06-12-2014, 10:21 AM
Hey Andreas,
I'd suggest setting your buss compressor after you've got the bass and drums mixed in, but before you fade anything else into the balance. I've found the resulting resistance to level increases helps get the levels right early on in the mix, and it also helps avoid over compression. That'll highlight any low end issues as well, and you'll find you work a bit harder to clear up headroom without realizing it. Just leave the compressor alone after you set it or you lose the benefits, and you'll probably have to rebalance.
Another thing you could try is using more channel to channel compression so you're not hitting the master compressor so hard. It's recommended to compress most elements of a mix in stages... I'll often individually compress many tracks quite lightly, then buss the instruments with similar roles and lightly compress the busses as well. Then when all this is feeding into the master compressor, the mix tends to glue together a bit, and since everything's been compressed a little bit at a time, you'll wind up with much more even dynamics, and automation becomes a breeze.
Of course, this is all assuming you're after a loud mix, which seems to be the case. Such cavalier compression isn't so necessary for some other genres, but with rock and metal it's a good idea to keep the gain staging nice and clean, and in my opinion compression in stages is the way to do it. Really makes it a lot easier to equalize properly to, especially with the raging guitars going on.
One last tip... Make sure your sides channel is clean from 125 down. Anything beneath that is going to narrow your stereo image and cause the master compressor to overreact... And it'll muddy the hell out of the mix. High passing the sides right before the master compressor is how I like to do it.
I'd suggest setting your buss compressor after you've got the bass and drums mixed in, but before you fade anything else into the balance. I've found the resulting resistance to level increases helps get the levels right early on in the mix, and it also helps avoid over compression. That'll highlight any low end issues as well, and you'll find you work a bit harder to clear up headroom without realizing it. Just leave the compressor alone after you set it or you lose the benefits, and you'll probably have to rebalance.
Another thing you could try is using more channel to channel compression so you're not hitting the master compressor so hard. It's recommended to compress most elements of a mix in stages... I'll often individually compress many tracks quite lightly, then buss the instruments with similar roles and lightly compress the busses as well. Then when all this is feeding into the master compressor, the mix tends to glue together a bit, and since everything's been compressed a little bit at a time, you'll wind up with much more even dynamics, and automation becomes a breeze.
Of course, this is all assuming you're after a loud mix, which seems to be the case. Such cavalier compression isn't so necessary for some other genres, but with rock and metal it's a good idea to keep the gain staging nice and clean, and in my opinion compression in stages is the way to do it. Really makes it a lot easier to equalize properly to, especially with the raging guitars going on.
One last tip... Make sure your sides channel is clean from 125 down. Anything beneath that is going to narrow your stereo image and cause the master compressor to overreact... And it'll muddy the hell out of the mix. High passing the sides right before the master compressor is how I like to do it.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!