One of the most crucial mix phases is referencing the tracks outside of your studio and getting feedback. One way to help remove the obvious distraction of your mix being at such a lower volume than a typical commercial release is to strap a limiter on the master fader just before you bounce down your mix.
Getting You In The Ball Park
The goal of this move isn’t to call that a mastered track, but rather to get the volume of your mix in the ball park of that of a mastered CD. This keeps the client (or yourself) from being distracted by your mixes low volume, and instead allows feedback to be drawn from how the mic actually sounds and compares to other mixes.
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My name is Graham Cochrane and I'm the founder of The Recording Revolution, one of the world's most loved audio recording and mixing blogs with over 200,000 readers each month. 
Would you want to use this in addition to a mix bus compressor? Or is it either or?
Jamar, this would be in addition to the mix bus compressor.
Graham, sad to seee we are coming to the end of this great series, want to say thanks and also, I have come to really love the song you have been using, is that you singing?
Graham, I’ve loved this series and am also sorry to see it come to a close. Can you make some tutorials on carving out frequency spaces in the mix to achieve maximum clarity and separation?
Eric
If you hang in there, I have something around the corner to address that very thing 🙂
Wouldn’t it be better to simply lower the volume of the reference tracks? Otherwise you’re not hearing your true mix (and you’re also not hearing it through the eventual *actual* mastering chain either).
-Kim.
Sure you can just turn down the other tracks, I mention that in the video. But most people get weirded out that their song isn’t as loud as another song and they focus too much on that.
Do you ever get ‘It sounds too squashed/limited’ as feedback? 😉
-Kim.
John, the guy in this video is Keilan. Check out his music at http://www.KeilanMusic.com
Kim, no I don’t get that as feedback because it doesn’t sound too squashed 🙂
Graham, after re-watching all these videos, what I found really interesting is the ideia of submix and submaster. How does it work? You create a subgroup containing every single channel in the mix and then send it to you submaster?
Kelton, it’s mostly because of the way master faders work in Pro Tools. I did a video on this http://therecordingrevolution.com/2011/04/06/master-faders-in-pro-tools-video/
I was wondering if you could explain the difference between you Submix and Submaster fader because I never understood the reason for that and I would like to know what the benefits may be by doing that.
Thanks!
This video explains my setup: http://therecordingrevolution.com/2011/04/06/master-faders-in-pro-tools-video/