For those of us who use the Control Room Out for our monitoring, I just used the Spider Audio Merger & Splitter, put the CRO to the Spider input, then one out to the in of the filter, and another out back up to the Audio IO, (and of course the filter output to the Sidechain Input).
Did this using the built in Channel EQ. Put it on the rack the same way Ryan does using the High pass filter on the EQ and it does WONDERS! Just dial in what you're looking for.
This is an amazing tip I just picked up. I don't even think it's a subtle difference, I think it makes the world of difference! Just recently turned out one of the best beats I've ever made and I just chucked this sidechain onto the master bus compressor and it's added so much! Thanks!
+tothefinalstation; Exactly, so many different and derailing videos" tutorial" on this DAW, misleading or better confusing. R9 a fun and intriguing DAW yet, still have to wrap my head around, again, if more proper videos would have made, I wouldn't spend my time on jumping through all this Reason "tutoria"l channels rather work(ing) it! Still want to dive more into it and have phun wit it, yet I have work to do, so I stick with LogicX and Studio One ( as I know these DAWs from long time and editing it comes easier and faster.)
This is exactly what i needed today. I was struggling mixing a bass heavy track the last couple of days. It seemed to lose it's punch and sparkle when it went past the Master Bus/ Mastering Suite stage. This works like magic thank you so much for this tutorial!
Great tip as always Ryan. For those who have the RE, the Fxpansion Dcam bus compressor has a high-pass filter effortlessly built in, and is also modeled on the same SSL master bus compressor, so works great in the mastering chain. Softube's FET also has hp and lp detection filtering.
What a great tip! And all this time I have been avoiding the MBC like the plague because it made my tracks sound horrible. Now I see how to use it! I tried it on a mix and already saw a great result! Thanks. You guys desperately need to do more vids like this one!
I bought the extension after watching this video, wow what a difference. The double bass in the metal track I have was getting way too compressed no matter what settings I used to make my drum samples sound better. It makes the mids of the guitar, snare hits, and high hats sizzle much more nicely with a strong punchy bass to back it up. Thank you 🙏
Now that we have the Master Buss Compressor as an individual rack device in Reason 11, we can group individual tracks and compress them that way as well. The M Class Compressor does a great job of this as well, to my ears. YMMV.
Gary Bronham talks about this concept in this video Reason 6 Mixing Masterclass mit Gary Bromham (Englisch) but he uses an MClass EQ to shape the keyed signal. Also, he splits the signal so you can still use the unaltered output signal to monitor the busses etc.
Could it be, that you guys are the greatest thing ever wandered this earth? I mean for real: Just look at you, really caring about what people want to know about your ingenious piece of software! Who else does this in such a manner? I am a fan from Reason 4 till now, really gets me going in my music! I deeply love what you are doing and how you are doing it! Reason 9 is a whole new level, I LOVE IT, period! Cheers, Calling! :-)
Curious about the logic of this routing. Why does this not cause a feedback loop? Aren't we sending the newly compressed audio back to the Ctrl room which again gets compressed again & again? How does this differ from say splitting the audio from the master sections FX insert with a spider & sending that to the Master Compressor?
that was such a great, simple, clear, step by step explanation. Now I understand so much better what was wrong with my mix. Well...one problem! Ha ha ha
Interesting. I had been doing this exact thing, except I was highpassing way lower than in this video (like around 200 hertz). Figured I was simply trying to keep the bass, kick and snare from totally dominating the compressor's behavior. High passing form 1-5khz actually does sound great, but I wonder what the logic of it is.
The logic is that the information that exists in the upper frequencies, while not pleasing to listen to for humans, still contains a lot of relevant dynamic information that the compressor can use to operate. And so if the compressor has useful information to operate with and none of the lower stuff that can throw it curve-balls then we benefit - even if it's not nice to listen to the sidechain signal for us humans. :)
Is there a case that you would use this for the Low frequencies (not highs)? Seems my bass is drowning things out but my highs are okay...thank you as always!
So, what would be the advantage over the built-in compressor on every channel? I usually create a parallel channel dedicated to moving forward the frequency spectrum in the desired shape. I guess you do it for all the tracks at once. But then you also have the highs of everything in the mix.
I use this but i use the main outs to the filter and the control room out to monitor. If for some strange reason someone fiddles with the control room vol knob it will change the input to the side chain and may create issues that are not wanted and you may change a bunch of stuff before figuring out the control room knob has been moved.
hi... thanks for this.can i know also how you did the pitchbend at the end of each chords? automatic or manual.i tried with the curve of matrix to the malstrom pitchbend, but it's not so smooth..
Listening to commercial recordings, I always felt like there was something going on at the final output that got around the bad frequency triggering everything. This then is it.
I'm trying to apply these techniques in different ways and I don't know it seems to be sounding good but it would help to have clarification on a few things
+Voltaire Slapadelic That is my main gripe with certain Propellerheads video's exactly. I personally like using the Stereo Imager; simply tell it to solo the low band and make sure not to activate / use the effects. Next there's Thor; requires some internal routing but it has awesome filters which you can use (Low Pass Ladder / State Variable). Last but most certainly not least: create a new mix channel and use the filter section on the SSL mixer itself. Thing is: all of these approaches take more time to set up than simply dragging a filter in, and that's something Reason can't do without 3rd party tools.
+Voltaire Slapadelic There are many filters that basically use high pass filters like the one he used. I personally used the Scream 4 Distortion and used it in place of the Synapse filter. With the Scream I went through the patches you can load into it until I settled on the Bitcrush patch in the Fidelity FX folder. Once I chose that I simply turned the Damage Control to 0 and it worked the same as the Synapse. Hope this helps.
This is a great video, but Propellerhead is there a way you can define this a little better, I get lost in translation when it comes to dialog, is there a written form of this; while still maintaing a simple explanation?
When you feed the entire audio spectrum through the master compressor (which is the default way of using it), the low end is adding a lot of volume to the signal, which makes the compressor lower the volume of everything more than it has to. By adding an EQ and cutting off the low end (at what ever frequency you think sounds best), the master compressor only compresses the mids and highs, resulting in a more stable overall volume.
sooo Would u say that i should turn the Master compressor on while i am doing the mixdown? because i was always confused about it so i just turned it on when i was Mastering my songs..
You have it right the first way. The master bus compressor is not actually meant for the mastering process - which surely can cause some confusion, given its name. :) But we didn't invent the name... we just stuck with the standard term. The master bus compressor is just that... a compressor that goes on the master "bus" which is just another name for "output." If it was called the "main output compressor" people wouldn't wonder about when to use it. The answer to your question is that it's meant during mixing and loved by mix engineers as a way to glue their mixes together and give them a cohesive blend prior to the mastering process, which uses the same word (master) to now refer to "master files ready for duplication, broadcast, or digital release." Same word... different meaning. And thus people get hung up on that "main output compressor" :) /ryan
Is there a video for mastering hip-hop? I keep seeing all these tutorials but they seem to be just for "edm" - they're hard to follow along with and don't seem to help with hip hop
Great Video ! just one question, the method that you are talking about tells me that we shouldn't compress the low end of a song, until it's the mastering stage. It's that right ? Thanks :D
Federico Gompertz The filter is set to 3k because that's what sounded best for this material. At the end of the video I say "try different cutoff frequencies. Maybe the right one for you is 1k or 500hz." There's no setting that's right for everyone. The concept might work for you but the exactly knob positions I use only apply to this mix. The threshold, attack, release, and side-chain cutoff or slope could be whatever works for your stuff. Experiment and good luck!
This doesn't mean you shouldn't compress the low end. It means that when it comes to the master compressor, sometimes it'll sound better to filter out the signal that the master compressor is LISTENING to. Mind you, it's still compressing the master fader, which includes the full frequency range. Let me see if I can explain a little more... Compressors, when you make it real simple in describing what they do, do this: They listen to a signal and when it gets too loud, they turn it down. Right? Now all this side-chain does is adds a different signal to listen to. So now the compressor listens to a SIDE-SIGNAL and when the SIDE-SIGNAL gets too loud it turns down the MAIN-SIGNAL. Since the MAIN-SIGNAL includes bass information, then the bass is still getting compressed. It's just that the bass information isn't factoring into what the compressor is hearing in order to determine what to turn down. Does that make sense? It's complicated, I know!
A great tutorial, but the mix feels decently dynamic without the compressor - the compressor seems to crush it too much (for my tastes at least - Id have changed the ratio)
Yes, I understand the business side of promoting your partners, nothing wrong with that in my opinion. But I think you make it a win-win for ALL of your user base by saying something like, "You can do this in Reason with 'this or this' and this is how you do it; but we really like our partner's product 'product name', that sounds amazing and adds 'such-and-such' functionality, and here is how you do it with this. It's really a let down when you just want to learn and try something out, but it's like, "If you want to follow along, please pull out your wallet." And for those with stacks of money on the living room coffee table, no problem. But you start to watch a Reason Studio video, and you're like, "Ok... what are they going to want me to buy in this one?" Please give us both the "average musician" option, and the "Daddy Warbucks" option. Thanks ; )
An Uncertain Future of the Album Pieces. Hope that saves you some time and that you at least got some other great new music during the search! :) /ryan
Oh wait! The one at the end is not Adam Fielding. No wonder you couldn't find it. :) That's a song by Ali Payami called English. It was a demo song in Reason 7 or 8.
First of all I'm not trying an arse but here we go: The weird thing about this is, it does not compress the high frequencies, it compresses when there are high frequencies, so how is this useful when there isn't a big booming kick without highs that sidechain compresses the rest of the track. And what other thing are you really doing than flattening out the part that you're sidechaining compression. So what you basically ending up with is pumping kicks and the compressed part being flatted out, don't you get a somewhat, well safer result when you just compress the high frequency instruments in a sort of seperate master, and run all of that through a sidechain compressor. So I don't really know what I'm missing here, can anybody explain?
The Master Bus Compressor covers the whole track, with every instrument and full frequency range. As Lower ends take up more room in mixes, the compressor is working to tame those louder ones over the High end first. The goal in the video is basically filter out/(bypass) those really low frequencies to focus around where the kick drum should be (generally 3-4Hz). Here, at 3Hz, the bass drum frequency becomes the focus for the compressor to necessarily bring out, and lets it come through over every other instrument in the track. Think of this of terms for House music where the drum kick has priority over other instruments. Also there is sidechaining going on before the Master here. It looks like the Bass Drum needs to be distinct or powerful for this to work.
Izzy Leans Over Well I got that... But even in house music, when you have a break with just a low sub and a melody that does have a changing volume over it, it seems like it'll become messy, the entire thing including the bass would be getting softer. also when you want some highs over your kicks, your kicks will get soft too. I just think this thing is only useful in very particular cases really, and I don't really see a lot of advantages for using this method over simply compressing the high end of the track separately, and then just put it together with the lows and then add a limiter over all of it. I think it's a bit of a shame, I only recently (actually litterally) found this knob, but I didn't get it to be effective any way, I only got it too make the entire track sound more flat, but also softer (yes, I know there's a make-up gain), so even if I was willing to win the loudness war, I couldn't put it to good use. I'm mostly making DnB like music (which also is bass heavy music) at the moment, and I quite often find the music to be sounding the most clear when the drums are nearly twice as loud as the rest of the track, so I was looking forward to a method with which I could compress more effectively.
PauLtus B Not sure what you mean by softer, the thing about this technique is that it doesn't take into account the low-dynamic bass frequencies which are by far the loudest in any EDM track. You say it gets softer, but how would it not get softer if you hadn't taken out the bass? If anything it would be even more extreme, because you would have no control over any dynamic but the bass since it's overwhelmingly loud and it's the only thing that'll make the meter twitch. That said i do agree that it's not the most accurate way of compressing individual frequencies, but that's not its purpose. This is still a master compressor, meant to compress everything together in every frequency. It's not a multiband compressor (which might be more what you are looking for). Its only purpose is to flatten it out and control the volume and dynamics of the entire track as a whole and raise the overall RMS volume.
you can use any filter or eq , u could even route your master bus to thor and use thors filter to it give the mix a more analog feel cause it seems to cut off a bit of the real highs i sometimes use it on my drum tracks with new york style compression for a more dubplate sound
You can use the Stereo Imager's crossover... Thor's filters... the HPF in Kong... or even a mix channel (with the volume down). Someone on Twitter asked us how to do it with the main mix channel filters and I posted a response. I'm not sure RU-vid will let me post a link so you might have to check out Twitter page for the graphic... let's see if it works to paste the link... drum roll... pbs.twimg.com/media/BtQX9KgCEAAyO1q.jpg
