Mastering Loudness Trouble

[D3ATHSTEP]

Before someone links me to the giant mixing/mastering thread; I'm well aware of its existence. I can't find a detailed answer about what exactly my issue is, so I figured I'd ask with hopes of an honest, helpful response.

Where is the middle ground of the whole "loudness war" situation? What I mean is; when I master a track the proper way, it certainly sounds better on nice headphones/systems and has more dynamic range. However; it just doesn't match the loudness of "pro" tracks. When I brick wall master something, it's certainly loud, but obviously some quality is lost.

How in the hell do modern day "brostep" artists manage to achieve those loudness levels while maintaining (what I personally perceive to be)a fairly clear mix? Here's a track I mastered the "proper way":

http://soundcloud.com/deathstepofficial ... -deathstep

And here is an example of a straight-up, purposefully-loud/compressed master I did to get close to "professional" volume levels:

http://soundcloud.com/deathstepofficial ... ack-5-2012

Is it just because of the odd inclusion of guitars within the tracks that's throwing things off? I really am at a loss. My guess is this is all something to do with my actual mix that I'm not quite getting. For instance; in the future I plan to mix and master the guitar tracks completely separate from the rest of the instruments. Any other ideas would be incredibly appreciated.

I realize hoping for a lack of trolling is most likely futile, but I hope things stay on track and end up being constructive. Thanks in advance!

[Basic A]

mastering and mxing = two seperate notions.
there is no doing it right. mastering yourself is like grading your own math test. it doesnt work that way.
good mastering will cost you around the same price as a single person bag of green. pay for it.

[outbound]

If we start at the mixdown which is where you'll be able to gain a lot of "loudness potential" there are a number of thing that can be done to gradually build up loudness from the word go.

The main things 3 that are going to trigger the compression/limiting at the mastering stage are

Kick (Transient with a lot of low end energy)

Snare (which not only has a fair amount of low end energy but fills the majority of the frequency spectrum)

Sub bass (In order to get it to an audible level there has to be a lot of this which eats up a whole lot of head room)

Using a mixture of compression.limiting, parallel compression and distortion at the mix down to get these to appear louder will allow the overall mix to be pushed a lot more without noticeable pumping/distortion happening at the mastering stage.

[D3ATHSTEP]

mastering and mxing = two seperate notions.
there is no doing it right. mastering yourself is like grading your own math test. it doesnt work that way.
good mastering will cost you around the same price as a single person bag of green. pay for it.

Allow me to rephrase the question for you then:

If I wanted to become a professional mastering engineer using only software; what would allow me to achieve this goal with other people's music? For the purposes of this thread and your personal view on self-mastering, just don't even speak another word about me mastering my own stuff. Pretend I'm mastering someone else's and I want to do this for a living.

[D3ATHSTEP]

If we start at the mixdown which is where you'll be able to gain a lot of "loudness potential" there are a number of thing that can be done to gradually build up loudness from the word go.

The main things 3 that are going to trigger the compression/limiting at the mastering stage are

Kick (Transient with a lot of low end energy)

Snare (which not only has a fair amount of low end energy but fills the majority of the frequency spectrum)

Sub bass (In order to get it to an audible level there has to be a lot of this which eats up a whole lot of head room)

Using a mixture of compression.limiting, parallel compression and distortion at the mix down to get these to appear louder will allow the overall mix to be pushed a lot more without noticeable pumping/distortion happening at the mastering stage.

Thank's for that. I've checked out a few masterclasses that touched on this idea. Reso's was a fantastic one and really helped me out. I'm going to try to increase the perceived loudness of things in the mixdown process in the future. Time to go over compression for the 500th time

[fuzion]

Work on the mixdown before anything - sidechaining will help drums stand out but don't overdo it.

Then if you're mastering yourself just work with compression and eq they are the only things that can make it substantially 'louder' and sound better - a brickwall limiter wont do this its just to stop clipping

but loud isn't always better just a thought