I'm a new-ish, self-taught music producer, currently working on a house song for a remix contest. I've managed to get the track to -8 LUFS / -1TP (which is in the neighborhood of what's acceptable) with no noticeable distortion. However, I'm concerned that the track is lacking dynamics now. In particular, the loudness of the verse section is too similar to the loudness of the drop. The drop does have more energy than the verse, but I'm not sure if this lack of dynamics is problematic or normal.
After setting individual track levels, I used a soft-clipper on different instrument groups to control transients, then multi-band compressed the different instrument groups to reduce dynamic range, then applied a limiter. Everything sounds pretty balanced. It's just the loudness dynamics that I'm concerned about.
Thoughts?