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!

Avid EQIII Hidden Feature

If you use Pro Tools, then you're probably very familiar with the stock EQIII 7-band eq that comes standard with Pro Tools. It's a useful eq, though not with any sort of "character", but sometimes that's a good thing. Very recently I came across a key command trick to get access to a hidden feature of the EQIII. If you hold down Shift and Control while you adjust a frequency band, the band goes into solo mode and you can hear whatever is only inside that narrow band. It's a trick that is common to Brainworx eq's, but I had no idea that you could do this with the stock Avid eq. Here's a little video showing it in action.

Make Things Wider By Making Them Mono

Ever since stereo records came out in the 1960s people have been trying to get their mixes to sound as wide as possible. People think that having all their tracks recorded in stereo means that their mixes will be guaranteed to be wide, but that's usually the opposite of the way things turn out. If you're guitars are panned hard left and hard right, and so are your pianos and drums and everything else, then there's no contrast in your mix. Everything is in both speakers and the ear has trouble separating your mix.

Contrast can come from many different avenues, and taking mono sources and panning them around is one of the easiest and best ways of creating contrast in a mix. If you are given source files that are all stereo, make sure they're truly stereo, and not just a stereo track. If the source isn't truly stereo, consider throwing away one side and panning the remainder to help it sit in the mix or stick out of the mix. You could also use any number of plugins to reduce the stereo width of a track. Most plugins that aim to widen the stereo field can also reduce the stereo field, so don't think of them as one-trick ponies. Confining the stereo width of an instrument can help you place it in a specific area of the stereo spectrum.

Slate Virtual Tape Machine RTAS vs AAX

As a frequent adopter of new technology, I quite like living on the bleeding edge, but that's not always an option for me, whether due to fiscal responsibility or plain-old...responsibility. Hence why I'm still using Pro Tools 10, instead of Pro Tools 11, which has been out for almost a year now. The reason why I've been holding out so long is that, with Pro Tools 11, Avid have decided that only AAX plugins will work in their software. This puts the onus on the myriad plugin manufacturers to recode all their plugins for AAX 64bit compatibility. You see, in introducing Pro Tools 10, Avid also introduced their new plugin format, AAX, and said that in the future Pro Tools will no longer support the older RTAS system of code. Fortunately Avid decided that Pro Tools 10 would allow both RTAS and AAX formats, so as to lesson the shock that would come from a sudden shift to a whole new format. So while I wait for all my favorite plugins to be reintroduced in 64bit AAX format, I'm sticking with Pro Tools 10.

It just so happens that at this point, the only plugins I'm waiting for are Slate Digital's. I use them in all my mixes, and they sound so damn good that I wouldn't want to be without them if I had my druthers. Meanwhile, Slate Digital has done a rather odd thing, and they have released public betas for some of their plugins, most notably their aptly named Virtual Tape Machine. If I were to go ahead and install beta software (there's a reason it's called the 'bleeding' edge) I could take advantage of Slate Digital's claim that their newly recoded plugins have been optimized and now take less CPU resources. While I'm happy to hear that, I would have hoped that all software manufacturers try to optimize their software pro forma. So, how does the new AAX versions stack up against the older RTAS versions?

As you can see, I opened up a session that had 5-6 instances of Virtual Tape Machine, and took screenshots both before and after I updated to their beta software. I was hoping that there'd be a marked improvement in VTM's system usage, and indeed there seems to be a 10% lesser load after updating to the AAX beta versions. The great news is that that is a 10% lighter load for the entire session, meaning I can now use other plugins as well as VTM and potentially be at the same amount of usage as I was before updating VTM.

Favorite EQs Part 1

When it comes to choosing an EQ, I find that there are two different outcomes I'm looking for, and that will steer me towards one of two genres of EQ. For instance, there are occasionally problems with a track where EQ is the best way to deal with things, whether the problems be ringing, boominess, or a general buildup of frequencies that I want to eliminate. In those instances I gravitate towards very clean-sounding surgical EQs. The Maag EQ4, by Plugin Alliance, is nowhere near being in that camp! This EQ is colorful (obviously, look at those knobs), and is drop dead simple to use, but the simplistic controls mask a very deep plugin.

As you can see, the controls are very sparse, mostly consisting of a fixed frequency controlled by a gain knob. That may seem very limiting, but it's an extremely well thought out design. The gain is stepped in .5db clicks, and I never thought I'd say this but I can totally hear a half decibel change in many of the bands. Adding .5db at 2.5kHz and 40Hz makes kicks and snares more powerful. Adding .5db at 650Hz and cutting .5db at 2.5kHz makes electric guitars less buzzy and sit better in some songs. I sometimes find myself adding a decibel or less of just one frequency band, and moving on to the next track. 

The main reason I bought this plugin is because of the peculiar Air Band, which you can see goes all the way up to 40kHz, way past what humans can hear. I don't know what kind of voodoo is in this thing, but I can add 4-5db of stuff only dogs and bats hear, and it sounds amazing. I may be adding gain to a shelf that high, but it's affects reach into the high end of human hearing, and it's pretty obvious to hear what you're doing. I tend to pop this plugin on vocals, acoustic guitars or horns, set the Air Band to 40kHz and raise the gain til it sounds angelic, then back the gain off a bit. We can't have things sounding too angelic, can we?

It wasn't until after I'd demoed the EQ4 and bought it did I spend much time messing with the other bands (the Air Band is that good!), since I thought the choice of fixed frequencies was too limiting. While the EQ4 doesn't always work out, it's a beautiful sounding bit of gear when it does. The amazing/hidden genius of this plugin lies at the extreme low end, not just the extreme high end. The Sub knob isn't labeled with a frequency, but I've heard that it operates at 10Hz. That's right, there's another range you can control that is outside of human hearing, this time it's subsonic rumble. 

All in all, this is a great sounding and very easy to use EQ, and I find myself using it a lot on vocals, pianos, acoustic guitars, and even on my mix bus.

Quickly Hide Tracks in Large Pro Tools Sessions

When working in very large sessions, it can be very easy to get lost in the sheer number of tracks. In a post-production mixing environment there are usually lots of tracks being routed to many different subgroups and output summing assignments. I have a template that I've set up for working in 5.1 surround sound, and you can see a glimpse of the mix window above. As you can see, there are 141 tracks in the session. While I may not use all of them, the template is set up with that number because it's not uncommon to end up somewhere near that many tracks. Daunting, yes, but with color coding and a clear naming scheme you can quickly get your orientation. Here's a little tip to quickly hide all the tracks you don't want to see, which is very useful when you've done all your editing.

Here's a look at some Dialogue tracks, and you can see that they're all summed through the Dia ∑ aux track that lives at the end of the mix window, along with summing auxes for all SFX, Music, and Atmosphere tracks. If you are using newer versions of Pro Tools you can right click on the output assignment, and click Show Only Assigments To... This will hide (but still enable) all tracks that aren't a part of the signal chain for that assignment.

This will allow you to see only Dialogue tracks, any Dialogue reverb tracks, and the Dialogue summing aux track. Because I like to keep all my summing auxes at the end of the session, I can have the best of both worlds: I can see how everything is coming together when I scroll to the end of the session, or using this tip I can focus on every aspect of the Dialogue all on the same part of the screen. Of course, this also works in the Edit Window, allowing me to dive deeper into editing whatever I feel is needing some work.

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To get back to where you started, just right click on the output assignment again and select Restore Previously Shown Tracks.

Another aspect of this tip is that if you're using aux tracks to sum all of your audio, you can quickly focus on fine-tuning the final pieces at the summing stage while keeping an eye on the final output.

As you can see, I have all my final summing auxes next to my final output aux and my print track. These are at the end of my session, and are tracks 134 through 139. With two clicks I can go from that to seeing only those tracks, which are now tracks 1-5.