Hacking a Bus Compressor When Making Stems

Nowadays it's pretty common to use a bus compressor over your whole mix. This can add those mythical qualities like 'glue' or 'warmth'. Or a bus compressor can make things louder, not that there's anything wrong with that. But what happens when you need to send someone stems of your mix? If you just print the individual elements through that magical bus compressor, your stems won't sound right when you combine them later. The guitars won't be reacting to the snare drum hits, the vocals won't duck the guitars, and the kick drum won't combine with the bass guitar to create that platinum record sound. So what can we do? If you have a compressor with a sidechain input, it's pretty easy. 

Print your whole mix, but don't print it through your buss compressor. Bypass that, and you'll have a 2-mix of your song minus any compression. Go ahead and assign that printed 2-track to the sidechain input of your buss compressor. Now when you go to print stems, the compressor will be responding just as it would have with everything combined, but it is now showing it's total effect on individual elements of the mix!

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Compression Tips Using Clip Gain

With the introduction of Pro Tools 10, we had access to a new feature called Clip Gain. In essence, you could change the gain of a clip, pre-fader and pre-insert, right on the clip itself. This was cool for a number of reasons, but there's an aspect of clip gain that I hadn't used until very recently. Basically, you can insert a compressor on a track and use clip gain to drive that compressor harder during different parts of a song.

Adjusting Dynamics with Clip Gain

Adjusting Dynamics with Volume Automation

These two screenshots show the same guitar parts, with my Clip Gain adjustments highlighted in the top photo, and the automation moves that I made in the bottom photograph. On the surface, all I'm doing is adjusting the level in two different ways, but it's a lot more powerful than that. Both these tracks have a compressor on them, and I wanted to bring out more excitement and power in specific sections of the song, so I used Clip Gain to drive the input of the compressor harder, and the resulting tonal changes I could then ride using volume automation.

Try it out for yourself, and see if you can't use both Clip Gain and volume automation in your work.

Waves Vitamin Preview

Here's a look at how I'm using Waves' Vitamin plugin. It's a very cool multi-band harmonic enhancer and stereo shifter thingie. I don't know what to call it, or what it does under the hood, but I like it! 

Parallel Master Bus Compression

As an addendum to my Bus plugin video, here's a little video explaining how I use a multi-parallel signal chain to achieve bus compression with three different compressors. It's a kind of Michael Brauer technique, but mine is a bit simpler and set up differently. 

This doesn't work for every song, but if you're interested I go over how I set this up and the practical benefits.

My Bus Plugins

It's become a big part in how mix engineers get their sound, and so I thought I'd share a little video going over what plugins I use for my master bus, and how I set them up. Take a look and feel free to share what you use on your bus.

Featured plugins include:

Slate Digital's Virtual Channel Collection, Virtual Tape Machine and Virtual Bus Compresser

Massey's L2007 Limiter

Brainworx bx_hybrid and bx_meter

Maag EQ4

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- Not long after this video was shot I picked up the Clariphonic DSP plugin from Kush Audio. I've only had it for a couple days, but it seems like an amazing tool for adding high end sheen to things. So far I've been using it in place of the Maag EQ. It's not a normal EQ, in that it works only on the upper mids and top, and it does so in parallel. It's almost scary how much high end you can add without it sounding weird. It sounds so natural that it's effect is really only noticeable when you bypass it and everything sounds dull. 

I guess it goes to show you how right I was when I said in the video that these plugins on my master bus can change next week. Always be open to changing things up!

Use Strip Silence to Quickly Find Room Tone

If you're like me, editing dialogue can become very tedious, so anything I can learn to make that job go faster is something worth remembering. Here's a quick tip on using Pro Tools' Strip Silence feature to quickly separate dialogue and room tone. I hadn't thought of using Strip Silence for this task before, but I found that it works pretty well. Take a look and see if it's something that would work for you.

In this example, I duplicated the dialogue track and used Strip Silence the standard way on the original track, and used Extract on the duplicate. Now I had the option to start editing all the extracted room tone and building it all up, without worrying about messing up the original track.

Another way I started using this technique was on a live recording, where I wanted to duck the on-stage spill from other instruments. Instead of setting up a ducking compressor, or manually editing the track, I did the same thing and just lowered the track volume on the duplicate "spill track", while still keeping the live feel. It took me all of 30 seconds, so I hope to keep finding useful ways of utilizing Strip Silence.

Cartagena Day 5

Cartagena Day 4

Cartagena Day 3

Cartagena Day 2

More exploring, more colorful houses. My camera is getting a good dose of sweat. Good thing it's water resistant.