6 racks built only from Live's own EQ Eight, Saturator, Utility and Limiter: 33 devices and 112 settings, each one with the reason it is where it is. The streaming master rack sits at -1 dBTP, the Maximum Permitted True Peak Level in EBU Recommendation R 128, so a distributor's true-peak test has nothing to bounce back.
Finish a full mix for upload: clean the bottom, glue it, set the ceiling where the true-peak check wants it.
Drop this on the master, play your loudest chorus, and raise the Utility Gain until the Limiter shows 2-3 dB of gain reduction. That is the whole workflow. The order matters and is deliberate: the corrective EQ cuts before the Saturator, so the saturation is never fed rumble it would turn into intermodulation; the tone shelves come after the glue, so what you hear is what leaves. The one judgement a tutorial skips is the release time - it is set at 160 ms, which at 120 BPM is well inside one beat (500 ms), so the limiter is fully recovered before the next kick and never breathes in time with the track.
Signal chain: EQ Eight → Saturator → Utility → EQ Eight → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EQ Eight | Band 1 - filter type (Low Cut, 12 dB/oct) | 1 | Turns band 1 from a bell into a gentle low cut. 12 dB/oct rather than 48 because a steep cut rings at the corner frequency and you hear that on kick tails. |
Band 1 - Freq (Hz) | 24.0 | Below 24 Hz there is nothing you or any speaker can reproduce, but there is DC offset and room rumble, and the limiter counts all of it as level. Removing it gives the limiter headroom back for free. | ||
Band 4 - Freq (Hz) | 320.0 | The place where bass guitar body, kick shoulder and low vocal all stack. It is the first thing that turns muddy when a mix is limited. | ||
Band 4 - Gain (dB) | -1.2 | 1.2 dB, not 4. On a master you are correcting a tendency, not fixing an instrument - anything deeper and you are re-mixing with the wrong tool. | ||
Band 4 - Q | 1.1 | Wide enough to sound like a tonal decision rather than a hole. | ||
Band 6 - Freq (Hz) | 3400.0 | Where cymbal edge and vocal consonants pile onto the same spot. It is the frequency that makes a loud master tiring after 30 seconds. | ||
Band 6 - Gain (dB) | -0.9 | Under 1 dB. The limiter will push this region up again as it works, so the cut is set to cancel that push, not to darken the mix. | ||
Band 6 - Q | 2.2 | Narrow enough to leave presence at 2 kHz and air at 8 kHz untouched. | ||
| 2 | Saturator | Drive (dB) | 2.5 | 2.5 dB into the curve. Enough to round the peaks the limiter would otherwise have to catch, so the limiter does less work for the same loudness. |
Dry/Wet | 0.22 | 22% wet, not 100%. The dry path keeps the transients sharp while the wet path adds density - at full wet the snare goes flat and you cannot get it back. | ||
| 3 | Utility | Width (1.00 = 100%) | 1.06 | 6% wider. Small on purpose: width added here is subtracted from the mono fold-down, and streaming still gets played on single-speaker phones. |
| 4 | EQ Eight | Band 2 - filter type (Low Shelf) | 2 | A shelf, not a bell: you want everything under the corner lifted evenly, not one note louder than its neighbours. |
Band 2 - Freq (Hz) | 90.0 | 90 Hz sits above the 24 Hz cut and below the 320 Hz dip, so the lift lands on kick and bass fundamental and nowhere else. | ||
Band 2 - Gain (dB) | 0.8 | 0.8 dB. A shelf covers octaves, so it moves far more energy than a bell of the same number - this is already audible. | ||
Band 7 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | Air is a shelf. A bell at 11 kHz makes one band of cymbal shine and leaves the rest dull. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 11000.0 | Above the 3.4 kHz cut, so you get air without bringing the harshness back with it. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | 1.1 | 1.1 dB after the saturator, not before: saturation already adds high harmonics, so the shelf is tuned to what is there now. | ||
| 5 | Utility | Gain (dB) - your loudness control | 1.5 | This is the only value in the rack meant to be changed on every track. Push it until the Limiter shows 2-3 dB of gain reduction on the loudest chorus, then stop. It ships at 1.5 dB so you hear a difference immediately without the first play being crushed. |
| 6 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -1.0 | -1 dBTP is the Maximum Permitted True Peak Level in EBU Recommendation R 128. Leaving that 1 dB is what stops a lossy encode from reconstructing a peak above full scale and distorting on a listener's phone, where you will never hear it. |
Release (ms) | 160.0 | The decision a tutorial skips. At 120 BPM one beat is 500 ms, so a 160 ms release is finished long before the next kick and the limiter cannot breathe in time with the track. Shorter than about 50 ms and you hear distortion on bass notes instead. |
The same mix prepared for a big room and a DJ mixer instead of a phone.
A club fails differently from streaming. The dancefloor is close to one stack, so the sides you added for headphones mostly disappear - the width goes down here, not up. The sub cabinets stop long before your plug-in meter does, so everything under 30 Hz is only stealing limiter headroom. The horn-loaded top boxes sharpen the region around 8 kHz that sounds fine on your monitors. And the file passes through a DJ mixer with its own gain, so the ceiling sits at -1.2 dB rather than -1.0 to leave that stage somewhere to go.
Signal chain: EQ Eight → Saturator → Utility → EQ Eight → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EQ Eight | Band 1 - filter type (Low Cut, 12 dB/oct) | 1 | Same gentle slope, higher corner than the streaming rack. |
Band 1 - Freq (Hz) | 30.0 | 30 Hz instead of 24. Most installed sub cabinets roll off before this, so that energy never becomes sound in the room - it only makes the limiter pull the whole track down. | ||
Band 2 - filter type (Low Shelf) | 2 | The weight you removed at 30 Hz is put back where the rig can actually move air. | ||
Band 2 - Freq (Hz) | 70.0 | 70 Hz is inside the band a club sub is designed around. | ||
Band 2 - Gain (dB) | 1.2 | 1.2 dB on a shelf is a lot of energy. Any more and the limiter starts working on the kick alone and the top of the mix ducks with every beat. | ||
Band 3 - Freq (Hz) | 240.0 | Boxiness. On a small monitor it is a texture; in a room with concrete it is the loudest thing there. | ||
Band 3 - Gain (dB) | -1.5 | Cutting here is what makes a track sound loud in a room without being louder in dB. | ||
Band 3 - Q | 1.2 | Broad, because room boxiness is broad. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 7800.0 | Where compression drivers in horn-loaded top boxes are at their most forward. Your studio monitors will not show you this. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | -1.0 | 1 dB is enough. This is insurance against a rig you have not heard, not a tonal choice. | ||
Band 7 - Q | 1.6 | Wide enough to cover the whole driver region rather than one point in it. | ||
| 2 | Saturator | Drive (dB) | 3.5 | A little more drive than the streaming rack: in a loud room the ear compresses too, and a denser track holds its shape at high SPL. |
Dry/Wet | 0.18 | Less wet than the streaming rack even though the drive is higher - the transient is what a dancefloor tracks, so the dry path stays dominant. | ||
| 3 | Utility | Width (1.00 = 100%) | 0.92 | Narrowed, not widened. Standing near one stack you hear something close to mono, so anything that only exists in the sides is gone. 92% keeps the image but reduces what can cancel. |
| 4 | EQ Eight | Band 4 - Freq (Hz) | 120.0 | The port tuning region of many bass reflex cabinets, where a room adds level you did not put there. |
Band 4 - Gain (dB) | -0.8 | Small, because if the rig does not have that peak you have not damaged the track. | ||
Band 4 - Q | 1.4 | Tight enough to leave 70 Hz and 240 Hz doing their own jobs. | ||
| 5 | Utility | Gain (dB) - your loudness control | 1.0 | Lower starting point than the streaming rack on purpose: a club track that is squashed flat has nothing left for the system to amplify. |
| 6 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -1.2 | 0.2 dB below the EBU R 128 -1 dBTP figure. The DJ plays a lossy file through a mixer that adds its own gain; that extra 0.2 dB is the margin for both stages. |
Release (ms) | 90.0 | At 128 BPM one beat is 469 ms. A 90 ms release lets the limiter recover between the kick and the hat that follows it, so the groove survives the loudness. | ||
Link | 1.0 | Fully linked left and right. Unlinking makes the stereo image wander when one side peaks - unnoticeable on headphones, very noticeable across two stacks. |
A bus rack for the vocal group, not a master: make the voice sit over 808s without stealing the mix bus's headroom.
This goes on the vocal group, and the most important number in it is the ceiling: -3 dB, not -1. A limiter on a bus inside a mix is there to catch two or three ad-libs, not to make anything loud - if you set it at -1 here you have used up the headroom the master rack needs. The other decision worth naming: the air shelf sits after the Saturator, because saturation has already created high harmonics, and the Utility trims 1.5 dB back off the Saturator's output so that when you bypass the rack you compare it at the same loudness instead of just hearing 'louder is better'.
Signal chain: EQ Eight → Saturator → EQ Eight → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EQ Eight | Band 1 - filter type (Low Cut, 12 dB/oct) | 1 | A rap vocal has no useful information below its fundamental, but it has plenty of plosive energy and stand rumble. |
Band 1 - Freq (Hz) | 95.0 | 95 Hz clears the 808 completely while staying under most spoken fundamentals. If your voice is very low, move this down - it is one of the two values in this rack meant to be moved. | ||
Band 3 - Freq (Hz) | 230.0 | Proximity boom from a close cardioid mic. It is what makes a vocal sound big in solo and buried in the mix. | ||
Band 3 - Gain (dB) | -2.0 | Deeper than anything on a master rack, because on a single source you can afford to be decisive. | ||
Band 3 - Q | 1.3 | Wide - proximity build-up is a region, not a note. | ||
Band 6 - Freq (Hz) | 6600.0 | Where 's' sounds concentrate on most close-miked voices. | ||
Band 6 - Gain (dB) | -2.4 | Say plainly what this is: a fixed cut, not a de-esser. It cannot follow the sibilance, so it is kept to 2.4 dB - enough to take the edge off, small enough that it does not lisp the words that have no 's' in them. | ||
Band 6 - Q | 4.0 | Narrow, so presence at 3 kHz and air at 10 kHz are untouched. | ||
| 2 | Saturator | Drive (dB) | 5.0 | Harder than any master setting here. A vocal fighting a sub-heavy beat needs harmonics in the midrange, and harmonics survive translation to a phone speaker where the fundamental does not. |
Dry/Wet | 0.3 | 30% wet keeps the breath and the diction from the dry path while the wet path does the pushing. | ||
| 3 | EQ Eight | Band 7 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | Shelf, so the whole top lifts together and the sibilant cut below it stays effective. |
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 10500.0 | Well above the 6.6 kHz sibilance cut, so you add air without undoing the cut you just made. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | 1.5 | Placed after the Saturator because saturation has already added high harmonics; boosting before it would have fed the drive material it then multiplies. | ||
| 4 | Utility | Gain (dB) | -1.5 | The Saturator raised the level; this pulls 1.5 dB back. Now switching the rack off compares tone against tone rather than quiet against loud - which is the single reason most people over-process a vocal. |
| 5 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -3.0 | The number this rack exists to get right. This is a bus inside your mix, so the ceiling leaves 3 dB for the mix bus and the master rack downstream. A vocal bus limited to -1 is why so many mixes cannot be mastered afterwards. |
Release (ms) | 60.0 | Short, because it should only be touching the few loudest ad-libs. If you see it working continuously, lower the fader instead - that is the fault it is telling you about. |
One rack across the drum group: weight at the bottom, cardboard out of the middle, and a limiter that never ducks the next hit.
The value that makes this rack work is the 45 ms release. At 90 BPM a sixteenth note is 167 ms, so a 45 ms release is finished long before the next hat arrives - set it to 300 ms as many presets do and every snare pulls the hat behind it down, which is exactly the 'lifeless drums' that people blame on the samples. The Saturator sits at 35% wet so the transient survives, and the Utility after it takes 2 dB back off so the bypass comparison is honest.
Signal chain: EQ Eight → Saturator → Utility → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EQ Eight | Band 1 - filter type (Low Cut, 12 dB/oct) | 1 | Removes the sub thump that overheads and room mics pick up from the floor. |
Band 1 - Freq (Hz) | 28.0 | Under the kick's fundamental and above the rumble. If your kick is tuned very low, this is the first value to move. | ||
Band 2 - filter type (Low Shelf) | 2 | Weight is a shelf; a bell would tune the kick to one note. | ||
Band 2 - Freq (Hz) | 80.0 | The band where a kick is felt rather than heard. | ||
Band 2 - Gain (dB) | 1.5 | Applied before the Saturator so the drive has something to work on - saturating a thin kick makes it buzz, not thump. | ||
Band 4 - Freq (Hz) | 420.0 | The cardboard box sound of a close-miked snare and of most drum sample packs. | ||
Band 4 - Gain (dB) | -1.8 | Cutting here is what makes drums sound expensive. Boosting the top to escape this problem only makes it brighter cardboard. | ||
Band 4 - Q | 1.5 | Covers 350-500 Hz without touching the snare's body at 200 Hz. | ||
Band 7 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | Cymbal air across the whole top rather than one band of it. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 9000.0 | High enough to be air and not hat click. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | 1.2 | Modest, because the Saturator that follows will add more top than you expect. | ||
| 2 | Saturator | Drive (dB) | 6.0 | The hardest drive in the pack. Drums are where saturation earns its keep: the harmonics it adds are what make a kick audible on a laptop speaker that cannot reproduce 60 Hz at all. |
Dry/Wet | 0.35 | 35% wet. The dry 65% is carrying the transient - go past about half and the snare goes flat and no amount of EQ brings the crack back. | ||
| 3 | Utility | Width (1.00 = 100%) | 1.15 | 15% wider spreads cymbals and room away from the kick and snare, which sit in the middle. Check it in mono afterwards - the mono lens in the Reference Check rack is there for exactly this. |
| 4 | Utility | Gain (dB) | -2.0 | Takes back roughly what the drive added, so switching the rack off is a fair comparison instead of a loudness trick. |
| 5 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -4.0 | A drum bus is not the master. -4 dB catches the one snare that overshoots and leaves the mix bus its headroom. |
Release (ms) | 45.0 | The decision this rack is built around. At 90 BPM a sixteenth is 167 ms, so 45 ms is fully recovered before the next hit. A long release here is what makes a limiter duck the hat that follows the snare. |
Spoken word for a podcast or a voiceover: intelligible on a phone in a kitchen, and mono, because that is what a phone plays.
Speech has nowhere to hide. There is no beat covering the limiter's release, so the release is long - 220 ms - and it recovers during the pauses between words instead of breathing inside them. The rack collapses to full mono on purpose: a single-speaker phone is where most spoken word is heard, a stereo room mic leaves phase differences in the voice, and folding to mono now means you hear exactly what your listener will hear rather than finding out afterwards. The 2.2 kHz lift is the intelligibility band - it is what lets someone follow you with the tap running.
Signal chain: EQ Eight → Saturator → EQ Eight → Utility → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | EQ Eight | Band 1 - filter type (Low Cut, 12 dB/oct) | 1 | Desk bumps, chair movement and building ventilation all live under the voice and none of them help. |
Band 1 - Freq (Hz) | 75.0 | Set under typical adult speech fundamentals so no voice is thinned, while the room noise below goes. If your voice is very deep, move it down and listen - this is a value meant to be adjusted. | ||
Band 3 - Freq (Hz) | 300.0 | Proximity boom from speaking close to a cardioid microphone. | ||
Band 3 - Gain (dB) | -2.2 | Removing this is what makes speech sound clear rather than merely loud - and it costs nothing in warmth because the fundamental is below it. | ||
Band 3 - Q | 1.0 | Broad, matching how broad the build-up is. | ||
Band 5 - Freq (Hz) | 2200.0 | The consonant band. Raising it is why a listener can follow you over a running tap without turning the volume up. | ||
Band 5 - Gain (dB) | 1.4 | Gentle. Past about 3 dB here speech becomes tiring in the second half of an episode, which is where listeners actually stop. | ||
Band 5 - Q | 1.2 | Wide enough to cover consonants without sounding like a telephone. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 7400.0 | Sibilance for speech sits lower than for singing. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | -2.0 | A fixed cut, not a de-esser: it cannot follow the 's', so it stays shallow enough to be safe on every word. | ||
Band 7 - Q | 3.5 | Narrow, so the 2.2 kHz lift above is not undone. | ||
| 2 | Saturator | Drive (dB) | 4.0 | Rounds the loudest syllables so the limiter is not the only thing controlling range. On speech this is heard as evenness, not as distortion. |
Dry/Wet | 0.2 | 20% - past this, breath noise between words comes up with everything else and the recording starts to sound like a room. | ||
| 3 | EQ Eight | Band 8 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | A shelf, so the reduction is smooth rather than a corner you can hear. |
Band 8 - Freq (Hz) | 13000.0 | Speech carries no content up here, but room hiss and air-conditioning noise do - and a lossy encoder spends bits on them. | ||
Band 8 - Gain (dB) | -2.5 | Reduced, not removed. A hard cut makes speech sound like a telephone; 2.5 dB just stops the hiss riding up with the compression. | ||
| 4 | Utility | Width (0.00 = mono) | 0.0 | Full mono. Most spoken word is played on one speaker, and a stereo room mic leaves phase differences that make a voice hollow when that happens. Collapsing here means you hear the listener's version while you can still fix it. |
| 5 | Utility | Gain (dB) - your level control | 2.0 | Speech is usually recorded far quieter than music. Raise this until the Limiter shows 2-3 dB of gain reduction on your loudest sentence, then leave it alone for the whole episode so the level is consistent between segments. |
| 6 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -1.5 | Half a decibel under the EBU R 128 -1 dBTP figure, because speech is usually delivered as a lossy file and the extra margin absorbs what the encoder adds. |
Release (ms) | 220.0 | Long, and this is the judgement that separates this rack from a music one. Music hides a fast release behind the beat; speech does not, so a short release is heard as the room breathing between words. | ||
Auto release | True | Switched on because a conversation changes pace constantly - one guest is loud, the next is quiet - and a fixed release cannot suit both. Turn it off and use the 220 ms above if you are reading a single scripted voiceover. |
Not a processor - four listening lenses that show you what a distributor, a dancefloor and a phone will do to your master. Ships with every lens switched OFF.
This is the rack you leave on the master while you work. Every lens is shipped with its Device On switch off, so it changes nothing until you click one on, and you only ever use one at a time. Mono shows what cancels. Low End Only shows what your sub is really doing. Phone Speaker shows the mix the way most people will hear it. Gain Match is the honest one: the commercial reference track you drop beside your mix is louder than your mix, and louder always sounds better - type your own offset into that Utility so you compare tone against tone. The Limiter at the end is the only device shipped switched on: it sits at -1 dBTP, never touches anything below that, and stops a single stray peak reaching your export.
Signal chain: Utility → EQ Eight → EQ Eight → Utility → Limiter
| # | Device | Control | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Utility | Device On switch | False | Ships off. Click it on to listen, click it off to keep working - the rack is meant to live on your master permanently. |
Width (0.00 = mono) | 0.0 | Anything that gets quieter or disappears when you click this on is out of phase, and it will disappear the same way on a club system and on a single-speaker phone. This is the check almost nobody does and it is the one that costs a bass line. | ||
| 2 | EQ Eight | Device On switch | False | Ships off, like every lens here. |
Band 7 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | A shelf pulls everything above the corner down together, leaving the bottom exposed. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 200.0 | Everything above 200 Hz goes down, so what you hear is the region a sub cabinet handles. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | -15.0 | The full 15 dB the band allows. Now you can hear whether your kick and bass take turns or fight, which is invisible when the rest of the mix is playing. | ||
| 3 | EQ Eight | Device On switch | False | Ships off. |
Band 2 - filter type (Low Shelf) | 2 | Removes the bottom the way a small driver does - by not producing it. | ||
Band 2 - Freq (Hz) | 300.0 | A phone or laptop speaker gives you very little under here. | ||
Band 2 - Gain (dB) | -15.0 | With the low end gone, you find out whether the song still has energy or whether all of it was in the sub. | ||
Band 7 - filter type (High Shelf) | 5 | Small drivers fall away at the top as well as the bottom. | ||
Band 7 - Freq (Hz) | 8000.0 | Above this a phone speaker gives you almost nothing, so your air shelf is not doing the work you think it is. | ||
Band 7 - Gain (dB) | -12.0 | What is left is the midrange, which is the whole song on most devices. If the vocal vanishes here, fix the vocal bus - not the master. | ||
| 4 | Utility | Device On switch | False | Ships off. |
Gain (dB) - type your own number here | -6.0 | A starting offset, not an answer. Put a commercial reference track next to yours, and lower this until the two are the same loudness by ear. Every comparison you make without doing this is a comparison of volume, and that is how a master ends up over-limited. | ||
| 5 | Limiter | Ceiling (dB) | -1.0 | The EBU R 128 Maximum Permitted True Peak Level. With no gain in front of it this device does nothing at all until something exceeds -1 dBTP, so leaving it on costs you nothing and stops one stray peak from reaching your export. |
Gain (dB) | 0.0 | Kept at zero deliberately. This rack must not make anything louder - the moment it does, every lens above lies to you. |
Built from Live stock devices only
This page is the working piece. The full pack has everything below.
6 racks built only from Live's own EQ Eight, Saturator, Utility and Limiter: 33 devices and 112 settings, each one with the reason it is where it is. The streaming master rack sits at -1 dBT
The number in these racks is not ours: EBU Recommendation R 128 (European Broadcasting Union) sets the Maximum Permitted True Peak Level at -1 dBTP, and that is exactly what the Limiter Ceiling reads in the streaming master rack -
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