That sort of "high frequencies go way when the bass booms" thing is in
fact an artifact of over-compressing the entire mix.
Individually compressing all sounds will tend to minimize this and give
you a more even mix. That technique can be over-used as well. Listening to
a track made that way, but too compressed, is a lot like trying to eat
tough, dense bread where the yeast didn't work. EVERYTHING sounds all mashed
and thick.
In general I try to compress bass sounds and any 'through the air' sounds
(vocals, instruments, percussion) and let everything else kind of have its
own way. Then I just try and get an uncompressed mixdown that sound the way
I want it to sound. The mastering stage after that, I start out just
using a limiter and seeing if I can get things up to -12dB RMS without killing
the sound of the mix. If that doesn't seem to be possible, I'll use a
multiband compressor to try and manage the unruly frequency bands a bit better.
And if the limiter seems to be making things a bit too crunchy, I'll put
a DE-Esser in front of it to shave off some of the high frequencies around
the peaks.
Your best bet is going to do the least amount of processing as a last resort,
and to try and make your source material sound as good as possible so you
don't have to fix it in the mix. I'm not averse to using some channel EQ
from time to time; but it's good to try and use it to cut instead of boost.
On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, EggyToast wrote:
quoted 27 lines Nate Schmold said:
> Nate Schmold said:
> > does the track : 'A19 - You Open Always' (on that warp Mira Calix sound
> > page)posess proper compression. I know i recognize compression being
> > used but it sounds like its fading out the melody when the kick hits..
> > is this actually a good example of compression usage, or if i do this
> > in my songs will people laugh and point at me and my tomfoolery?
>
> In my opinion, it's not really a good example. At least of "proper"
> compression. She may have been trying to do that in the first place in which
> case it's supposed to sound like that, or it could be a side effect of the
> normalization prior to converting the songs to put on the site.
>
> Anyway, yeah, compression will simply reduce the volume of bits when they hit
> a certain limit. Most likely, the final track was run through a compressor,
> instead of compressing each track on its own. A *good* example of
> compression probably wouldn't be detectable. Listen to "turquoise hexagon
> sun" by Boards of Canada. Notice how the melody doesn't get quieter when the
> drums kick in, despite them being of a similar loudness? If the final track
> was run through compression, those drums would affect the melody line,
> instead of sitting happily next to them as they do in the song you hear. If
> you're honestly looking for advice, I'd say it's best to run each track
> through compression on its own, so you can match up the volumes easier
> without having the different parts of a track negatively affect other parts.
>
> That would also be a good question to ask of a mr. kent williams, resident
> mastering master on the idm-making list.
>