This article is about some pretty crazy techniques that can really take your sound up a notch or totally screw up your mix! These aren’t techniques I use all the time, but enough to warrant a mention.
If you’ve got some experience under your belt, here are a few things you can do when the situation warrants it.
1. Multiple Outputs Tor Group Sends
This is useful if you know you’re going to be doing some parallel processing. Most commonly I’ll use this approach on the drum bus.
Why? Well, if you use a single output into two send channels you get the same levels going to both. If you have independent control you can set them evenly to begin with, then apply your compression to your parallel track. From there you have finer control of how much of each element is going into the compressor.
Once you blend your parallel compression in, you might find that while your cymbals may start to fluff up nicely, your snare and kick are starting to “pancake” out. By individually controlling the output levels you can fine tune the compressor’s reaction.
Why not do this from auxiliary sends? Because DAW aux sends tend to be glitchy enough that there can sometimes be a delay on the return. It doesn’t help you out if you’re comb filtering your return when the goal is to get a fuller sound.
2. Leaving The Midrange Bump In Vocals
Four out of five times I find myself cutting some kind of bulky tone between 350-600 Hz in vocal tracks. This usually leads to a cleaner sound.
However, in the mix you may find the solid midrange to be very helpful, especially once you’ve added some treble. One way to control this range but not remove it is to use a compressor with a customizable side-chain circuit.
Triggering the compression without the lows, upper-mids and treble of the vocal opposed to regular compression will open up the presence of the vocals like an EQ would, but without losing that dead center midrange. If you have a knee control you can make the compression very transparent even without the upper and lower ranges in the detector circuit. Conveniently, the stock digi compressor in Pro Tools will let you do all of this.
3. Overdrive For Compression
I discovered this while tracking vocals through my 1176. The transformer will actually apply its own compression when driven into.
If I set the attack on bypass and really fine tune the input, I can get a very subtle compression that brings up sustain without compromising any attack. The “drawback” here is that this process generates distortion. If I can find that sweet spot, the distortion will excite the sound coming in. I’ve done this on vocals, guitars and bass guitar very successfully – compressing without compression engaged!
The way this works will vary from each piece of gear but you might just find something new about one of your favorite (or least favorite) items.
4. Clipping Instead Of Limiting
Taking that idea a step further: one of the riskiest but potentially coolest approaches is to square off a signal instead of limiting.
Clipping is essentially limiting with a zero attack and release time. Limiting is far more transparent in terms of frequency control, but often comes at the price of punch. Likewise, clipping is not transparent in terms of tone, but leaves the dynamics outside of the peak signal completely intact.
Now, this usually sounds terrible. But over very short spans of time, particularly on sources that have broad frequency content, it can actually sound fairly transparent or even good (snare drums anyone?).
Now a lot of audio guys will jump down my throat for this one, but remember, we soft-clip things all the time. Hard clipping your converters is really not so different than overdriving the outputs of an MPC, which hip-hop producers have been doing for years.
