Few questions about mixes and loudness

[bryan_kilco]

I still consider myself a noob at mixing and I've been working at it (basically as a hobby) for about 3 or 4 years now. Anyhow, on a recent mix I did, I posted a clip here for some advice. I took the advice and now I'm noticing something strange/different.

It seems that when I "master", my limiter isn't as sensitive as it was on, say, a mix from a few months ago. (I dropped some high end in cymbals/guitars due to some of your guys' advice). I'm hitting like -11, -10 RMS. I just thought maybe I was onto something since my limiter is reacting differently. I still seem to have a scoop across my mid-section for some reason, according to my analyzer....which seems to always be a problem for some reason.

 

[Sloan]

This might mean that your mixes are more balanced than before, so your limiter isn't working as hard. Not sure about the scoop, may have something to do with your eq settings throughout the mix.

Personally, when I started using clipping in my mixes, it made it very easy to make things louder, and it makes perfect sense - in an analog world you would drive your signal through things that cut off your really high transient peaks, clipping them anyway. Without huge peaks hitting your compressors/limiter they can concentrate on controlling the real meat of the mix.