MIX BUSS: You NEED to try THIS!

the things that i'm focusing on early in the mix midway through a mix even three quarters of the way through the mix are not the kinds of things that a mix bus compressor helps me with in any way mostly because i just rely on mixbus compression for density [Music] welcome to cush after hours my name is gregory scott tonight part three in a series of how i break the rules every time when i say rules i'm talking about things that the internet would have you believe are things that you should be doing or the ways that you should be doing it i have lost track of the number of times that i have seen or heard somebody saying something to the effect of you have to mix into a mix bus compressor meaning you got to put the compressor on either at the beginning of the mix or very early on because it changes the balances it changes the relationships of sounds and so when you're mixing you can push into it you can swell things it'll push back you need to know how that's going to work drive the kick drum up a little harder it gets eaten up you need to compensate for that first of all that's all true everything there is all true in terms of how a compressor responds on the mix the effects that it has and why it might be necessary for you to put it on at the beginning or very early in a mix but the thing is it might not work for you to do it that way and i say that because it does not work for me to do it that way every single time that i've tried that and i've tried it more times than i care to admit because it means i was just listening to the voice of other people out there saying every time i slap a mix bus compressor on early in the mix at the beginning of the mix even like 70 into the mix what ends up happening is i end up fighting the compressor i like to push balances aggressively i like to do big automation rides like to swell my things up in the transitions and have them spill over and cascade and collapse and i'm going to talk about all that kind of stuff in future episodes but for now i just want to talk about how for my mixing style which i would consider to be aggressive a mix bus compressor anywhere in the formative stages of the mix is my enemy it just works against me part of that is because when i'm mixing and i'm shaping a song and getting it together i'm not really listening for things like glue i'm not i don't really care about glue so much what i'm listening for are the arrangement choices that i've made and how those translate into the mix i want to know that my dynamics are in place so if i've got a intro that's sitting here and it's this big and then it hits the verse and sounds empty out and fall away and it clears into a more open space and whatnot i need to feel that happening in the mix now if the kick drum is not quite tucked up in there with the bass guitar yet and the snare drum is poking out a little too far and there's like the acoustic guitars are just a little bit too like strumming at me that's okay so i'm just trying to get like the shape of the spaces together i want my front to back my left to right sorted out i want to get my movement my contrast those kinds of things in place the things that i'm focusing on early in the mix midway through a mix even three quarters of the way through the mix are not the kinds of things that a mix buss compressor helps me with in any way mostly because i just rely on mixbus compression for density density it doesn't really affect anything else you think about what density is is packing a sound filled in just tighter it's a more solid mass all right so that's pulling the bottom up pushing the top down bringing the back forward a little bit bringing the front back a little bit all these things this packing of things in that's what that's how i use mixbus compression i'm not using it to sort of counterbalance my moves i'm not using it as a form of glue i can glue mixes fairly well without any processing on the mix buss that's just my style that's not a brag doesn't make me a better mix engineer than people who need to mix into a mixbus compressor to get their sound this is just workflow what i'm saying to you is that there's this really overwhelmingly popular idea out there on especially on mixbus compression but mixed processing in general there's a thing i think is called top down mixing where you put all of your mix processing in place the idea being you do your high shelf up here and you do a little bit of low mid cut there and a little bit of bump on the low lows and you get your 1.5 or two to one or even four to one and your ssl auto release happening you get all that in place first then you have to do less processing on the channels and again that's probably completely true for anybody who says that that's true for them but the thing is it doesn't work for me if i put a high shelf up if i do stuff here's my back this up i said that i fight the mix bus compressor i'll also fight a mix bus eq and what i mean by that is that if i put a high shelf on the mix and i turn it up it doesn't matter 1 db 8 db whatever i'm going to mix into that and my ear my ears are so freaking consistent at this point in time i will mix my sonic signature regardless of what that eq is doing so if that eq is cranking up the top end i'm going to bring down the top end on all my channels to compensate for that right so that doesn't work for me what works for me instead and what might work for you i really really like having nothing mixing wide open on the mix bus and seeing how far i can get every aspect of my mix without anything without any help on that mix bus and then when i've got it like okay this is as tight as i can get it this is as much as i can harmonize the kick and the bass and the drums all together getting them moving as a solid instrument this is as much as i can get that vocal tucked in there without crushing it too hard and it's still kind of doing a little bit too much of this popping out there the high frequencies maybe need a little bit of a gentle softening along with everything else because if i just soften the high frequencies on the drum bust then they just feel a little dark and all the vocal s's are popping through too much then at that point in time so i want to preserve the relationship of all the highs but just lift them up a little bit so i get the mix as far as i can wide open on the mix bus and then i start bringing in my mix bus processing usually the first thing that i will do is some small amount of saturation just to help hug the bottom add a little bit more harmonic energy and sparkle to things and then that will inform a little bit of eq i'll throw an eq on there and i will listen to what's going on because of the saturation maybe i need to restore a little bit of a bump at 30 hertz way down there maybe i need to restore a little bit of a bump at 100 hertz and pull a little 200 down and get just just to shift the focus of the lows now that i've added all these harmonics that are singing in my mud zone i gotta pull the mud down a little bit and a little bit of a bump in the warmth to compensate for that it's all case by case these are just some of the things that i often do after that you have saturation and i'll have an eq or these days i have an eq that saturates and hint then i will insert and go out to the racks currently my mix bus looks like i have a prototype cush processor which all it does is coloration so more saturation and distortion it also has a very distinct timbre to it so it adds a very sweet shimmery sparkly presence at 8k i just i cannot get this effect in the box get the right amount of juice happening on that's all that box does and then i send it along to these things that you're looking at here this is my a designs chain of glory if you've never used a designs hardware this is i don't hate the tease people who are never going to be able to afford this crap i didn't actually pay for these because a designs as you may know is a kush partner so these were generously permaloned to me um i find gear designers do that for each other everybody's alone and everybody else stuff and it's just perpetual anyway i'm spoiled the point is a designs for my money is about man their stuff is just like liquid silky smooth it's not bright it's not dark it's not colored it's not rock and roll it's not api grind it's not neve crunch it's just ah just liquid silver i love that sound on my mix and the tiniest little things nail compressor maybe it's just doing this because they call it a nail compressor it's really a limiter fast limiting just a little bit more on those drum peaks it's not reacting anything else it's not gluing my mix together because my mix is glued right then it moves on to the hammer and the a designs pull tech and the hammer is an interesting thing the kush plug-in i love it i use it all the time but half the time when i use the hammer plug-in i need a second hammer plug-in because it's only three bands and i could also like why why is this eq designed like this until peter loaned me the pull check and then i was like uh i don't know if this was the intention but very much the hammer pairing with a pull tech on the mix bus those things complement each other amazingly so if you have the kush hammer plug-in you can use any plug-in that does a pull text style probably coming out with ours eventually but for now use the inferior one that you have and but they partner so well because what the pultec does those lows in the highs the hammer's got all these various flavors of mid-range it's also got the tips the ends it's not generally where i use it although the 10k on the hammer is magical go through that chain now i've got from the kush prototype box and the a design stuff on the mix i've got so smooth of a texture all that digital is gone i was able to push the high frequencies in ways that i'm not comfortable doing on a mix with plugins bumping up the low lows taking a little bit more out of the low mids analog just has this beautiful way of of adjusting the low mids you can take a little bit out and you don't lose weight you don't lose authority it doesn't sound thin it just sounds clearer it's amazing comes back into the box after that stuff and then i will do usually a bit more zealous compression usually with the novotron sometimes with ar1 or silica but usually with an overtron because it's clear and i don't want to add any more color so i'll turn the transformers down on the novatron i'm in mixed mode which is two to one and then i just dig in with a 180 or 100 millisecond release and i will dig in until i'm over compressing the mix because i want to hear what it's like to have density and no dynamics and i'm just i live with that density for a minute get my ears adjusted to it i hit bypass it goes away and suddenly the mix that i thought was glued and sounded good it feels a little too lifeless it feels a little too empty right so it's a little unprocessed and then i start working my averages and i'm like okay bring the compressor back in back that threshold off until i start to lose that quality of density and urgency and regain the sort of openness and clarity and transient impact and and pure punch of the unprocessed mix the uncompressed mix and it's somewhere right on that line there's a line i find it online it just gives me tremendous pleasure but i'll find that line where i'm like okay bypass it that's clearly just not it's not exciting enough it's not finished enough doesn't quite sound like a record put it in okay now i've got that excitement and that zing factor but i've lost some of the size i mean the more you compress a mix the more you lose that size turn it up you're compressing a mix and you're a being like this turn it up when you put that compressor in suddenly that big exciting mix just becomes too noisy too much of a wall of sound you've lost the spaces in between the transient hits the crest factor's gotten too small back that threshold off a little more 2 db of reduction at the most sometimes a lot less than that sometimes i just want to see that needle move up and recover fully on the transients and then the last thing in my chain will be an inflator and again inflator is just it's a wave shaper aka a distortion box and you can use it one of two ways you can use inflator in the positive direction which will reduce peaks and increase the rms energy or you can pull into the negative space on it and that will increase peak energy and decrease the rms so you get an even punchier uh less compressed sounding mix so if you've got a mix if you're a mastering person if you printed a mix and it's a little too compressed inflator can restore some of those dynamics it's really a magical plugin i have a high curve on the inflator it's like 30 35 and the effect level is somewhere between 20 and 30 percent and i'm keying in usually to the low frequencies when i'm listening to the inflator because it will change the sort of growl and urgency of the base for me and the density factor down low when the curve is that high 38 it's really working the ends of the spectrum more aggressively at least that's my understanding that's how i hear it so saturation into a compensatory eq which also sets up for the analog chain which is saturation limiting just a tiny amount of limiting tiny little tweaks on an eq or a bump on the bottom doing something to the low mids usually pulling them out or i'm pushing a little bit energy around 800 or something 800 on a mix tangent here howie weinberg i think one time i was in a session with him he was mastering a song of mine he said 800 hertz for me is the foundation of the mid-range and that always stuck with me i'm like uh the foundation of the mid-range so if you've got a mix and everything is sounding good but it just doesn't feel like it's got sea legs to stand on it's not lows and highs that are the problem not the issue there a little bit of shaping a little bit of bump wide bump preferably for me around 800 hertz on a mix not much little goes a long way with mix eq magical anyway that's what i'm doing there a lot of times i will soften up 5k with the hammer i'll just pull a little 5k out or a little 3.5 k get more of the softening happening and then i'm putting it back higher up with the pull tech 12k or 16k that's it sometimes the hammer's adding 10k in which case i will then go to the pull tech pull a little 10k back out and add some 60k back in or i'm pulling 20k out with the pulltek and adding 16km that's just but all of these moves are tiny and that's because my mix is set up and really i don't have to have any of this processing i could hand you my mix without any of this mix plus processing half of you would probably think it sounds fantastic it does sound fantastic but it's just not quite finished so my mixbus chain is about getting a finished sound it's not about modifying my balances or doing anything in terms of glue or transient shaping in a way that meaningfully impacts my mixing work and so for that reason i 100 of the time break the rule of having my mixbus processing in place from the outset because i don't use mixbus processing as a mixing tool i use it as a finishing tool if that makes sense hopefully that makes sense not you're on your own i'm just kidding you're never on your own to cush after hours my name is gregory scott thanks for listening to me ramble and we will talk to you soon [Music] you

Channel: The House of Kush

Views: 70,891

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Id: iDztr22VRO0

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021