kind of time to start adding a little mix buss compression shadow hills
mastering compressors have been really floating my boat so to speak lately it's
been a lot of fun it takes a little bit to figure out though I will say that
there's two parts to the compressor there's the discrete part and then
there's the optical part I usually take the optical part out of the chain and
then this meter select here is defaults on the optical and since I've taken the
optical out of the chain I switch it over to the discrete side is so now both
left and right meters just show my gain reduction so anything I do on the
left-hand side affects both channels as you can see by the knob in the middle
that says dual model to the left and stay o to the right it can be your
benefit to play around with both ways of working on the stereo bus whether you're
in dual mono mode or stereo mode just when you're doing that in dual mono mode
you just have to make sure that you're matching your settings properly but for
today I'm just going to stick with stereo mode
so here I have the ratio I'm just gonna go to 105 and I usually like my attack
to be a little on the fast side and my release to be a little slower so I'm
gonna play it and slowly turn up my threshold until I get some meters
dancing
that's feeling pretty good to me the bus is getting squeezed together let any
more a little more control going on I'm kind of wondering if it's a little bit
too slow on the attack so I'm going to play with the attack or release while
the tracks playing
when I was listening to the track back I was playing with the attack time on the
compressor and I felt like it needed to be faster the track itself is a moderate
tempo track but it comes into play with that live situation of the the band and
a kind of tubby room playing together where I was looking for more of a
transient I wanted the compressor to grab the transients quicker and that
makes it feel tighter to me and also a little bit more exciting to me in that
instance but at the same token I left the release at the same way and right
now it's feeling really good it's starting to gel really well together now
I'm just checking my Headroom so when the compressor is compressing I'm losing
gain and there's no auto make up gain on this particular plug-in so I have to
make up the gain and I usually want to play it for a little bit to see how loud
I can get my dynamic range within my print track before going over
so that's eight so I'm just gonna crank it up to nine see how hard I can go
without peeking
that looks really good I'm gonna start from there so we play a
couple bars with in a couple of hours without let me just start without first
here we go
so the name of the game and this it's the compressors doing really what I
wanted to do I'm really hearing a lot of squeezing going on it's taking a lot of
the transients and things that are sort of flapping around in the stereo image
and really bringing them together in a tight tight way so it's making the
speaker's react in a really good way and that that in turns creates excitement in
your mix big thing about especially with this track since it's a live thing all
the parts in there are sort of weaving in and out of each other at a frequency
in a great way and I've made them big sounding and now I'm using a little bit
of stereo buss compression to sort of tame them down a little bit but it's
working in a way to where the whole tracks becoming tighter more responsive
and exciting to my ear and that's what I want for the listener I want it to be
like want is to jump out of their speakers and this is helping the cause