when DO you compress low end?

[crow]

I learned by testing years after years that low frequencies in my opinion need saturation before compression to sit nicely. I add saturation and lowpass it down to most often around 500Hz before I blend it back with the dry signal just so that I notice that something almost insignificant has been added. THEN i compress. This makes a world of a difference.

Heck yes. Saturating the low end a bit sure helps the low frequency information survive on bass-challenged stereos and earbuds, too.

My favorite approach to low frequency dynamics control has been to split the kick and bass tracks' frequency ranges out to their own tracks and process them differently. So I often use a "Kick Low", Kick Mid", and "Kick High" track all feeding a master "Kick" track, and the same with the bass guitar. Then you can tread each like its own instrument. Since most of the low end of the song is in the "Kick Low" and "Bass Low" tracks, you end up with SO MUCH control over the low end, with the added benefit of being able to treat the finger/pick sound of the bass and the beater sound of the kick as their own instruments, as it were. and you can use attack and release times, distortion, etc appropriately for each frequency range.

[drumsound]

I learned by testing years after years that low frequencies in my opinion need saturation before compression to sit nicely. I add saturation and lowpass it down to most often around 500Hz before I blend it back with the dry signal just so that I notice that something almost insignificant has been added. THEN i compress. This makes a world of a difference.

Heck yes. Saturating the low end a bit sure helps the low frequency information survive on bass-challenged stereos and earbuds, too.

My favorite approach to low frequency dynamics control has been to split the kick and bass tracks' frequency ranges out to their own tracks and process them differently. So I often use a "Kick Low", Kick Mid", and "Kick High" track all feeding a master "Kick" track, and the same with the bass guitar. Then you can tread each like its own instrument. Since most of the low end of the song is in the "Kick Low" and "Bass Low" tracks, you end up with SO MUCH control over the low end, with the added benefit of being able to treat the finger/pick sound of the bass and the beater sound of the kick as their own instruments, as it were. and you can use attack and release times, distortion, etc appropriately for each frequency range.

I need to do this more often. Our beloved Larry Crane was one of the first people to hip me to this technique. I think he wrote something in the mag or here about having a crossover in his rack for this type of processing.