I feel like digital has encouraged people to be so conservative with their settings in the last 10-20 years. “We’re lookin for about 3db of gain reduction”, “let’s boost 1.2k about 3db”…3db seems to be the internet’s magic number when demonstrating this or that. Dude, Tom Lord Alge will sometimes smash an *entire drum bus* with 12+db of gain reduction. Granted, it’s at a very low ratio but the point still stands. Your favorite engineers are NOT conservative mixers. They use subtlety when necessary and they all have a divine sense for it…but when something needs it, one to one, they will all crank away. My tracks took an immediate, major step up once I grasped three things…extreme subtlety (automation moves of 1db or less when necessary, etc…it’s amazing what .5db bumps/dips can do for a vocal track…immediate emotional impact), pushing the limits for certain things (if 600hz sounds really bad on a source, keep attenuating until that distracting ring goes away…even if you have to obliterate it) and the taming of the 1.6k-5k range (I could yammer on about this forever…suffice it to say, NS10s translate really well partly because they’re very sensitive in that ultra-harsh range). Your mixes take on a whole new level once you dig your way past the hyper-conservative land of “audio engineering 101”…especially if you’re getting all your audio tips from online sources.
i changed my p bass vst cla 76 settings as discussed above and it made such a difference. i'm going to replace it with a real bass and make sure the di and mic channels have exactly the same compressions settings. really helpful.
Thanks for the video! Very informative. Where in the chain should compression occur? Direct signal before any other processing? Or is it a send after some initial EQ on the channel?
For bass and things that you most likely won’t put any reverb, delay, chorus and such on you want eq first and then compression on the actual track. No need to buss it or anything.
i think that the catch is that you should feed those fixed settings with a region gain or send fader if you go through the bus, and not just slam them in the insert of the channel as they are to over-clamp and destroy all of the low end
I tried this on a heavy rock track I'm mixing, directly in the bass bus, but the compression was a bit too much. I'm assuming this is meant to be a form of parallel compression where the bass bus is sent to an aux with the compressor and these settings on it, then blended to taste?
No need for all that. Just put it on the track after eq and then don’t smash it as much. I suggest using the 1176 followed by the 3A at around -2db gain reduction on both of them. Or you can switch it and put the 3A first. All depends on your taste. Either way I don’t like using one compressor and smashing it. I like using 2 on the bass and lightly compressing.
