Stimming is returning with a brand new Facebook Advent calendar. Last year the focus was on music production, where as now it is all about playing live. The Diynamic boy wonder will be posting elaborate tips and tricks on specific subjects that can really help out those that are struggling to sound more professional, or even those just interest in the techniques behind playing dance music in a live setting. Next to Stimming’s own tips, he wil also feature guest tips from some of his friends, like Henrik Schwarz, Frank Wiedemann and Johannes Brecht. Here is a pretty interesting one tip he posted recently, about compressors and limiters:
“A big problem in playing live is to reach the loudness from a mastered track. To not fall off in loudness after a dj who’s playing masters its very important to also use a maximizer or limiter on your master out. I am using the Voxengo elephant but in the low-latency version which is called: EBusLim. The original Elephant sounds better but has a latency of 10ms which will cause problems for my live-instruments. the category „maximizer“ is not only a limiter but also a thickener who produces artificial harmonics to thicken up the signal.
The gain reduction is, depending on the track I play, between 4-7db which is a lot, but I didn’t choose to start this loudness war you can also put one of those on every channel with less gain reduction to reach the desired loudness, but for my signals I found it too loud and squashed that way. so I’m only having the EBusLim on my master out. I used to use the UAD Maximizer but I got rid of the satellite because of weight. another limiter with a very good reputation (if you look at gearslutz.com) is the one from Fabfilter. And there’s also the possibility to use external hardware like Johannes Brecht with his custom made ssl style bus compressor.”
