Making it louder

[mane0x06]

I've been practicing and making a few remixes, and compared to other songs I've heard, mine sound so much quieter.

After loading uThunder's song into FL Studio, I can see that the level is basically completely maxed out:


Compared to the audio waveform of my song:


Which brings up two questions:
1. How do you get the audio to be completely maxed out like that? No matter how much I push the limiter, the level never really hits the top that much
2. How do you get it so maxed out and still have it sound fine? Whenever I turn it limiter up too much, it causes a ton of problems, like making the vocals sound pumpy, and destroying the kick transients

I've tried stuff like EQing out the low frequencies on the non bass instruments, I'm not sure if that helps.

I have no idea what I am doing wrong. Do I just need to master it better, or do I have to mix better?
Probably I'm just being bad at everything :(

If anyone can help me with this, I'd really appreciate it.

First post on MLR, sorry if I sound like an amateur X_x..

[Injustrial]

- Proper EQ'ing to even out the balance.
- Multiband compressor.
- Soft clipper / Exciter.

Do be careful. Don't squash it too hard, it'll sound flat and tiresome. Plus, Youtube and most other services normalize the loudness level. Stick to -24 LU (Loudness Unit), -15 at most.

[mane0x06]

Thanks for replying.

I'm finding that the vocals are taking up a lot of the headroom/space, since don't have the acapella, so I'm using the original audio.
I have already EQed out the bass frequencies, EQing too far makes the vocals lose a lot of warmth. Looking at JTH's remix of the same song, I can tell that an acapella was also not used, yet it sounds still louder:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6Xp8B6VOIE

BTW Soft clipping is amazing. Makes stuff 20% louder! How come I hardly hear about it anywhere? Everyone says use a limter, but soft clipping sounds a lot more transparent to me?