Never "mix into the red" with digital. That is a major "no-no". Send you mix to a mastering house for mastering, or .... when you burn the CD apply compression and limiting across the mix bus to hold down peaks while you jack up the average levels.

thanks kurt, any rough settings for compression though , as it always seems to make the sound kinda pumpy

Use the limiter if you have one. Limiters are comps that use higher ratios over 8:1 .... or set your comp to a ratio of 9:1 or higher.

Set the attack to it's fastest setting and then back that off a little and the set the release to as short a setting as possible .. That will help with the breathing and pumping. I have found I get good results with a threshold setting of +6dB.

Im no pro, but i have tried chaining a few compressors together mildly. Seemed to bring up the level real nice, then I used l3-multimaximizer and it was darn loud with out any real loss of qulaity. But i dont have good monitors now, but it sounded real loud crisp and good on the car stereo... Just dont go crazy with the pre compressors, jsut use em to bring up the level and normalize.

Anyone think im nuts? =]

-Josh

L2 is how i do it too, but i use it like a traditional limiter. my mixes are already usually pretty loud. i need to turn everything down a bit to make it sit nice. i usually just mix with the L2 and A/B it to make sure I'm making good choices. it really overly excites the snare and guitar a lot of times. if im gonna have someone else master it, i will opt to not use the L2, but use it for mixing to make sure everything is going to sit right when it is mastered.

if you want pure volume, use the sony oxford inflator. volume and *then some* would be an understatement. you can make it so loud that it would be clipping in the analog world, but with no digital overs. crazy.

steve