vladasyn
I do not understand the concept of mixing under -3. Are you serious- that would make my tracks sooooooo ridiculously low!

 
What do you mean by low ?  Why not just turn up your monitors if you want it louder ?
 
There's no reason to have your track levels close to zero.
 

The goal is to compete with all the kids that using a brickwall limiter to make track loud. At -3, it will never get even close to the commercial or "new age" loudness. And what is the reason? If you ask about reason for being under 0, I will say- to avoid distortion. I suspect many of those loud tracks actually past 0 point, but I don't know how they get away with it. But I will not release a track that is at -3. Then I will have to rely on limiter to some how make it at -0.1, if I can already have it at -0.1.  

The idea is your ENTIRE MIX adds up to -3db at the Master bus.
 
So nothing is quieter or louder in relation to each other. Just everything is quieter evenly so all you have to do is turn up your headphones and monitors to make it ALL louder while you mix/record.
 
THEN once your mix is done you use a limiter and/or put your mastering effects on (like Izotope Ozone) and use those to increase the level evenly to just below peaking (and the final limiter prevents the peaking at whatever level you need for the target media like CD or mp3 or whatever).
 
And yes... you CAN use a limiter on tracks. You can use them wherever you want to do all sorts of stuff (but most times you'll want a compressor instead). However you probably don't want to use fancy mastering effects (like Ozone) single tracks just to limit peaks because mastering effects tend to be VERY resource intensive (so you would just use them on the Master bus or on a stereo mixdown in a new project).
 
As far as "experience" there is always more to learn. I've actually been recording for about a decade now but only really started "learning" stuff "properly" a few years ago and likely need another 5 years just to actually really know what the heck I'm doing. lol
 
There is lots of great info on this site and all over the internet though so we are lucky. The old guys had to actually have access to schools, books and real life studios. These days we can mostly just screw around with computer stuff and learn.
 
Cheers.

If they were more than 0db they would be clipping. They use limiters and other tools to make things that loud. They do not just turn up their faders.
 
Read up on "Gain Staging". There are lots of methods to acheive this but the ideas all follow the same general principle of "summing" your individual signals (your tracks) into one big signal at the very end (your Master bus/main outputs).
 

vladasyn
The goal is to compete with all the kids that using a brickwall limiter to make track loud.

 
That's fine, but that's the very last step.  The tracks in your mix shouldn't be anywhere near zero before your final mastering, at which point you bring things up to where you want them.  I understand (?) that the last stage is done on the bounced output of your mix, so there's no uncertainty concerning your peaks.
 

vladasyn
If you ask about reason for being under 0, I will say- to avoid distortion.

(We may be misunderstanding each other but) if you're not close to zero, you're not likely to clip.
 
I've found discussions on the K-System in the Techniques forum very helpful in learning about levels.  Jeff Evans is especially interesting to listen to.  Here are a few :
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/K14-mastering-standard-m3177699.aspx#3177699
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com...-m3195674.aspx#3195674
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3220727
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Getting-the-Ksystem-working-in-Sonar-852-m1935407.aspx
 
You don't only want to worry about peaks and clipping, you also should think about dynamic range (unless loudness is more important than anything else).
 

Paul P

vladasyn
The goal is to compete with all the kids that using a brickwall limiter to make track loud.

 
That's fine, but that's the very last step.  

Since you didn't emphasize it, I figured I would 

So nothing is quieter or louder in relation to each other. Just everything is quieter evenly so all you have to do is turn up your headphones and monitors to make it ALL louder while you mix/record.
 
THEN once your mix is done you use a limiter and/or put your mastering effects on (like Izotope Ozone) and use those to increase the level evenly to just below peaking (and the final limiter prevents the peaking at whatever level you need for the target media like CD or mp3 or whatever).

 
What is the reason to leave the track at -3, and then use limiters to bring it up? How is the limiter brings something up? My understanding is that it is similar to "normalize." Normalize brings everything close to Zero. The down side of using Normalize is that if your track has an intro at -7 gradually turning in to main body of the song, Normalize will bring Intro to Zero as well as the main song body, which is undesirable. What is the limiter? I understand that it brings everything to zero just like Normalize and it suppresses standing out peaks. I do not use limiters in mixing, only as part of Ozone mastering preset. But in case of Normalize, it actually changes the structure of the song. I don't want to use wront term, I want to say it resamples it, but it is a wrong term. It takes the song apart and increases every individual element of it to the point of zero. Your song may never be the same. The limiter is the same way. So- the more work you have to do with limiter, the more chances it will recalculate your song. If you are at -0.3 and you use limiter to get it to -0.1, it will suppress few picks here and there and get it to -0.1 with no loss. If you have to go from -3 to -0.1 by making limiter to increase your volume, you risking to have your song restructured. If you can use fader and bring volume to -0.1, why would you want to leave it anywhere below your destination and then use other tool like limiter to get it to the same place? The idea of using limiter is that you playing with perception of loudness, you not actually increase loudness. Sure, if your track is at -3 and you use limiter to get it to -0.1, you may be hearing that it got louder. And it did! The art if to take the track at -0.1, put limiter, exciter, saturator on it and make it feel and sound louder while staying at the same -0.1 level.

Read this for starters. I'll elaborate later.

vladasyn

So nothing is quieter or louder in relation to each other. Just everything is quieter evenly so all you have to do is turn up your headphones and monitors to make it ALL louder while you mix/record.

THEN once your mix is done you use a limiter and/or put your mastering effects on (like Izotope Ozone) and use those to increase the level evenly to just below peaking (and the final limiter prevents the peaking at whatever level you need for the target media like CD or mp3 or whatever).

 
What is the reason to leave the track at -3, and then use limiters to bring it up? How is the limiter brings something up? My understanding is that it is similar to "normalize." Normalize brings everything close to Zero. The down side of using Normalize is that if your track has an intro at -7 gradually turning in to main body of the song, Normalize will bring Intro to Zero as well as the main song body, which is undesirable. What is the limiter? I understand that it brings everything to zero just like Normalize and it suppresses standing out peaks. I do not use limiters in mixing, only as part of Ozone mastering preset. But in case of Normalize, it actually changes the structure of the song. I don't want to use wront term, I want to say it resamples it, but it is a wrong term. It takes the song apart and increases every individual element of it to the point of zero. Your song may never be the same. The limiter is the same way. So- the more work you have to do with limiter, the more chances it will recalculate your song. If you are at -0.3 and you use limiter to get it to -0.1, it will suppress few picks here and there and get it to -0.1 with no loss. If you have to go from -3 to -0.1 by making limiter to increase your volume, you risking to have your song restructured. If you can use fader and bring volume to -0.1, why would you want to leave it anywhere below your destination and then use other tool like limiter to get it to the same place? The idea of using limiter is that you playing with perception of loudness, you not actually increase loudness. Sure, if your track is at -3 and you use limiter to get it to -0.1, you may be hearing that it got louder. And it did! The art if to take the track at -0.1, put limiter, exciter, saturator on it and make it feel and sound louder while staying at the same -0.1 level.

Thats now how normalize works. It searches for peaks and places them at zero. The rest of the audio is brought up proportionally. If you have an audio track with peaks already near zero and much of the audio is -24 dB you will not see much change in loudness even though the audio is relatively low for the most part.  Its all about the range difference between peaks and valleys. If the valleys dominate and you rely on normalizing to raise the overall loudness you wont be happy. Here a compressor is in order to push the valleys up and hold the peaks steady. This will lower the dynamic range where normalize doesn't. Normalize isn't effective on everything. 
 
    

Anderton, you being cited in this blog! I don't want to sound like a snob, but it is amusing that he just realized it. Yes, people let their individual tracks go past Zero and only worry that their master will stay under Zero. I never let anything go past Zero. All my tracks are below Zero, nothing ever clips even for one sample. Actually in Sonar it is easy to neglect as it does not give audible distortion. You can have all 70 tracks slightly clipping and it will sound ok. I personally am obsessive with keeping everything below Zero. But this blog sounds immature. Who in the world care about where the Faders are. There is no need to pay attention where the faders are. That number has no value. What matter is where the signal shown my the meter. The meter, not the fader. Why would he even say he sets his faders at -12. The fader on a new track is set to Zero, and it does not matter. If signal is low- it goes down, if signal is high, the fader goes up. We were talking about meter level of final mix being under -0.1 or -0.3 or, for some, -3, not the fader level. The fader level is just a fader, the numbers next to it are for the meter. And this blog has nothing to do with issue of having final mix at -3 versa -0.1 before mastering. He says- the effects may be clipping? Come on now! No visual working? My effects do not randomly clip. There usually is a meter and you can see or hear if it clipping.