[TIL at AES 11/12] Busses and busses of parallel compression to shape your mix

One of the cooler mixing tricks at AES I learned from Andrew Scheps.

In case you don’t know who he is you can listen to my interview with him here.

Anyways, us some of his mixing tricks.

One of the most interesting things I saw was that most of his processing was in parallel.

Especially the compression.

I’m assuming that they tracked through some sweet EQ and compression during the recording stage because the raw tracks sounded spectacular.

But for the mix he used various parallel busses depending on what sound he was after.

For instance, if my memory serves me right he had three various compression settings depending on what he was after on three separate busses.

So he would route the instruments through what color or shape he was looking for in the song.

All without compressing the original signals.

I believe this can give some great depth and dynamics to your tracks while still allowing you to be heavy handed on the compression.

For the vocal he had one specific buss where he sent it through an LA2A plug-in that made it super nasally and prominent in the mids.

In solo it was completely unusable and gross-sounding.

But added in parallel to the original vocal?

It added some extra punch to the vocal that really made it cut through.

So take it from Andrew Scheps and create compression busses and treat them as colors in the soundscape.

If you want to grit it it up a little bit you run it through the bus that really crushes things.

You want a different type of shape or feel that just slightly colors the instrument instead of crushing it? Make a new bus that only does that.

And speaking of color, a simple way to navigating a mix session.

Until then,

Have a great Halloween! I’m gonna be Johnny Cash 😉

Björgvin

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