**Beat Makers & Producers** The drum samples used in this video are available at www.TCustomz.com/drum-kits.html

In this tutorial, I discuss  the “Character” setting  in the Izotope Ozone (4 or 5) loudness maximizer section. Adjusting this setting properly will  allow you to maintain the dynamics of your mix and at the same time increase the overall loudness of the track.

An issue I was having with many of my Hip Hop tracks was that the mixes sounded great, but when I tried to increase the overall loudness with compression, I ended up “squashing” down my drums (kick, snare).

Previously, the only way I knew to avoid this problem was to not compress the track as much as it needed to be – but I was the sacrificing the industry-standard loudness.

In all of the Ozone mastering tutorials I watched online, they mentioned  the “Character” setting, but eluded that 4.0 (the default “Character” setting in Ozone’s Maximizer) was recommended.  So I always left it at the default, simply because I didn’t understand it’s purpose.

The more you increase the “Character” setting [upwards of 10.0], the more it “squashes” the audio during the compression.  If you decrease the value below 4.0, into the “fast”, “fast and loud”, or “clipping” ranges, you’ll notice that your drum sounds “pop” out through your mix, even when you lower the maximizer threshold liberally.

[See video demonstration above]