This has been my go-to reference track since it came out in February 2014, it's a near perfect mixdown.

My friend and I have a theory that he has 2 mastering chains working together. One for just the kick and snare and one for the rest of the track. He'll completely sausage the entire track (like all the synths, basses, sub and effects) and then  master the kick and snare separately.

Then it's just a matter of sidechaining the kick and snare to everything else in the track or cutting small gaps in the track so he can slot the kick and snare in and have absolute silence to minimise clipping, allowing him to push his master even further whilst retaining those solid transients. Then he might add an extra limiter or maximiser to bring it up a little further if he left a few db of headroom after he individually mastered the drums and the rest of the track separately.

I'm not sure if that's what he does, but it makes sense and in theory should work, it's just very long winded lol.

So once he's made his two mastering chains, he'll have a track of all his synths, basses, sub fx, and percussion (i'll just refer to this as the 'track') and then he'll have a second track with just his kick and snare on.

Just to make this easier to explain, let's say he's bounced these two tracks to audio and put them into a fresh project in Logic.

So he's got 2 audio tracks in his project, his kick and snare and 'track'. Everytime a kick and snare plays, he'll cut a tiny section out of the 'track' so that he has complete silence on the initial hit of the kick or snare, kind of like an extreme sidechain. If he were to cut this extremely accurately so that his kick or snare aren't playing at the same time as the 'track' or overlapping, this would result in the master not clipping, in theory. (And because these two tracks have already been mastered, the waveform would still look totally brick walled because nothing is overlapping, he's just slotting the drums into the silence that he's cut out of the 'track')

Since the snare has a fairly long tail on it, if he were to cut out a gap in the track for as long as the snare tail decays, it would sound awful and the 'track' would suddenly jump in volume when the tail has decayed completely. He's probably cut a tiny bit out for a few milliseconds where the snare transient hits leaving the tail of the snare overlapping with the 'track'. By doing this, his limiter doesn't have to work as hard, it only has to limit where the tail of the snare overlaps with the 'track' as opposed to having a huge transient to deal with.

Quote from: Axis on February 17, 2016, 06:18:57 am

The Invisible Limiter is THAT good. Any other limiter I've tested starts choking way before Invisible Limiter gives you any audible distortion.

Just purchased it! It was between Invisible Limiter and FabFilter Pro-L and I finally went with Invisible Limiter.