Mixdown choir - effects on master

[inthecorner]

Hi there, I know that it's not good for the individual tracks in a song to be recorded and mixed too hot. But what I have to do often in logic, when doing the final mix is do a mix-down of the sum backing vocals. All the backing gets mixes down into parts (alto, soprano etc.), so instead of there being 20 mono channels of a backing part it becomes a stereo sum file/track of it all. Logic also normalizes the audio, the result being a really hot sum, which also gets compressed a little. This is bad, right? Would reducing the overall gain solve the problem? Especially cause I now understand that too hot recoded tracks are not cool for the mastering stage.

[wado1942]

There must be some kind of "switch" that will bypass that normalization/compression you're getting. You just want to manually bring down the faders so there's no clipping.