---
title: 'How to Get a Loud, Clean Master in Under 10 Minutes'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=KXSnRPKt_ac'
video_id: 'KXSnRPKt_ac'
date: 2026-06-30
duration_sec: 880
---

# How to Get a Loud, Clean Master in Under 10 Minutes

> Source: [How to Get a Loud, Clean Master in Under 10 Minutes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=KXSnRPKt_ac)

## Summary



## Transcript

For some people, getting loud and clean
music seem to be impossible. But there
are five steps that I have never seen
anybody talk about in a single video
that will get your music to sound as
loud as you wanted to while making it
cleaner and crisper. My name is Max.
Welcome to Mix Elite Academy. And how
come this track here we get [music]
about minus 10 LFS. We are even peing 1
dB and I cannot push it harder [music]
because it just start distoring. But the
same track with different processing
applied. I can push to plus 17.
You're getting -5 - 6 LFS. [music] We
are not picking
and it sounds clean and crispy. Louder
equals better. Like literally
psychologically and physiologically.
Docs hate it. We love it. But here is
not just louder. It's crispier,
punchier, and glued together. The very
simple way to achieve this loudness is
by playing our song through a limiter
that doesn't allow the audio to get
above zero dBFS threshold, which is the
limit for your speaker to play music,
and turning on the gain. So, we shave
off the peaks of the sound, making the
[music] louder parts quieter and the
quieter parts sound louder.
[music] And this is exactly what I've
just done to this track. is a cardinal
sin VDM right here
>> that you should never ever do. So,
what's going on and what should you do
to get the crispy masters? First, let's
clear up that the PQC on the meter
inside your door has nothing to do with
how loud your music is actually
perceived. We measure this with LUFS
instead. It's a separate metering plugin
you have to use. If you don't have one,
just click the link in the description
below. As electronic music producers, we
want this number to be as high as
possible, ideally to at least minus 8 to
-6 integrated LUFS. Scril X goes minus
three. We'll get to how in a moment.
Second, why did you just say louder
equals battery max when Spotify tells me
that recommended is minus4 LFS or they
will lower it? Because people are
confused between distribution target and
playback threshold. Spotify uses minus14
LUFS as playback settings. Is their
target for average integrated LUFS of
your entire song? If your drop is
hitting minus1 LUFS and it still sounds
great, that's amazing. No streaming
platform is going to be applying limiter
on your song. People will just turn up
the volume as they want it on their
studio Bluetooth speakers and Spotify
might just change the volume. So, we
always master our tracks as loud as
possible without it starting to sound
worse. Full stop. Next, before we start,
fundamentally, your muscle will suck and
not be crispy. Not because of what you
do on the master mainly, but what you do
while mixing. If you want a clean and
loud mix before we get to mastering,
your friends are right click delete
button. You cannot make 50 misins loud
because they're fighting for the same
pixel of headroom. Selfish low end
because low end is carrying the most
energy but least loudness. That's why if
you listen closely, protras actually
don't have as much sub frequencies as
you might think. Frequency masking, a
lot of side chaining, not only from kick
to bass, but to make space for whatever
is the priority in your mix. Clipping
individually and groups to control the
peaks and everything below 100 htz is
mono. These guys will give you 80% of a
clean mix. that we now can get to making
loud and crisp. So, let's start from the
loudest part of our rendered mix.
This applies to every genre, ADM, trap,
hip-hop, etc. First, on your master,
since low frequencies are the heaviest,
we always apply a low cut to cut
everything that's unnecessary. So, I'll
apply Fruity Parametric EQ2. And
unnecessary starts just under the lowest
note that your song plays. that
shouldn't be lower than 30 Hz. For
example, D1 or D2 in FL
place at 36 Hz. In FL, there's this
preset you can apply. And I will take it
a little bit higher because my track is
in E. It hits at around 41 Hz. So, I'll
just start rolling down after it. You
should not turn on linear phase or
oversampling. Linear phase and
oversampling will leave for the final
limiter.
You can hear it's getting worse within
our face and over something applied.
Some people like to also use shelf
instead. That would look something like
this. You use this shelf if you feel
like after the low cut your track became
boommy, right? There are some phasing
issues. Then we don't need any lows from
the side channels because side channel
is everything that's different between
left and right ear. Side is what creates
stereo width effect. And serial width in
low frequencies is bad. Very bad. Want
to know why? Right? Because they
oscillate in lower frequency. And if two
play the exact opposite signal, you'll
hear silence. Not in your headphones,
but when you listen back to it on mono
speakers or there will be blind spots in
clubs with no bass audible at all. I
will use a free midside EQ preset for
Patcher that you can download for free
below and just start increasing the side
low cut.
So this is how it looks like from two to
300 Hz. We're starting to roll off
everything so that at 120 Hz everything
down is only mono. There's no side
signal and this is what we are cutting.
Take a listen and notice how the phase
shifts. So the bass is inaudible every
couple of seconds.
So it's also really inconsistent and it
will screw up our face a lot. That's why
we do it like this. And if you worry
that we are losing a little bit of this
punch and bass, we'll be adding the good
one back in a moment after we would get
into dynamics. take a look at our
waveform, how many weird little peaks we
have. That's why we would usually apply
a clipper just after the EQ. If we
wanted to really push the loudness, I
really like this small plugin, literally
very small, called the G-Clip, you push
it until you just barely hear it change
the knock of your drums, then back it
off 10%.
And now we also turn on the over sample.
We do not turn on softness. We keep it
at 0%.
So I had it started to distort and then
I backed it off. So I don't hear it no
more. Take a look at what waveform looks
like with and without it.
>> We're cutting the unnecessary peaks that
don't really make it sound different,
but we'll screw up our limiter in a
minute. Technically, even better way
would be if we applied multiband
clipping. So you would not be limited by
the whole waveform and you'll find a
whole niche for multiband clipping on
YouTube. But ideally instead you don't
do multiband clipping on your master
when mastering but do it on individual
groups of instruments when mixing. This
is what for example Skrillex does to
achieve this minus 3 LFS. That's why
some mastering engineers will want you
to send stems of your track for
mastering so that they can do stuff like
this. But this is basically mixing
already. We are not doing that today.
Now, why did we use hard clipping before
compressors or a limiter? Because our
limiters are trying to be smart. Their
goal is to be as transparent as possible
without adding distortion. If you have a
huge snare hit like that upcoming, this
smart brain of this thing will soften
the hit to fit the snare under the
ceiling we set over here. On the other
hand, clipper is damp and that's why we
love it. It just chops all the waveform.
That's why the next step after we got
our signal clear from this weird harsh
peaks is multiband compression. You can
do this in Maximus or something like Fap
Filter Promb MB. Inside Maximus, I think
it's pretty easy to see. I like to set
the preggain of each band by like 7 to
10 dB so we have more [music] room to
work with.
Our goal here is just to lower the
dynamic range of every single band
individually instead of at once. And at
the same time, very important, make up
for that. So if we are going down from
plus 8 dB to around five, we would add
about 3 dB of gain to the lows like
that. Then do the same for mids
[music] and highs.
And now we can get to limiting and
maximizing. This is the most important
part. If you were to watch just one
minute of this whole video, this is the
one. I really like to use this one from
Ozone because it has all the features we
really need. First, before we even tweak
anything, we turn on always true peak
and set the output level to start at
minus0.3
dB ceiling. Why this is important?
Because when audio leaves your computer,
it goes through digital to audio
converter DAC from PC to speakers. It
basically takes the dots and draws a
smooth curved line between them to send
to your speakers. If two dots are too
high, the curve can get about zero dB
causing distortions. So speakers try to
play signal that's technically
impossible for them to play and it's
called inter sample peing because the
signal is peing between the samples.
When you turn on true peak, it over
samples the audio to create more dots to
make sure they won't go above the
thresholds you've set after converting
to the signal that speakers can read.
You will not hear these issues inside
your DA because your D works in 32-bit
float at least. But this all only
applies to lossless file, meaning a wave
file that nobody will be listening to.
Actually, everybody will be listening to
something like MP3 versions of your
file. Like maybe DJs on festivals play
wave files, but usually this would be
Spotify converting your file to MP3. And
this settings don't fix this. Your
limiter even in true peak mode doesn't
care about MP3 or any other codec.
That's why inside of ozone you have this
codec so that we can preview how it will
sound and what will be the true peak
after converting to MP3. And this is
key. Okay, we don't even start turning
on the gain before [music] we do that.
So we have true peak minus 0.3 is a good
starting point. And now I'll start with
the chaotic off so we can hear the
difference. And we'll start turning on
the gain up until I hear audible
distortion. No LFS [music] matters for
now.
All right.
So [music] you can see we are under
minus 6 LUFS. This is crazy. And we are
picking at minus0.1
even if you have output level set to
minus0.3 with crooic on. Okay. And now
let's turn on codec. go to for example
AAC because that's what Spotify for
example uses for their web player and
set it to 256 and we'll be looking at
this peak to see if we are clipping
[music] and immediately we're clipping
even though with no [music] codec light
we are pretty much at the true peak Go.
Now this plus one shouldn't be outable
at all. But if we go lower in codec,
it's getting much worse. That's why so
many people will tell you to go lower in
the true peak ceiling. Spotify tells you
to go minus 2 dB true peak ceiling just
because of this codec. If we go minus 2
dB,
we only have half a dB of headroom after
converting it to AAC 128 kilob. I would
personally before limiting apply some
kind of imager to make the stereo width
of our track a bit more rich. I would do
something sort of like that where we
have lows fully in mono and mids to
highs a bit more stereo. This will also
increase a little bit of our headroom.
The problem I see here is that our
[music] peaks are still a little bit too
high even though we've applied clipper
already. If you seen something like
this, what I would do after our
multiband dynamics, I would apply
another G clip just to make sure we are
controlling those tiny little peaks that
don't really bring anything. But
unnecessary volume peaks.
As you can see, now [music] we are much
more in control environment. Now, if I
just apply a limiter and apply the same
amount of gain we've added, this is how
it would sound.
And this is after everything we've done
today.
>> [music]
>> Even though I'm trying to give you my
best here on YouTube, there's just so
much that I can cover. That's why inside
our Mix Elite Academy, you get lifetime
access to all of our premium courses,
all of our samples, presets, song
templates, including this one, and
weekly live group coaching, unlimited
one-on-one feedback on your music,
discounts on thousands of plugins. So,
if you want a foolproof way to start
making professional sounding music,
check the first link in the description.
And remember that the best way to get a
loud master is to make music that people
want to turn up. Quality is the best
volume booster. That's why in this video
you can see here, I'll take you through
the start to finish process of mixing
your track. So click over and I see you