I’m trying to ‘master’ a bunch of songs I made.
This is the conundrum:
I’m trying to reduce the dynamic range of my songs overall as well as them being at a reasonable Integrated LUFS level around (-14) with no clipping or distortion.
At the moment I am using this plugins in the Master bus in this order:
1- Cubase’s compressor (Ratio set 2, Threshold set to -18dB and Make Up set to 1.5dB)
2- Cubase’s Maximizer (Optimize set to 24% and Output set to 0%)
3- At the very end, Cubase’s Brickwall Limiter (Threshold set to -0.4 dB)
I don’t fully know what I’m doing, the problem seems to be that the songs sound too compressed but only the lauder peaks, I guess maybe there is too much dynamic range in the mix? (bad level balancing) . So the Compressor’s threshold seem to be affecting the drums and louder parts but leaving the quietest parts and their dynamic ranges unafected and hence in the end there is still too much of a difference between quiet parts and loud parts.
My question is which of Cubase’s factory plugins can I use to compress the signal as a whole, to reduce the dynamic range in the whole signal, not only to bring the lowder peaks down?
I’ve tried upping the Optimize percentage on the Maximizer but the lowder parts (such as drums) just sound distorted and also the stats on the LUFS meter go off, as in, Integrated LUFS becomes -8 where I’ve been told streaming plataforms ask for around -14.
Please help!!