21-05-2015, 05:39 AM
Hey Don, long time. Bass can be kinda tricky for me because me room needs more absorption than I can manage right now.... with all the crazy double bass rolls I played it safe and maybe undercooked it a bit.
I tried out the multibuss compression because of a conversation I had with Blitzzz on another thread. From what I understand, Michael Brauer has his entire system on standby, set up on an analog desk, and leaves everything plugged in and doesn't really mess with the settings unless he has to. The general idea is that sets up 4 stereo busses and routes instruments that are related in musical function together. He had a problem mixing an Aretha Record... the producer wanted more bass but loved the rest of the mix. The snag is, pushing up the bass was causing the compressor on the main stereo buss to push back harder and messed up the rest of the mix. So he devised his multibuss method to get the mix glue that you'd get from master buss compression without backing yourself into a corner.
So for this one I have a buss going for kicks and drums, one for guitars/midrange instruments, one for vocals, and one for instruments with really high harmonics. After I get the rough balance together, I start auditioning different compressors/equalizers on each buss until I find one that sounds good and I commit to my settings.... then I'll try feeding small amounts of instruments into other busses. In this case I fed a bit of the vocal into the mids buss to introduce a level interaction between the guitars and the vocals that wouldn't be nearly as controllable with master buss compression, and put a little bit of the kick into the air buss so that the cymbals would pump with the kick, but not the mix as a whole.
What's cool about it is that the balance comes together through the busses and the processing necessary for balancing on the individual tracks lessens a great deal, so you can focus more on processing for enhancement... and the mix balance seems to automatically adjust to it through the buss compressors! And on top of that, since most of your processing is going on through the busses, you can afford to use really CPU-intense plugins... the kind that seem to make things sound better even when all the knobs are set to zero but love to crash your computer
It hasn't worked on every mix I've tried it, maybe due to lack of practice, but I highly recommend giving it a go... this was a really positive experience. Michael Brauer's website has a really detailed Q&A section where he lists his exact default specifications and also explains his method of routing the vocal to five(!!!) parallel compressors. I personally didn't try to mimic his setup, I just found a way to take the general concept and adapt it to the way I mix.
I tried out the multibuss compression because of a conversation I had with Blitzzz on another thread. From what I understand, Michael Brauer has his entire system on standby, set up on an analog desk, and leaves everything plugged in and doesn't really mess with the settings unless he has to. The general idea is that sets up 4 stereo busses and routes instruments that are related in musical function together. He had a problem mixing an Aretha Record... the producer wanted more bass but loved the rest of the mix. The snag is, pushing up the bass was causing the compressor on the main stereo buss to push back harder and messed up the rest of the mix. So he devised his multibuss method to get the mix glue that you'd get from master buss compression without backing yourself into a corner.
So for this one I have a buss going for kicks and drums, one for guitars/midrange instruments, one for vocals, and one for instruments with really high harmonics. After I get the rough balance together, I start auditioning different compressors/equalizers on each buss until I find one that sounds good and I commit to my settings.... then I'll try feeding small amounts of instruments into other busses. In this case I fed a bit of the vocal into the mids buss to introduce a level interaction between the guitars and the vocals that wouldn't be nearly as controllable with master buss compression, and put a little bit of the kick into the air buss so that the cymbals would pump with the kick, but not the mix as a whole.
What's cool about it is that the balance comes together through the busses and the processing necessary for balancing on the individual tracks lessens a great deal, so you can focus more on processing for enhancement... and the mix balance seems to automatically adjust to it through the buss compressors! And on top of that, since most of your processing is going on through the busses, you can afford to use really CPU-intense plugins... the kind that seem to make things sound better even when all the knobs are set to zero but love to crash your computer
It hasn't worked on every mix I've tried it, maybe due to lack of practice, but I highly recommend giving it a go... this was a really positive experience. Michael Brauer's website has a really detailed Q&A section where he lists his exact default specifications and also explains his method of routing the vocal to five(!!!) parallel compressors. I personally didn't try to mimic his setup, I just found a way to take the general concept and adapt it to the way I mix.
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!