I might just be out to lunch but, for ages now, I've been told the secret to keeping up with the "big boys" in the loudness war is to either write nothing but gabber and thrash metal OR sell your left kidney so you can afford "professional" mixing and mastering. Now I don't think I need to explain why the kidney thing is not an option for 99% of us, so we'll move on.

Option 2 I'm told is to add saturation to everything you possibly can and hammer it into a limiter like your breading rabbits. Though saturation can be great if used moderately, the "slamming a limiter" part of the equation, not so much. Not always but USUALLY it just squashes stuff into an unappealing mess. So if you, like myself, DON'T like your hard work sounding like mud pumped through a garden hose for the sake of the loudness war, you might be asking, how? How the bloody ell do I fix this?

Truth is, professional mixing and mastering is very nice but not really necessary IMO. You just have to know a few of the "industry secrets". It's kinda dumb even calling them secrets, since, you can find them floating around the net if you look.

What really twists my noodle though is that SO MANY professionals have either glossed over said secrets (so they can get more clients) or just plain given me WRONG advice. Want your track to be loud without professional mixing/mastering? Pay some 200 bucks for a super duper AI enhanced limiter plugin that can't be beat! . . . . . . . . OR. . . . . . . you could just do the OTHER thing instead. Which is what I'm guessing a lot of professionals have been doing all along.

Applying duckers, EQ and saturation where appropriate is good but the key ingredient turned out to be: A simple clipper.

So I slap it on my 2-bus before most other plugins like compressors/limiters and pay attention to the low end. Trying to keep mix levels where sustained bass instruments (bowed strings and pads) fall below the clipper's threshold, while allowing more transient distortion loving bass material (kicks 808s bass plucks slaps and percussion) to push above the clipper's threshold. Clipping about 3 to 6db and bam. Done. At this point even an "ok" mix/leveling job will now be as loud as the big boys WITHOUT having to slam the end chain limiter. Best of all the track doesn't sound like mud flaps on a donkey and it didn't cost me over a hundred bucks.

Here's the one I use https://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/little-clipper-2

I'm no slouch but I used to struggle to get some of my tracks to -14iLUFs without destroying them. Now I'm easily getting ambient stuff to roughly -12iLUFs and more loud genres to roughly -9iLUFs. From my tests, I've found it's legitimately competitive with mainstream releases I listen to. This would be things like French house, ambient, 90s alternative rock, big beat, chemical breaks, old school hiphop, atmospheric D&B, gorillaz, ect. All I need to keep in mind is making sure I don't run the before mentioned more delicate sustained types of bass over the threshold, as it does distort nasty when that kind of material gets clipped. Also I have to remember to render with 8x oversampling. The oversampling can run havoc with my CPU while working in real time, so I leave it off till I'm ready to render. I tested the aliasing on that clipper with a sine sweep in logic pro. Aliasing noise practically disappears entirely when run at maximum oversampling.

I had tried many other more fancy clipper plugins but they were all either too complicated and/or too CPU heavy and none of them ended up working for me. The one I listed though is pretty simple and inexpensive. Only complaint I have is logic sometimes freaks out when I use it. That's apple's fault though I'm going to guess. Lol whatever man. My loudness is now arguably competitive with late 90s chemical brothers, daftpunk, the white stripes and gorillaz. I'm not pretending I haven't been upping my game in all production areas to help but that simple clipper really was the missing ingredient. A simple clipper. Unbelievable.