23-05-2014, 04:05 AM
There's another trend on the legal landscape... various governing bodies are actually legislating the maximum RMS values of radio content to make the listening experience more consistent. The main purpose is so that the limited, compressed commercial breaks won't blow your eardrums out, but in practice something like this could actually cause overcompressed material to peak at lower levels than more dynamic material. That combined with the fact that everything played on the radio goes through a multiband compressor anyway....
I'm not going to tell you NOT to compress the master bus, but take it easy, because the ends aren't going to meet the means before too long, if loudness is the goal.
If I think a hard rocking song would benefit from master bus compression, I usually mix into the compressor... you get the useful gelling effect and it's much more transparent, provided the compressor and settings are fit for purpose. Some of my more dynamic mixes actually used this technique, simply automating it depending on the musical needs. To me it makes sense to do this on a mix that consists entirely of overdubs, because the compressor does what the musicians would do when playing as an ensemble.... blend, gel, and maintain consistency. This is very difficult to do when recording one track at a time, ESPECIALLY if it's just one person doing all of the recording... and when you use this technique, you'll find the need to compress individual instruments is less, and fader rides become considerably smoother.
So like I said... compression/limiting to make a mix loud is pretty silly and in a few years time will be self defeating... but compressing the master to take several tracks and reproduce the natural dynamics of an ensemble, that's a very good idea if executed properly. Dynamic range is great and very important... too important to sacrifice for the sake of loudness, but if we can compress the dynamic range without really compressing the dynamic range (?) there are some really smooth sounds to be found in that.
Just my two cents
I'm not going to tell you NOT to compress the master bus, but take it easy, because the ends aren't going to meet the means before too long, if loudness is the goal.
If I think a hard rocking song would benefit from master bus compression, I usually mix into the compressor... you get the useful gelling effect and it's much more transparent, provided the compressor and settings are fit for purpose. Some of my more dynamic mixes actually used this technique, simply automating it depending on the musical needs. To me it makes sense to do this on a mix that consists entirely of overdubs, because the compressor does what the musicians would do when playing as an ensemble.... blend, gel, and maintain consistency. This is very difficult to do when recording one track at a time, ESPECIALLY if it's just one person doing all of the recording... and when you use this technique, you'll find the need to compress individual instruments is less, and fader rides become considerably smoother.
So like I said... compression/limiting to make a mix loud is pretty silly and in a few years time will be self defeating... but compressing the master to take several tracks and reproduce the natural dynamics of an ensemble, that's a very good idea if executed properly. Dynamic range is great and very important... too important to sacrifice for the sake of loudness, but if we can compress the dynamic range without really compressing the dynamic range (?) there are some really smooth sounds to be found in that.
Just my two cents
I'm grateful for comments and suggestions. Thank you for listening!