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Hi Guys - It's been a while and hoping one of you gurus can chime in.

I have a completed song I need send away for mastering. I usually just drop the master fader to -6 db without any issue at all. Problem is, it's not working this time. It's not visibly clipping on the meter on the main interface, however when I bounce the song to .wav I'm being told it's clipping to all hell. It's true because it's loud as fuck when I put it on a cd and listen to it in my car, but it's perfectly quiet when listening to it in FL.

Anyone ever deal with this issue?

Thanks

Don't turn the master down turn everything else down

As above, mix your track properly.
Edit: just because you're turning the master down 6dB doesn't mean the whole mix won't clip still - you have the track too loud to begin with.

Is that really the end all solution. I mean I don't have anything really up very high? The mix sounds super clean to my ears but it's clipping with my mastering guy.

Dustwyrm wrote:Is that really the end all solution. I mean I don't have anything really up very high? The mix sounds super clean to my ears but it's clipping with my mastering guy.

I edited my post... if you've turned the master down 6dB and it's still clipping then you must be sending 6dB over to the master.

You could use a limiter to catch the peaks but I'd remix everything to have the master fader at 0 and have the mix levelling at ~-3dB

So just remix everything so that the loudness will naturally be lower without forcing the master to do it for me?

Do as what Brothulu said.

Edit: Ok I understand now, it makes perfect sense. Thanks for your help guys.

Yes that's what I'd do.

Just to demonstrate what I'm saying, here's an exagerated example:
Soundcloud
The first half of that clip is a loop that had playing, it was peaking at nearly 0dB with the master at 0dB too.
The second half of the clip is the same loop but on a different mixer slot, I used a plugin to transparently boost it by 6dB and then lowered the master fader till it didn't clip on the master meter.

It pretty much sounds the same and looks the same on SoundCloud right?

This is what edison recorded:

edit - I realised the image I used is sightly wrong but you got the point so I cba retaking the shots.

-Whole waveform
-First loop.
-Second loop.
-Zoom of second loop clipping.

Again this is obviously a vast exageration, and probably not "technically correct" but it shows what I'm tring to say.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, it's very helpful. Going to be a pain remixing EVERYTHING, but perhaps it must be done Bahhhhhh

Dustwyrm wrote: it's loud as fuck when I put it on a cd and listen to it in my car, but it's perfectly quiet when listening to it in FL.

I get why his mix is still clipping if individual channels are clipping but why would it be super loud if he bounced it down to -6? Sorry if I'm being thick.

Because the individual tracks/busses were more than 6db too loud.

Monowan wrote:

Dustwyrm wrote: it's loud as fuck when I put it on a cd and listen to it in my car, but it's perfectly quiet when listening to it in FL.

I get why his mix is still clipping if individual channels are clipping but why would it be super loud if he bounced it down to -6? Sorry if I'm being thick.

I figured out what happened and I feel like a numbfck for what I did. Originally I dropped to -6 when I rendered it out to .wav.

Problem is, I went back to that saved file and I started working on it again and I never brought it back up to 0. Really dumb mistake. Live and learn I guess, hopefully remixing isn't too much work. Grr