limiting busses in rock music - digital

[losthighway]

The craziest compression thing I ever did was:

Route drumkit to a limiter.
Route all backing vocals to a different limiter.
Route all electric guitars to a different limiter.
Route the entire mix to yet another limiter.

That said, each limiter was doing only a LITTLE BIT of limiting. Not ever mass quantities of processing.

This enabled me to basically deliver a "mastered" mix, that could not be rtuly mastered much more, as far as EQ and level.

It is not what I normally do, but what the client wanted. Got the mixes to 99% of the final result like this. It took far more work mixing, because I had to keep all these limiters in mind.

Result? They hated the mastered versions, and ended up using my mixes instead. They choose a shitty ME, who was a moron. Their words not mine, and I do not recall who it is.

This is pretty much exactly what I'm talking about. The mix I did it on ended up really good in a different way, I'm just not sure if that's the reason. Ocassionally, when I'm going through a youtube phase I feel like I'll hear one of the pros talk about doing this, but I dunno maybe I made it up. I suspect some of those guys just need to be sending out mixes with that brickwall kick/snare squash in order to make their clients happy. I tried it again tonight and really liked it on the vocal bus and the bass. I spent some time with drums and I ended up preferring a nice parallel compression, but I could see it working on a different song. This isn't getting mastered so I mixed with a limiter on the bus too.

Well, I don't think the process is automatically worthy of derision from all of us with a more old school, or naturalistic aesthetic. Tapping a limiter is a sound, and it's not a loudness wars sound either if it isn't taken to an extreme.