up
gain in the compressor (set in the Main page). An unwanted side eect is that
the ground oor level is also brought up. The noise will be most evident in the
pauses.
The Expander is one possible cure for this, as it will reduce audible noise when
applied to vocal tracks, for example.
Noise, whether it is hiss, hum or just background noise, is always a parameter to
evaluate and deal with. Initially, noise must of course be reduced to a minimum
from the source, but with a Gate/expander it is also possible to reduce the noise
on channels when no signicant signal is present.
A Gate - or downward expander, - is used to attenuate the signal when the signal
is below a certain threshold. When talking about attack and release times in
reference to a noise gate: - the attack time is the time is takes for the gate to
"open" when the signal rises above the threshold and the release time is the time
it takes for the gate to reach the specied attenuation.
Use the Expander carefully. The modulated noise, due to the Expander shifting
between opening up and reducing the noise, of the ground oor level is much
more audible than a higher ground oor level without such modulation.
The Expander’s threshold must be lower than the compressor’s threshold. If you
raise it too much, you might cut into low parts of the signal, such as reverb tails.
The Expander’s Ratio parameter determines the width of the level range.
Note: The Attack time is a critical parameter for an expander. A short Attack time
will be suitable for transient content like drums, but may create audible artefacts
if applied to less-transient content like drone synth sounds.
Note: A rather seamless way to reduce noise by using a gate or expander, is to
turn down the treble, then the mids and then the bass.
6.4 Modern Mastering, Loudness and True-
Peaks
The MD3 NATIVE is a multi-band dynamics-multi-tool, highly suitable for the
mastering process, with many ways to make your mix sound better, but if not
used wisely, there are many ways of making it sound worse!
There is a risk of becoming speed-blind in the tuning process, and at rst prefer
an over-compressed and loud-sounding track. This is a situation that can be
avoided by:
• • Knowing your music genre deeply
• • Using relevant reference tracks for comparison
• • Ensuring calibrated monitoring levels
• • Using an optimized monitoring environment
The resulting Loudness and Dynamic Compression are two of the most important
properties of a track, adjusted nally in mastering. These two properties can be
regarded as counterparts to each other. In other words, it is important to:
• • Decide how loud your tracks should be
• • Design the dynamic prole of your music
Due to the xed 0 dBFS ceiling in digital audio, louder tracks have less dynamics,
and “weaker” tracks will potentially have more dynamics.
We recommend that you do not hyper-compress and limit your tracks to the
extreme in the mastering process, in order to achieve a loud track. If you overdo
it, it will potentially reduce the audio quality of your work. And often, there
is even a penalty in playback stages so your loud track may end up sounding
weaker, rather than louder.
6.4.1 Loudness
The Loudness approach to music mastering is based upon similar methods
introduced more than a decade ago by the industry producing audio for TV.
Loudness measures how loud we actually hear audio, which is dierent from
“level” PPM meters that look at transients only. The Loudness method includes
K-ltering that emulates human hearing, where bass aects the perceived
loudness level less, and where frequencies from approximately 2 kHz and up
aect the perceived loudness level more.