From the course: Audio Foundations: Compression and Dynamic Processing

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Get in the Mix: Using mix bus compression

Get in the Mix: Using mix bus compression

From the course: Audio Foundations: Compression and Dynamic Processing

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Get in the Mix: Using mix bus compression

Now that we understand why bus compression is so powerful as a mixing tool, let's get hands on with an example, and get in the mix. Take a listen to this full mix with the bus compression bypassed. It sounds pretty good. But I want to get just a little more lift out of the lower level details, and tuck in the transients a bit to glue everything together. Now listen with the bus compression enabled. Here I'm using an attack of five milliseconds, to allow some of the transience to punch through and a release of 200 milliseconds or about an eight note in this song, based on the tempo. Generally, I only want to get no more than a db or two of gain reduction. Just enough to tie things together and give me that lift and tuck on the whole mix. In this example, I exaggerated my threshold settings just a bit, to make the effect more audible. But in a real mix, I might go back and ease off the gain reduction. While mixed bus compressors are great for gluing a mix together, they can often do…

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