Joe Gilder: 1. Waiting until the end of the mix to add compression to the mix bus. This is the easiest way to unravel a great mix. If you want to compress the entire mix (which is totally fine to do), make sure you add the compressor to your mix bus EARLY in the process. [...]
Audio examples of bus compression
by Kim Lajoie on February 24, 2012
Sam O’Sullivan: Buss compression is certainly not a new concept, however, it is an effective and reliable engineering tool and its basic principles are vital considering you are affecting multiple voices. When approaching buss compression, there are two essential tools at your fingertips: Attack and Release – these two tools, when properly utilized, will have the [...]
Five secrets to making your mix louder
by Kim Lajoie on February 22, 2010
Don’t dismiss this post yet! Even if you’re in the ‘more dynamics’ brigade, these tips will give you clearer mixes that suffer less in mastering. That means better-preserved dynamics and higher fidelity! For those of you who really do want your mixs SUPER LOUD, this tips will let you push more volume without your sound [...]
Five compression mistakes and how to avoid them.
by Kim Lajoie on January 11, 2010
Compressors are complex tools and, like most other audio engineering tools, there are more ways to set them up ‘wrong’ than there are to set them up ‘right’. If you’re careful though, you won’t fall into these common traps: Too much gain reduction. You know you’ve done this when you’ve got tons on gain reduction [...]
Sweetening your mix bus, and why you shouldn’t wait for mastering to do it
by Kim Lajoie on January 4, 2010
There’s a case to be made for ‘sweetening’ your mix bus. Many mixes can benefit from some subtle processing to bring out the best qualities of the tone of the mix and to use dynamics to give the mix a more compact, controlled sound. To bring out the best qualities of the tone of the [...]
Reverb on the mix-bus
by Kim Lajoie on October 7, 2009
Under most normal circumstances, using reverb on the mix bus is no different to using a send on every track, with every send set to the same level. Usually this it not a good idea – it’s better touse sends to apply reverb in different levels to different tracks. Some sounds can ‘take’ more reverb [...]
Mastering versus mix-bus processing
by Kim Lajoie on August 24, 2009
It’s a murky world, this mastering. Mastering is a process by which a mixdown is prepared for distribution. Traditionally, this has been performed by a dedicated mastering engineer with specific skills and equipment. The esoteric skills and expensive equipment gave the mastering engineer a sort of mythical status. No-one outside the mastering studio really knew [...]
Monitoring gain staging
by Kim Lajoie on June 18, 2009
The reason the commercial references are so loud is that they have very little headroom – the average level is so high that there’s not much room for the peaks (which have been squashed down). When mixing, however, you shouldn’t worry about headroom on the mix bus. You need to give yourself enough headroom that [...]
Multiband compression
by Kim Lajoie on June 16, 2009
Multiband compression is a complex and subtle tool. Compression itself is one of the most complex single processes commonly applied in mixing. Multiband compression multiplies that complexity because it applies several compressors in parallel, each processing a different frequency range of the audio. Because of the way the audio is split by frequency, multiband compression [...]
EQ on the mix bus
by Kim Lajoie on June 10, 2009
As I’ve written previously, there are compelling reasons for and against using processing on the mix bus. What I recommend against, however, is using static EQ on the mix bus. The reason for this is that pure EQ (discounting EQ with added saturation) has the same effect regardless of whether it is processing single tracks [...]