You Give the Mastering Engineer More to Work With The effect wound up more musical than I could have ever imagined. So, I rode the fader of a drum bus in time with the music to accentuate its swing, doing so to approximate what (I imagined) an SSL comp would have done. Here’s an example: on one mix in a strange studio, I didn’t like any of the software compressors. You’ll find creative roundabouts you’d never thought you’d try. If you’re someone who regularly puts plug-ins or hardware on the master bus, taking everything off and working dry is an undisputed jolt to the process, for all the reasons mentioned above. Sometimes we might have forgotten/overlooked basic tenets of mixing due to the crutches we’ve allowed ourselves for the sake of expediency. Sometimes a jolt to our workflow can re-energize our creativity. Look, we all hit plateaus, and we all get stagnant. This brings us to our next advantage: An Excellent Shake-Up to a Boring Mix When you don’t have your usual tools, you want to make sure you walk freely into the situation, without any crutches. Why is this important? Because you never know when you’ll find yourself mixing in a situation where your tools are not available to you. When you’ve hit a good level, and everything is flowing, pumping, and breathing musically, you’ll realize that you’re the one who made that happen, not the tool. The no-processing approach has added benefits for your ego, and by extension, your efficiency. Sure, I could’ve grabbed every element in the mix and pulled it down, but that leads us into this next bit: An Excellent Confidence Booster Many are the times I’ve had to cycle a section and move a vocal down in 0.2 dB increments, so that the vocal would simultaneously cut through the mix and avoid hitting the digital ceiling with a sudden peak. If you go this route, you’ll often find yourself using automation to accomplish a task that a compressor/limiter could handle with ease. The only thing keeping frequencies from masking each other-or saving your output from clipping-is you! As a result, you have to practice elegant signal flow and excellent gain-staging. There is no equalizer to save you from the mud. There is no compressor to catch a wayward snare peaking above the mix. This method forces you to work hard in the act of balancing and processing all the elements of your mix. I can understand why this seems like a boring approach, but this method does have its advantages, some of which include: Lack of Safety Net Instead of a compressor for glue, an EQ for sheen, a stereo-width processor for width, you forego all of it, and put exactly nothing on your bus-not a limiter, not a gain plug-in nothing. This is, by default, the most minimal way of treating your stereo bus. We’re going to break down how each method is accomplished, as well as the virtues and vices of each style. Still, we can separate the general approach into three overarching categories: no processing, minimal processing, and a veritable boatload of processing-a large chain that does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to the overall sound of your mix. I’d wager there are as many ways of treating the ol’ bottleneck as there are engineers. It’s no surprise that engineers have their own special way of handling the stereo bus. Whatever you call it (okay, nobody calls it the Mississippi Mud Basin), the stereo bus is paramount, as it constitutes the mix’s ultimate point of egress: every sound you manipulate, every instrument you pan, every reverb you instantiate, it all finds its way to the stereo bus, or else the listener doesn’t hear it.
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