Do You Really Need All That Processing?

I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my flight to the yearly NAMM show in Anaheim.

It’s always fun to take in all the new gear, and more importantly all the great panels and educational opportunities they offer.

I just know there’s going to be a smorgasbord of new stuff in the form of plug-ins, but it made me think: do you really need all that processing all the time?

In fact, sometimes you don’t need much processing to get things sounding good.

I was making a mix walkthrough yesterday and going through the percussion section of a track.

This particular song is an acoustic ballad with no drums, but a bunch of little percussion tracks like a shaker, tambourine, woodblocks and the like.

I’ve started mixing a lot more of the rough mix on the individual tracks and I often throw the Omnichannel on each track before I start mixing just to keep it there until I’ve finished balancing with volume and panning.

As I was looking at each percussion track, I noticed that none of them had any processing. The Omnichannel was on, but none of the EQ, compression and saturation was activated. There may have been some saturation to dull the high-end, but that was it.

So I investigated further and found out that I had routed the percussion section together as a group and I just had some light compression for glue and some reverb and delay for space, using the ever-so-versatile CLA Unplugged plug-in.

Keep in mind that this was a final mix I had already sent to a client who was happy with the way everything sounded.

I tell you this because we often get wrapped up with making sure we add processing, instead of asking whether we need to add processing.

In this case, the song didn’t need the full processing power all my plug-ins could offer. Just a little glue and some space.

Think about that next time you’re adding the fifth plug-in to your shaker track 😉

If you’re regularly reading this newsletter, you’ve probably been doing some recordings and mixes for a little bit and you’re looking to take your skills to the next level. If you don’t want to read yet another cheatsheet or follow one more arbitrary Youtube trick, then I recommend following a proven mixing system that nearly every professional engineer uses.

All you need to know is how to use:

• EQ
• Compression
• Reverb
• Delay
• Saturation

And I teach you everything you need to know inside my Mixing With 5 Plug-ins course.

If you’re not satisfied with the sound of your mixes, this course is a perfect next step in improving your mixes.

Hit the link to learn more:

www.MixingWith5Plugins.com

If you liked this post, share the love: