jb101
Remember that you don't have to compress everything.
 
One way of working is to attempt to get a static fader mix, and listen for which instruments are still making you reach for the faders toturn up and down, and then compress those.
 
It's worth a try.

This is golden advice from brother jb, Beeps. To be honest, like I said in one of my novels, less will always be more. Here's an example. If I play a bass on one of my songs, and then my bassist Joey plays on the same song....the first thing you notice is, I need way more compression than Joey does. The reason being? He makes love to the darned thing and plays it correctly where I feel I play decent lines, but don't have that execution. Kinda like...if I played a piano and then got Janet to play the same part for me. I play fairly well, but Janet rocks the piano like we'd rock a baby to sleep with precision and touch.
 
The same can be said for all instruments in a mix. When something is played and recorded correctly, you may not need much compression or eq. I'm serious when I say all this to you. When a major studio puts something out, they don't sit there and mess with instruments  for days trying to make them work. Nor do they eq the instruments in such a way that they no longer sound like what they originally printed.
 
This is where lots of home recordists are missing the boat. The better your sound is, the less processing you have to do all across the board UNLESS you are going for something specific. Remember...cause, effect and reason. Compression is one of those animals that will always be a mystery in certain aspects of mixing. I say that because there will be times where you simply don't even know you're using it and can't tell if it's making a difference or not until you kill it and listen to the instruments you were processing on. Example...
 
When I compress my high gain guitars, I try to stay within -2 to -3 in gain reduction using anywhere from a 1.5:1 ratio to a 4:1 ratio. The amount of outboard compression I use going in determines how much ITB (in the box) compression I use after. A few years ago, for the longest time I was using a hardware compressor going in at 1.5: and -6 threshold setting which was taking away about a dB and a half of gain at -6 dB peak. This made me compress a bit more ITB once the guitar was recorded because I just conditioned the signal going in....I really didn't compress it the way I would for use on a song.
 
These days I'm running a different hardware compressor where I'm just using some over-easy compression from a DBX 163 pulling out about -1.5 dB going in at -6 dB peak. The DBX compressor in this situation is subtle and isn't harsh as it has no ratio, attack or release. It behaves a bit differently than the other comps I have. So when I use this particular compressor, once the guitars are recorded I can use a 2:1, 3:1 or 4:1 ratio on a Sonitus and just tighten things up a bit IF I need to. But if it sounds good and the guitars don't disappear or walk on anything else uncontrolled, I'll leave them as they are. BUT...they end up on a guitar bus, so I'll most likely compress them with a UAD Precision bus comp just to tighten them up as an entity. That little comp just does wonders for me and sounds great.
 
Cymbals: The thing with cymbals is...they are a very dynamic percussion instrument. So you really don't (at least I don't) want to compress them much if at all. To be honest brother, I have only had one job where I have compressed cymbals. To me they are just one of those instruments that don't sound good with compression. I'd rather manually automate and level them over using any form of compression. That said, I DO run a light compressor on my drum bus. But that pretty much just keeps the whole kit tight. You can't hear cymbal resonance or squashing. I'm just using enough to tighten up the kit so nothing strays and jumps out unless I want it to. It's sort of like the prison guard thing again....the "don't cross this line" type compression that isn't as strict as a limiter or a hard comp, but you sure can tell when it's off.
 
You shouldn't have to gate those cymbals. I have them here and think they are awesome. I think you may have had some compression or a multiband messing them up along with having them too loud. Stay away from p-comp if you're doing it as well as excessive compression or MBL's for now just until we see how you fair. THEN we can experiment with the other stuff. If you have to do anything, cut the ring down on those cymbals so they don't sustain as long...but you shouldn't have to gate them out.
 
I feel the same about toms actually. They are so dynamic, I only lightly compress them when I have to and try my best to automate/manually level them instead because it just feels and sounds better to me that way. There are no rules...you do what you feel. But like jb says, not everything needs compression. Sometimes you suck the life out of an instrument by adding it...especially if you're using it to the point of hearing it.
 
Sometimes it's working and you can't tell. That's the object unless you are going for something specific when you want to hear that compressed sound. Picture compression like this....let me see if I can better explain this...
 
You're a runner. You have some pain in your legs. You know that when you run today, when you run hard you will feel it during and after. However, if you run with these specially made braces (which in this case would be our compression) they will stop you from over-exerting your abilities and will make your strides consistent because they are governing your flawed legs. You will run a little slower in speed (like compression will make your instruments more controlled and consistent and may lower volume a tad) but you will not notice this the speed loss and will make better time because of the consistency.....understand?
 
Sort of like lifting weights too. If you have horrible form, it matters not if you can bench-press 300 pounds. The guy with perfect form pressing 200 that is perfect in execution is the one that will see more results and less injury. No compression....chance of injury to the mix. Proper compression...consistency and a healthy mix.
 
Compression does its best when you can't hear it yet you know it is taking out a certain amount of over-all gain. "Well how the heck do you judge something you can't hear Danny?!" Hahahahahaha! I think I've been asked that question more times than I care to think about. :)
 
The key is to jack it up first to where you CAN hear it while experimenting with the attack and release. This shows you how the compressor will react. Between your ratio, attack, threshold and release, you start to hear how the compressor works on that instrument. Your attack tells the compressor how fast or slow to hit depending on how much threshold you are using in the negatives (the threshold controls how much compression you actually hear) along with the ratio you select. Smaller ratios yield less heard compression even when you jack the threshold. The bigger ratio numbers allow you to hear more compression when you jump on the threshold. The attack then really comes into play because you can select immediate compression, or a more relaxed compression. Release is how long or short (sustains or cuts) the comp reacts before it triggers again.
 
So when you jack things to the extreme and experiment, you know what to listen for. The object there once you set it all up, is to take away a little at a time until the compressor is working yet is not audible to the point of hearing artifacts like pumping, breathing, things sustaining, or being too transient "percussive". It's one of those effects you just have to mess with until you find that happy medium. Sometimes you need to hear it (in situations where we want to use it as a transient designer) and other times we just need it to tighten things up. Other times, you may WANT to hear the pumping sound. But you have to experiment because each instrument you use it on will bring on a different set of circumstances and you have to know how to treat them.
 
Some cool rules of thumb for you that may help with ratios. Always set up your ratio first so the compressor behaves as it should when you jack up the threshold. You'll back the threshold down once you get what you need...but always have a rough starting ratio. Try to think this way..
 
1:1 to 2:1- These ratios are good for times where you just want to keep things tight where the instrument is either not one that needs much compression or the person playing the instrument really knows how to work it. For example, the bass player scenario I set up for you before. A good bassist that has the right pull on the strings that uses his fingers dynamically may fall into the 2:1 or maybe 3:1 ratio taking out about 4-6 dB of gain via threshold depending on what you hear and see meter wise. If a guy plays with a pick and is aggressive, most likely nothing in these ratio ranges will work. These ratio's are also good mastering starting points. 2:1 being a favorite. But again, you have to let the material dictate this.
 
3:1 to 4:1: These are the most popular in my realm. You can pretty much use ratio settings of this nature on everything. This allows the compressor to be more apparent when you jack up the threshold than what you heard at 1:1 or 2:1. 3:1 is awesome for acoustic guitarists, toms, pianists, wind instruments and percussionists that literally play for the song dynamically. Again, you'd just be sort of policing them and not doing anything crazy.
 
4:1 is the most popular electric high gain guitar setting that seems to really work well. In today's times though, this has changed because compression seems to be the effect of the 2000's so people are abusing it. I'd say for the music you like as well as what you're going for, start with 4:1 on your guitars, 3ms to 6 ms attack time depending on when you want the comp to hit, 200-450 ms release depending on how you want the compressor to react and re-trigger. 4:1 really does work well on most things but can be a bit abrasive on certain instruments so be careful. I find it works well for me on electric guitars, snare drums where I am creating transient effects, kick drums with transient effects, back up vocal stacks, guitar bus layers, transient type percussion that my lash out, brass, strings, woods and really just about anything. But you can't just use it because it's a popular setting. Each instrument needs its own love and you may find that a stronger ratio may be better...or maybe even something lighter.
 
5:1 to 6:1: I really like these ratio settings for vocals but it depends what compressor I use. For example, the results I might get on the Sonar bus comp would differ from the results I'd get from my NEVE 33609 which I can jump on without massive artifacts. This is why we have so many compression choices. One size does NOT fit all no matter how good the compressor is. These ratio's are also good for bassists like me that may be a bit more percussive with their bass attack/execution. I use felt picks to soften the pick blow...but I can still over-do it execution wise. So I usually fall in the 5:1 to 6:1 ratio range. This works well on horn stacks as long as you don't pump up the threshold too much. You can pretty much make any compression ratio work...you just have to really dial it in and know what to listen for.
 
7:1 to infinity: I've not used anything over 9:1 to be honest because it's never done anything to make me say "I need this here". I don't know that I have ever even tried a compressor that high up to be honest. But I've used 7:1 to 9:1 quite a bit for clients as well as for compression effects. These ratios help with smoothing severe transient type material as well as creating transient type material when needed. For example, a bassist that uses a heavy pick that may be sloppy and inconsistent. You'll mess with attack and release so that you cut that nasty transient out of his playing to soften the blow. You may have to run an insane amount of threshold here and boost the volume so that he's evened out which will lower his volume, so you'll need to turn up the output and bring him back in the mix. Of course you want to stop recording a sound like this at all costs IF you can...but there may be times where a client sends something to you that is just recorded like this. Compression can really smooth out stuff like this. But thankfully, we have the Sonar Transient tool and other goodies that can help us to soften harsh transients. But me being old school, I often reach for a compressor first as it just sounds a little more natural to me. :)
 
These ratio's are also really good for making drum kits pump hard in a parallel compression situation. The object of p-comp is to mix a wet squashed sound with the original signal and mix the two. I like to do this with 2 compressors so that you have one that is tightening up my kit, the other is slammed. You mix in just the right amount of "slammed" and it can make drums sound a bit more lively. The problem here is...everyone seems to think "if I can't hear the slammed effect, I'm not using enough" so they abuse it.
 
These ratios are also good for special effects compression...meaning just that. The effect of compression when you want to hear it. One last thing....
 
When listening to compression, toggle it on and off. Make sure you do NOT lose volume or boost volume from your original signal unless that's something you want. You should hear no signal boost or cut with the comp on or off. If the comp on is louder than comp off, lower the comp output. If the comp on level is lower than comp off, raise the output of the comp until it matches. You should notice the sound being tighter when it's in the mix. You may not notice a thing if you solo up the track. What you want to listen for is lashing out or if you are constantly raising faders. You should be able to make your mix sound so good and consistent, even if something is low in the mix, you still can hear it at all times without struggling. If you are ever struggling to hear something....there's a problem either with frequency masking, lack of compression, an un-eq'd effect or even a pan issue on that instrument in how it may be getting along with the others.
 
Hopefully, some of this will really get you (and others) on the right track Beeps. I know some of this you already knew, and some you may have been questioning. At least now you may be able to put it into perspective coming from a normal guy that is trying as hard as possible to explain this stuff in a language anyone can understand. :)
 
Uggh, another novel. So sorry brother(s) but I gotta seize the moment when I have it to try and make a difference for the better around here. :-P
 
-Danny

Anyway... this is what I changed:
 
- Took ALL the compressors of the cymbals at the track level and MAN were they ever smashed. I guess I figured it was making them all nice and bright and that was a good thing but was terribly wrong. The only thing going on at track level on the cymbals now is a hi pass and very modest hi shelves to either bring things up or down on a case by case basis. The unfortunately thing is that the hi hat is STILL a little too present for me but it is coming from the room mic mostly. Since I had printed the synth track to audio I couldn't do much about it but will adjust BFD in the future so that the hats aren't so prominent in the room/overheads. I also had some saturation on some of those tracks so I remove that as well. It's pretty much just the raw samples and I think it's a lot better. There was a reason I bought that pack and it certainly wasn't to have to process the hell out of them... but now I know.
 
-Created a cymbals bus. I wanted to control them all at once and after removing the compressors on the tracks I find they were a little flat and wild so again I did a low pass, a touch of high shelf boost and put the PC2A on so it was JUST barely compressing the peaks. Then I made sure the track levels were more even and turn them down at the buss to JUST before the point I felt they were getting buried. It's just that bleeping hi hat that's a problem which I will definitely pay more attention to from the start in the future.
 
-Tweaked the bass tracks. I turned down some of the saturation/drive on my fuzz bass track so I could turn things up a bit more. I also reworked the levels between the four bass tracks so there was more of softer fat bass track in the mix to round out the bottom end a bit more. Then it all got turned up at the bus (probably too much but I'll fix that). Overall it's not quite as gritty but I think it "feels" more like a bass track and now the mix isn't that typical 80s metal demo sound.
 
-Adjusted guitar levels. I didn't do anything to the guitars except try to balance the levels to fit into the new mix. There is one solo snippet that REFUSED to increase in volume (the second passage in the fast solo). Not sure what's up with that but there is some fancy cloning and routing I used to get some spread and that back and forth effect without dropping out of the center. Another thing I'll have to keep an eye on in the future.
 
-Kick/Snare. I probably could have gone over the processing for both a little more and was going to actually create a bus for each and tweak them there but after screwing around a bit I didn't think it was really necessary. The kick was cloned with on track set to get the attack and the other the body and the snare had top and bottom mic's tracks that I stripped out by fiddling with the controls in BFD and double bouncing. I turned up the fatter kick a little which rounded out a bit more and seemed to play well with the bass. On the snare I turned up the bottom mic quite a bit which seemed to make it crack a lot better (I think the old snare was a little dead with more of than PWONG type feel to it which I like but I think this is better and more traditional). Both the kick and snare then got turned up as much as I could get them without clipping or being obnoxious. I think I still have a lot to learn about kick/snare processing but I'm pretty happy with this for now.
 
-Turn up the drum bus/turned down the toms. This just felt right and the toms were kind of sitting weird before I think. It also got the kick and snare up a bit more.
 
-Bandpass on the Drum and Instrument reverb busses. I was looking over my notes and found a tidbit about this. I actually hadn't done ANY processing to my reverb busses and had forgotten this trick. Basically get the ultra highs and lows out of the reverb so they don't build up and make a bunch of unnecessary noise. It immediately got rid of a good deal of the not so apparent abrasiveness. I'm glad I remembered about that. I adjust the reverb bus levels a bit too but other than that I left them as is.
 
-Premaster bus. I put a bus before the master that everything gets sent to and that's where I tweak the overall mix EQ and add some light "glue" compression and leave the Master bus free of all processing. Here I turned down the compressor a bit (again the PC2A... I just love that thing) and used the Quad Curve to boost the bass a bit more and brought down the highs a little bit from where they were (both shelves). My little mid scoop seemed to be fine where it was so I left that as is. I didn't want this to be the "Master" even though this is kind of master processing I guess but I wanted to follow Danny's advice of getting the mix to sound right so as little as possible needed to be done in the actual master phase. Having the really light compression here was kind of meant as the first stage of a two stage compression process the second which I did in the actual mastering project. Everything I did in this step was indeed very light but I think when I go back into the mix I may turn down the low shelf just a bit and replace it in the mastering session because I think I might get a less boomy bottom end out of the Pultech thingy. I would have uploaded this premastered version for everyone to hear but I guess soundcloud doesn't like 96khz waves. D'oh!
 
-Master. I did VERY little here because as I mixed I kept hearing Danny's voice over my shoulder yelling "DON'T LEAN ON THE MASTER!! MIX IT SO IT SOUNDS GOOD FIRST!!" and I think it helped a lot. Instead of using X2 again I wanted to try out some of the new plugs in X3... specifically the Blue Tubes Pultech model instead of destroying things with the LP64 like I seem to always do. I decided to do a Pre-Master bus set up again so I could do my tweaks there and leave the Master for the limiter and the analyst just so I didn't have to screw around with post/pre settings or create FX Chains to get the routing right. Again I put on the PC2A which whatever... I probably could have used something else but I really didn't want a lot of compression at all. Just a bit of sparkle and that thing never fails and it's so easy to use. So that was the second stage of my master compression and it was just barely registering. I messed with the little screw knob a bit to get it working just at the right spot and many times that control doesn't do much but here it really did make a difference. Then I tossed on the Blue Tubes Pultec model (the basic one... not the fancy one with extra controls but I may play with that later today). I messed around with that thing for like an hour just trying things out. It is extremely cool. Eventually I got it set up so the bass was more pronounced without being boomy (in fact with the atten knob I seemed to be able to yank out a bit of boominess) and added a bit of clarity at the high end. It also manage to clean up some hi-mid abrasiveness. Really as I a/b'd it the difference was extremely subtle but somehow cleaned it all up in ways I never could have done with a linear phase or multiband. Again I definitely need more face time with this tool and "mastering" in general but I like what it did. Aside from the limiter that is ALL I did to the master and the before/after were very similar... the after was just a little more pro sounding. Not quite as hairy.
 
-Limiter. I think this deserves it's own section because I took a chance here... well not a chance, I did a lot of a/bing and trying things out but I decided to use the Blue Tubes Brickwall limiter instead of the Boost11 one. There really isn't MUCH of a difference and I may even be imagining a difference but to me the BT one is just a touch smoother and less mechanical sounding. It could very be psychological just because it LOOKS like an old analog unit unlike the rather sterile looking B11 but after a good long set of testing them back and forth it just felt more right. In both cases I made sure that I was boosting the signal up enough to be reading between -3 to -1db but BARELY triggering the limiter. Like making it so it only kicked in at two or three spots in the entire song and the reduction was only a db or two. This I think was another difference between the two. The B11 seems to pump and break up the signal when the limiter kicks in even with very little reduction which is very unpleasant. The BT Brickwall kind of does the same thing when you get past a certain point but it is a little less mechanical sounding and at lower/less frequent reduction it's not really noticeable at all (to me anyway). So even though I do need to take a look at other limiters and wish I have been able to afford the Concrete Limiter before I crippled myself financially this addition to the Sonar bundle is very welcome on my system. I'm kind of excited to try out the other BT plugs now considering how cool the two I've tried so far are. Anyway, I tried dialing in the limiter myself and that was working out but I decided to check out the different presets. I decided the CD Mastering preset was giving me the best results but it was a little low (I was peaking at -3 to -2db and I wanted just a little bit more) so I turned up the threshold a little to get more volume and that was that. Now you are listening to the end product.
 
Sorry for the novel but I wanted to write this all down in case I want to take reference it in the future and figured it might be interesting for folks to see what suggestions I used so they can judge what might (or might not) work on their own stuff.
 
Again many thanks and sorry I did not get a chance to reply to everyone. I was meaning to but I've been kind of busy, scattered and not feeling particularly well and figured it might be better to just get the work done instead of blathering on about stuff here. I may give this a quick work over today just to bring down the bass a bit and maybe play around with the mastering stuff a bit more but that depends on how my day progresses.
 
You all rock. Cheers!