A very basic guide to sensibly using a limiter on the master track in FL Studio.

[Tensei]

Introduction

Proper use of a limiter on the master track is a subject I find a lot of people new to production tend to struggle with. This definitely isn't supposed to be a be-all end-all guide to mastering, but more of an effort to give people new to mixing the means to make tracks at a reasonable volume level without ending up with a bunch of overcompressed noise or clipping. I'm not claiming this is necessarily the right way of doing things, but it has worked quite well for me so far.

Fruity EQ

This is a part that I believe to be very important before using the limiter. When you're still in the mixing phase of things, it's important to hear every part of the song at a level where nothing peaks/clips so you can have an accurate picture of the balance between instruments. More importantly, adding a limiter to a track thats already quite loud and possibly clipping, has the potential of causing it to limit the track 'too much', which is what ends up causing the aforementioned overcompression problems.

The reason why I don't simply use the master volume control for this is that it would reduce the volume level AFTER the limiter, which isn't something you want.

What to do

Add a Fruity EQ (or Fruity Balance I guess) and turn down the master gain to a level where not even the loudest part of the track will clip (i.e. the level meters at the top don't go into the red at any point)

Limiter

Now you should be able to add a limiter. There's a bunch of different options on FLs limiter, but the two most important ones are the Input Gain, and the Ceiling knobs.

If you did everything right, the limiter window should look like this while your track is playing (i.e. nothing is being limited just yet)

The de facto standard limiter ceiling setting is -0.2 dB, which should work fine for just about every track. Unfortunately, the amount of desired gain differs with every song, so this is where it gets tricky, as you're going to have to trust your ears to tell you when something is still fine, and when it's 'too much'.

What to do

Set the limiter ceiling to -0.2 dB, and, while keeping the busiest/loudest part of the track as a point of reference, slowly bring up the gain.

It's best NOT to trust to graphic display that much because the amount of limiting you can get away with almost completely depends on the genre of music.

Very generally speaking, this is the point where the track should still be relatively fine:

Whereas this is probably a bit too much:

Again, don't put too much faith in the graphic display

Use your ears, listen for signs of overcompression like pumping or the cymbals 'breaking up'. It's also a good idea to have a professionally mastered track in a similar genre as a reference track to compare the amount of limiting.

Addendum

I believe this mini tutorial is a decent starting point, but doing this will probably not allow you to get your tracks up to a 'commercial' level while maintaining clarity and dynamics, especially if your track is quite dynamic in the first place, with strong attack transients (snares etc).

It would probably require you to sensibly compress your track before running it through the limiter to prevent the limiter from 'hitting' your track too hard when you bring up the gain. The key here is to experiment with 'dividing' the gain increase between the compressor and the limiter, as both have different effects on the overall sound of the mix. It's quite tricky stuff, so initially it's probably best to familiarize yourself with just the limiter.