The lure of 2-buss compression

[MoreSpaceEcho]

oh man, that was close! i was just going to post and offer to give all my stuff away to you guys, but i saw ott0bot's post and yeah...the karma would've been terrible.

*lights cigarette from smoldering embers of massive gear fire, congratulates self on job well done*

[ott0bot]

oh man, that was close! i was just going to post and offer to give all my stuff away to you guys, but i saw ott0bot's post and yeah...the karma would've been terrible.

*lights cigarette from smoldering embers of massive gear fire, congratulates self on job well done*

ohh....you poor guy....you've just absorbed the bad karma into your system from inhaling the smoke from your tainted gear. Now you have to transform yourself into pure sound energy and beam yourself into a Neve sidecar and fight the evil Alesis Von Behringer in a battle to the death with pure waves of sound produced from Miles Davis' trumpet. Then upon succeeding you'll be transported back in time before you calibrated the signal improperly and you can prevent this whole mess from happening.

I think I've watched Tron a few too many times.

[Nick Franklin]

Once I've finished a mix I just whack a Waves L3 Multimaximiser on the master, set the output to 0.00000000000000000001dB below zero, threshold down until the meters don't move, mute the monitors and hit bounce.

No seriously I begin by pulling a drum sound with a compressor on the drum buss, and once that's cranking I'll put one on the master. I like to make sure my drums are sounding pretty tight and solid without the crutch of the main compressor then mix the rest of the track into it.

I always ask the client if they plan to have the songs mastered, which determines how much I'll compress the master. If they plan to take it to someone I'll let it swing to about 3 or 4dB, but if they are gunna press it as is the GR might be more like 6 or 8.

Nick.

[David Piper]

Man, I feel like for so long people told me "don't compress the stereo mix, you'll only mess it up". And maybe it's decent advice to home recordists making their first record, and maybe even someone in audio school. But I spent the last two days doing final mixes for my bands record. This thread inspired me to get my hands on a Pendulum compressor and run my in-the-box mixes out to them before giving them to the mastering engineer. It was good, and feels like a link that was missing before. Now I just need to save my pennies for a Pendulum...