Tricking yourself is just not a good long-term strategy. Look here, you do you, but my students keep asking me, and now for the third time today, I’ve seen this 6 dB trick. I do not believe this is good advice.
The premise is if you put a gain plugin set to minus 6 dB on every single one of your tracks, you’re gonna get some headroom back at the end. It’s a little bit like setting your clock 15 minutes ahead so that you’re never late, and if that works for you, great. But what most people discover is they start budgeting an extra 15 minutes, and they still show up late everywhere.
The problem isn’t that you don’t know what time it is, it’s that you’re not budgeting your time well. Sticking a plugin on each and every one of these channels is a crutch, and now you’ve gotta figure out whether or not to include the buses, when effectively, this is what your master fader is meant to do. Proponents of this technique like to mention mixing into a limiter, but if you’re not managing or busing the levels going into a limiter, you probably shouldn’t be mixing into one.
Just do your best to manage your gain sensibly so it’s not clipping at the end, and if it is, the internal headroom in your DAW is more than enough to accommodate that extra level, turn it down, and you’ll get it back when you change your output. Nah, crap, I’m late.
