Oh crap... a teaching moment?
Hold on!
My suggestion is to take the mastering software out of your chain. Mastering isn't for a work-in-progress, but is added at the tail end. If you were closing out the track, it would be fine, but mastering your stuff right up front squeezes the crap out of your dynamic range.
Further, you might have a recording that would clip wildly without the mastering software, but the limiter in your mastering plug-in will create an artificial "clip level" at something less than 100% signal.
I've always referred to mastering software as "filling all the cracks." I did a comparison on the BYO track I recorded for another thread as an example. There are three different mixdowns showing.
- The top track is the actual mixed recording without a mastering plug-in. The levels on it are far below clipping and it could benefit from mastering, since it is a final product.
- The middle track is the same as the top, but with overall gain boosted by 6db. Upon mixdown, it reported clipping, although it may not be obvious from the waveform shown.
- The bottom track is the middle track, with my mastering plug-in (Ozone 9) applied. When I mixed this down, I did not get a clip warning from my DAW.
If I was passing this track along to the VJR, the top track would be the one I would share. It has a low overall average volume level, with plenty of headroom for later contributors. The middle track might be OK, but as I mentioned, my DAW complained about clipping on it, so I would reduce it at least to the point where I don't get a clip warning during mixdown. Keep in mind that the middle clip is mixed 6db higher than the top one. That makes it more difficult for another contributor to fit "in the mix."
As you can see in the bottom track, there is a whole lot of limiting going on, by all the flat tops you see. While it is technically not clipping, too much limiting (which mastering software will happily do when not properly set up) is going to sound only slightly better than clipping. It's the loudest, but it sounds like crap!
I'm not familiar with which metering system Reaper uses, but there are several, all with slightly different response characteristics. The nice thing about digital recording is that the noise floor, which used to be a problem on analog gear, especially tape simply isn't an issue on most digital recordings. A slightly lower signal is better than a too hot signal, especially for something like the VJR contributions.
Further, I don't recommend normalizing a track either. Again, with digital, you don't gain anything by using it. If you must use normalizing, make sure you are normalizing to something like -6db or -9db. -12db wouldn't hurt anything.
Never normalize to 0db on any WIP recording.
tl;dr Don't use mastering plug-ins on VJR material.
