Interesting.

Now Im not going to pretend to be an expert on the mastering process, but I think I can clear up the -6db stuff. If you master your own work, you can put the premaster dbs at whatever you like. However, if you are sending it off to be mastered professionally, the -6dbs is necessary to give the engineer all the headroom he may need for your specific project. Everyone uses different processes to get similar results. At least that's my take on it.

So crazy since ive been analyzing this project for some time too. I actually just had it open and then saw this post. Ive come to find out that you shouldnt let the rules of producing stop your creativity. But in this case yeah, they get the end result mix in a different way.

At times its hard to make sense of all the gain staging they did with a utility on every channel. but yet the channel volume is above 0db.
So maybe we are just seeing the in and outs of a work flow that doesnt make that much sense to us.

The difference between gain and volume,

One controls the input, the other controls the output.

It's a weird way of understanding signal strength and balancing those two perspectives.

It's like saying "i want this to be louder" then turn up the volume or "the signal isn't strong enough" turn up the gain.

After literally 10 years of playing music live, live sound, and production my friend told me the difference between the two when we were setting up before a gig.

There's so much analogue in this digital world and a lot of it gets looked over.

I also took a look at at this and found some interesting stuff.

What I found interesting was their sidechaining... At this point in the bass music loudness war, I was under the impression basically everyone is using some form of volume automation sidechain that knocks the volume of more or less the entire mix to zero (Mids+Sub at least)

In this track, only the subbass was getting dropped to zero, in fact, the heavy midrange synths were only being knocked down ~50%, the keys/leads a bit more, and just slightly on the percussion and background stuff. Maybe this was done just because of the bass house signature groove?

It just seems like, how are you going to achieve such a loud mix when you've got the loudest thing in your mix, the kick, hitting right on top of another element that is right up there in gain, the mids, and not have the mids ducked all the way down.

Either way, saved all those LFOtool settings for when I wanna try my hand at a bass house tune

And even today, watching the Funtcase in the studio, he talks about how he doesn't sidechain very heavily since it sounds unnatural (which, is sort of rich considering how unnatural the sort of music is to begin with).