Master Buss Too Hot -quick remedy versus best remedy

[Michael Fogarty]

Hi. I've inherited a 10 song project with many playing errors which I have fixed,  but my master bus is way too hot. I have everything going through buses -drums, vox, organ, piano, guitars, acoustics, etc. The mix is good now, but when I summed everything it's just too hot. Is the best remedy sonically to lower all the buses by the same amount -lets say .3db, or is it ok to just lower the input of the master bus (it would have to be -.6 to not clip. )What effect does that have? Am I hurting something by doing that? Feels weird to have everything going in their hot and just lower it. Or am I making too big a deal out of it? Should I put a clipper at the top of the master bus? (the genre is alternative and the client wants it to sound a bit tough/dirty so I'm not worried about that 
 

PS I know about rolling off the lows of different instruments, etc, but simply across the board on all the songs the master is too hot. Most have over 50 tracks and do restart the whole mix again would be way too tough. It's my fault this happened. I got everything sounding great, but it's just too hot.

Edited February 16 by Michael Fogarty

[David Baay]

3 hours ago, Michael Fogarty said:

is it ok to just lower the input of the master bus

Yes, that will be fine. Gain-staging purists will undoubtedly object, but I've done null tests with a 50 duplicates of a track summing to massive virtual clipping and been able to get a perfect null against a single inverted track by pulling down the bus gain by the exact amount need to offset the summing.

[Bristol_Jonesey]

There's lots to address here.

I would consider doing the entire mix from scratch. Set all busses to 0dB, drag all faders down to -INF and start building the mix

You don't say if any compression has been used

Yes, roll off the lows of any instrument that doesn't have any LF content

Always keep your master bus at 0dB

[Michael Fogarty]

rebuild ten songs and over 500 tracks? I considered this hence the post but is it necessary? It seems you and David Baay disagree with each other. Where is truth? Yes, every instrument has been treated with great care. If it were a sensitive soundscape, smooth jazz or heavily acoustic I wouldn't even be asking this question, but its multiple  tracks of smashing drums and amped guitars so I thought it worth asking. Thanks for chiming in.

Edited February 16 by Michael Fogarty

[mettelus]

Quick synopsis here first, if you take a single track, you will add 3dB each time you double it. So if they were all identical and participating equally you will get roughly +18dB when summing 64 tracks (+15dB for 32 tracks). Basically every track would need to be roughly -18dB (when initially mixing) to not sum over 0dB at the end.

When talking signals, signal-to-noise ratio is king, so as long as you do have enough difference between them to process the signal properly you won't destroy anything by lowering/raising gain alone, but it will affect thresholds of (existing) FX if done willy nilly and can also bring up the noise floor. If you have the mix doing what you want, there is no reason you cannot lower the gain at the final output. It is much akin to the end user adjusting their volume knob, which you cannot control anyway. You could also lower the bus gains similarly (-9dB for 8 "identical" busses), but as you delve deeper to track level it will affect the mixing decisions/FX already made.

The advantage of being inside the DAW and working with floats is they will not digitally clip, so definitely try the master output first and then work backwards if needed.

[Andres Medina]

Bear in mind that you can quick group tracks and/or buses and lower the volume of all with one stroke.

Depending on your levels, one way to go is Quick Group and lower all the tracks involved.

If the tracks have acceptable levels, then I would do the quick grouping at the bus level.

I do both all the time.

I never touch the Main Output.

[Glenn Stanton]

Andres has the best answer for levels - pull down the levels all together will help and is fairly easy to do --- now the caveats --- with regards to David's approach - pulling down gain on the master each track, you risk altering the level into any effects on the buss those tracks - esp saturation, amp sims, etc and same for the master buss - any effects on that with reduced gain may behave differently than changing the overall input levels.

however, the answer may be some volume reduction on the tracks/busses + slight gain reduction on the tracks and master (and any associated busses). 

Bristol has the best answer overall - you reset the levels and add the high passes (your distorted guitars will thank you) and redo the levels. this is not the fun option but very likely to get you to where you need to be.

beside, you're not sleeping between midnight and 3am anyways, so a couple of days and you'll have it done! ? 

Edited February 16 by Glenn Stanton
corrected my thoughts on David's approach

[57Gregy]

How did you determine that it's "too hot"? Can you hear distortion?

[John Vere]

I have often ended up with the master being just a tad hot. I always have the Loud Max limiter and the the YouLean loudness meter on the Master.
First sign of trouble is  I’ll see the Limiter is working too much. It’s job is to catch the odd over my -1.2 setting. Not to squash the mix.  The You Lean meter will confirm showing the LUFS are say -11 - my target is -13.5. 
So I’ve done both and both work fine.

Just turn down the master input gain until the desired target is reached. This really is the best solution in my humble opinion. 

Or sometimes I’ll lower each bus buy the exact same amount. Yes quick groups work brilliantly on this. 
You can use the faders but don’t be afraid to use the input gains instead. 
Yes it can change the signal inter reaction with the processing on the bus but in my case buses might only have a limiter so backing off is actually making the limiter work less.

It’s a matter of understanding what happens when you do this and staying on top of action / reaction results. 

Right or wrong my habit is to have target max peak levels for each bus. Example- If the bass bus is reading anything over-6 db it will get a limiter set at -6 db. 
But I think my targets work best for my backing tracks and not as well for bigger track counts. Therefore getting a touch loud sometimes. 

Edited February 16 by John Vere

[David Baay]

2 hours ago, Glenn Stanton said:

with regards to David's approach - pulling down gain on each track, you risk altering the level into any effects on those tracks - esp saturation, amp sims, etc and same for the master buss - any effects on that with reduced gain may behave differently than changing the overall input levels.

I'm only suggesting to pull down the Master bus gain, and since he's remixing, it's assumed he will adjust any Mastering plug-ins (probably not even in place, yet) accordingly. Nothing else in the project should be affected.

[Gary Carey]

If you've not already done it, just full down the Master fader.You won't hurt anything as long as each individual track sounds good.

[bvideo]

4 hours ago, Gary Carey said:

If you've not already done it, just full down the Master fader.You won't hurt anything as long as each individual track sounds good.

In the analog mixing world, this would not be good. But in the digital - floating point - world, it would be fine.

I believe the master bus output through its output fader is still floating point. Floating point numbers can represent much larger quantities than the fixed point 24 bit numbers that audio drivers work with. I assume after the master bus fader, floating point gets converted to 24-bit fixed point on the way to the driver. That's where clipping or terrible digital artifacts would first happen if the meter reads "too hot". Of course I don't know the code, and the signal path diagram in the manual is not necessarily a proof of this assumption, but it might be fun to "overload" a signal sent to the master bus and see how it sounds when compensated with the master fader.

[John Vere]

5 hours ago, Gary Carey said:

If you've not already done it, just full down the Master fader.You won't hurt anything as long as each individual track sounds good.

This is wrong. The OP said they were overloading the Master bus. Pulling down the fader does not fix this issue.  If you don't believe me just turn on the Prochannel EQ and you'll see the red light. 

Notice  the red indicator in the EQ and the bypass toggle

. 

If I pull the Fader down it's still overloading the bus

But with the Fader at Unity and now I turn down the input gain that solves the overload issue. 

The Loud Max limiter will easily fix this but it's being fed an overloaded signal so that's not good. Even though I don't EQ my master I often turn it on just for that indicator. I can also then use it like Span for a spectrograph of the frequencies. 

[bvideo]

Red-lighting the prochannel EQ is definitely worth avoiding when expecting it to show useful levels.

But just for fun, I overloaded the master bus with an audio track & the master bus input gain. Reduced the master bus master fader until the master bus meter was never red. Then enabled the prochannel eq & set a mild curve. The prochannel overload light was full on.  But I did not hear any artifacts while the audio played. So the red lights didn't seem to correspond with audible artifacts.

Of course some other VST or prochannel effects could react badly when processing "out of range" data, even when processing in floating point, so there might be several reasons for not fixing master bus overload using the master fader.

[Gary Carey]

3 hours ago, John Vere said:

This is wrong. The OP said they were overloading the Master bus. Pulling down the fader does not fix this issue.  If you don't believe me just turn on the Prochannel EQ and you'll see the red light. 

Notice  the red indicator in the EQ and the bypass toggle

. 

If I pull the Fader down it's still overloading the bus

But with the Fader at Unity and now I turn down the input gain that solves the overload issue. 

The Loud Max limiter will easily fix this but it's being fed an overloaded signal so that's not good. Even though I don't EQ my master I often turn it on just for that indicator. I can also then use it like Span for a spectrograph of the frequencies. 

Hi John. 

We're using 32-bit floating point, so the full range audio can be recovered by dropping the fader.  Provided everything is in the box there's no problem.

This YouTube video explains it better than I could: 

 

Edited February 17 by Gary Carey

[Gary Carey]

Original post asks if dropping the input level to the master bus is OK. That's what I was saying would be fine, sorry if it wasn't clearly expressed. However, if there's no audible artifacts I don't worry about the visuals.  I lost any nervousness about red lights quite some time ago. 

 

Edited February 17 by Gary Carey

[Will.]

On 2/16/2024 at 7:18 AM, Michael Fogarty said:

Hi. I've inherited a 10 song project with many playing errors which I have fixed,  but my master bus is way too hot. I have everything going through buses -drums, vox, organ, piano, guitars, acoustics, etc. The mix is good now, but when I summed everything it's just too hot. Is the best remedy sonically to lower all the buses by the same amount -lets say .3db, or is it ok to just lower the input of the master bus (it would have to be -.6 to not clip. )What effect does that have? Am I hurting something by doing that? Feels weird to have everything going in their hot and just lower it. Or am I making too big a deal out of it? Should I put a clipper at the top of the master bus? (the genre is alternative and the client wants it to sound a bit tough/dirty so I'm not worried about that 
 

PS I know about rolling off the lows of different instruments, etc, but simply across the board on all the songs the master is too hot. Most have over 50 tracks and do restart the whole mix again would be way too tough. It's my fault this happened. I got everything sounding great, but it's just too hot.

The quickest way would be to rebalance your tracks to -9dB going into your Master Bus. 

The best way would be to rebalance your tracks to -9dB going into your Master Bus.

Gain staging seems to be the issue here. Theres also your Pan Laws and the matching levels of all your plugins to the ones on your faders. Your Dynamics could be all over the place, peaks could be hitting the ceiling of some tracks, compression could be off. Amps could be screaming too.  All this contributes to an out of balance track. 

Edited February 18 by Will.

[Michael Fogarty]

On 2/17/2024 at 1:58 AM, 57Gregy said:

How did you determine that it's "too hot"? Can you hear distortion?

without a limiter it would be bouncing off the ceiling.

 

[Michael Fogarty]

On 2/16/2024 at 11:28 PM, Andres Medina said:

Bear in mind that you can quick group tracks and/or buses and lower the volume of all with one stroke.

Depending on your levels, one way to go is Quick Group and lower all the tracks involved.

If the tracks have acceptable levels, then I would do the quick grouping at the bus level.

I do both all the time.

I never touch the Main Output.

yes, never considered the output volume. talking about the input gain.

[Michael Fogarty]

On 2/18/2024 at 3:40 AM, bvideo said:

Red-lighting the prochannel EQ is definitely worth avoiding when expecting it to show useful levels.

But just for fun, I overloaded the master bus with an audio track & the master bus input gain. Reduced the master bus master fader until the master bus meter was never red. Then enabled the prochannel eq & set a mild curve. The prochannel overload light was full on.  But I did not hear any artifacts while the audio played. So the red lights didn't seem to correspond with audible artifacts.

Of course some other VST or prochannel effects could react badly when processing "out of range" data, even when processing in floating point, so there might be several reasons for not fixing master bus overload using the master fader.

I don't use prochannel.