Should I use Masterbuss Processing (Compression, mainly) at all??

[Blizzy-Blim]

So, here's my deal:

I'm a musician/ singer-songwriter. I play, record, and now mix all my own stuff (drums -16 mic'd kit, bass guitars, vocals, etc). I take great care to get things right at the source -Using the right drum kit (have 5 of them), bass, microphones, strings -all of that...

I've had a great time learning to mix over the last year or so -Have watched hundreds of hours of youtube, interviews, talked with a lot of people and have downloaded and messed around with just about every free plugin there is on the internet. I've got a good handful of go-tos and I feel confident that I can bring life to my mixes. The OOOoonly thing I'm really struggling with at the moment is the idea of masterbuss processing. I've only messed with compression thus far and can't even imagine putting a limiter or a saturator or eq or whatever else on there -I like to do all that to my individual tracks -And, I barely even process my tracks to begin with. My whole modus operandi is to get everything at the source. In my philosophy, everything beyond capturing the sound correctly at the source is "fixing" things... I used to HAAATE compression -and I still do -but, it's such a necessary tool for vocals and bass di. I've found that i can get by without compression on everything except for vocals and bass di -I pretty much smash those... Also, I don't really do any parallel processing. So, that should give you a good idea of my production style...

So, having said all that -

Although it complicates things for me, there really is no denying the glue that a little bit of compression on the masterbuss can provide. Omg -it's just excellent. I used to be in love with the wild sounds of the transients and whatever else flying around everywhere, but the more I mix, the more I'm seeing how that's just not gonna fly -especially in the digital realm... I really like the idea of throwing an SSL emulation on there at 4:1, 30ms attack, automatic release and calling it a day. I've been using this one called "modern Apophis" by Antress which I think sounds great (was recently very impressed with the Shadow Hills thing, too...). I could mix through that and be perfectly fine, I suppose... I've even thought about buying an actual hardware ssl comp and just passing everything through that, just so I don't have to think about it ever again. Have got a presonus smart comp blue thing laying around...

Thanks for taking the time...

[ramseysounds]

No

[Blizzy-Blim]

No

Being serious?

Reasons?

[ramseysounds]

Totally serious. You say yourself that your mixes are fine; why complicate things by piling stuff on your master buss? If you feel some glue compression will help, use it. At the end of the day, only you know how you want your mixes to sound. Personally I only use an L2 set to very minimal limiting just to catch any pesky overs. Have fun

[Blizzy-Blim]

Totally serious. You say yourself that your mixes are fine; why complicate things by piling stuff on your master buss? If you feel some glue compression will help, use it. At the end of the day, only you know how you want your mixes to sound. Personally I only use an L2 set to very minimal limiting just to catch any pesky overs. Have fun

Appreciate the input!

Cheers!

[Azbest]

If you have a mastering engineer, then the answer is no. If you have a DYI everything approach, it won't hurt to learn about it.

[cantaloupe]

I would also say no.

If you put it on at the end, it changes the balance in bad ways. If you mix into it, it can be more complicated to hear if the track-level processing is the correct choice (subtle saturation on tracks are much easier to hear if you avoid buss processing for example.)

You might get better glue by trying to achieve a good mix with no buss processing imo. If you have pointy transients everywhere you might need more compression/processing on tracks, but that is fine. Avoiding buss compression helps revealing what you actually need to do. A lot of these top-down-mixing ideas are too often sold as the correct choice by mediocre youtube influencers trying to push That One Weird Trick to increase their view count in a ruthless war of attention.

I remember discovering buss compression years ago and falling in love with it, but going back to older projects with more experience and removing buss processing was eye opening to me. Not saying you will have the same experience necessarily, but it is very easy get hooked on saturation/buss compression etc initially, but sooo easy to overdo once you get some distance to the material and you realise it just smears and makes your mix smaller most of the time.

Buss comp can be a band-aid on brittle/flawed/pointy/flat mixes, but you are maybe better off spending time trying to figure out why/if your mix sounds like that instead of putting a band-aid on top that smears and reduces everything. You can still glue and control transients similarly, it isn't either-or, you just need to do it at track-level where you have more control, which seems like the approach you are already taking.

It all depends on genre, aesthetics, loudness requirements etc though. There are many legit reasons for masterbuss compression as a mixing tool, i just think it is way overdone, especially by 'regular' musicians just wanting their stuff to sound as good as possible without necessarily reaching radio-friendly EDM-pop levels of abrasive loudness mixed by surgical pros with three decades of experience and the intention of creating inhuman-sounding music.

I also think that in the coming decade, "the sound of heavy buss processing" is going to age a bit like gated reverbs of the 80s - this is the perfect time to be ahead of the aesthetic curve lol. Don't know how your mixes sound, but you seem to have a great approach already - i would just focus on what you are doing and get better and better at it. Make stuff as good as possible at the source and control dynamics at track levels.

[Blizzy-Blim]

If you have a mastering engineer, then the answer is no. If you have a DYI everything approach, it won't hurt to learn about it.

Appreciate it! Have been going back and forth between doing it myself and hiring someone...

[Blizzy-Blim]

I would also say no.

If you put it on at the end, it changes the balance in bad ways. If you mix into it, it can be more complicated to hear if the track-level processing is the correct choice (subtle saturation on tracks are much easier to hear if you avoid buss processing for example.)

You might get better glue by trying to achieve a good mix with no buss processing imo. If you have pointy transients everywhere you might need more compression/processing on tracks, but that is fine. Avoiding buss compression helps revealing what you actually need to do. A lot of these top-down-mixing ideas are too often sold as the correct choice by mediocre youtube influencers trying to push That One Weird Trick to increase their view count in a ruthless war of attention.

I remember discovering buss compression years ago and falling in love with it, but going back to older projects with more experience and removing buss processing was eye opening to me. Not saying you will have the same experience necessarily, but it is very easy get hooked on saturation/buss compression etc initially, but sooo easy to overdo once you get some distance to the material and you realise it just smears and makes your mix smaller most of the time.

Buss comp can be a band-aid on brittle/flawed/pointy/flat mixes, but you are maybe better off spending time trying to figure out why/if your mix sounds like that instead of putting a band-aid on top that smears and reduces everything. You can still glue and control transients similarly, it isn't either-or, you just need to do it at track-level where you have more control, which seems like the approach you are already taking.

It all depends on genre, aesthetics, loudness requirements etc though. There are many legit reasons for masterbuss compression as a mixing tool, i just think it is way overdone, especially by 'regular' musicians just wanting their stuff to sound as good as possible without necessarily reaching radio-friendly EDM-pop levels of abrasive loudness mixed by surgical pros with three decades of experience and the intention of creating inhuman-sounding music.

I also think that in the coming decade, "the sound of heavy buss processing" is going to age a bit like gated reverbs of the 80s - this is the perfect time to be ahead of the aesthetic curve lol. Don't know how your mixes sound, but you seem to have a great approach already - i would just focus on what you are doing and get better and better at it. Make stuff as good as possible at the source and control dynamics at track levels.

You got in so many good points here. Thanks for chiming in...

Handling things at the track level is absolutely what makes sense to me. Just comes intuitively... Really doesn't make sense to pummel everything through this one funnel in the name of "glue". Rather limiting, actually - no pun intended. And yeah - It did make my tracks smaller. Even with sidechaining the low frequencies and only maxing at 1-2 gr, it made things smaller. And, it just added another obstacle- Now, I'm having to think about mixing in a completely different way: "Okay, what am I gonna add in order to make this pop through now that I've got this masterbus comp going..." or, "Hmm... not quite sure I like what it's doing with the cymbals here..."

There is the issue of things being a little too clean in the digital realm -We're not passing everything through a console -but whatever...

Think I'll just stick with my brain being the master compressor for now...

[kritikon]

Sorry, I'll go opposite and say absolutely yes. Depends on what your aims are as to how much - from the little you say about genre/style it seems at least you have drums/guitar/bass/vocals so there is some density to your songs and bare-bones mixes are usually not very good IMO. Dynamics are great, but too much in most styles don't lead to mixes that sound like a whole gelled unity song. You said yourself how gluing things together makes them sound better. The vast majority agree with you. Songs that go up and down all over the place just sound thin, lacking power, lacking cohesion and distract from the whole. Anyone who tells you shite like "pro bands don't process their mixes" are talking utter garbage. Of course they do, always have. Huge name bands don't use highly expensive studios and engineers to just record bare instruments. Going way back, mixes were compressed/limited/Eq'd all over the place, often quite heavily. 1176s are not subtle in any way whatsoever but they were and are used all over the place.

Doesn't mean you have to use them heavily. Think of any successful guitar band and please try to tell me of any that used no mastering processes. You will probably struggle, as will those that say no to mastering. Just use Youtube, check out the stats on a wide range of pro songs on there and you very quickly see they are all compressed/limited. Even songs that you think are fairly sparse are often very heavily squashed. Adele - you'd be amazed how squashed most of her songs are. U2 are one of the biggest names that aren't highly squashed but they are still most definitely processed. They obvs do a lot of processing at channel/instrument stage, but their mixes are processed without fail. Here's from Pete Maher's own website:

"Pete Maher is the UK’s No1 independent mastering engineer working with the worlds leading artists, producers and labels. Established in Camden Town, London in 2004. Recent projects include U2, Peaky Blinders, The Pixies, Nick Cave, BBC Introducing, MTV, The Rolling Stones and Eurovision. He uses valve multiband compression and all the best digital plugins to give your mixes more height, depth and volume. Your masters will sound perfect on CD, vinyl and radio and will be fully optimized for digital release. All work is PQ encoded and iTunes/Spotify approved. From hip hop to heavy rock, Pete will optimize your tracks to their FULL potential. As a huge supporter of new music Pete offers lower rates to unsigned artists and independent labels."

Here's just a short list on his site of who he's mastered:
U2 – Invisible (Superbowl Edit)
LIAM GALLAGHER – Live In Blackpool DVD (Upmixed to 7.1)
PIXIES – Baal’s Back (Album)
PEAKY BLINDERS – Full Score 2019 – 2021
KATY PERRY – The One That Got Away
ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY – The Boy In The Dress (David Walliams, Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers)
LA LA LAND – City Of Stars
GOLDFRAPP – Thea (Sa Dingding, Universal China Release)
PAUL WELLER – The Poacher
NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS – From Here To Eternity
DAMIEN RICE – One
LANA DEL REY – Westcoast (Favela Remix – Polydor Official)
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN – Damage And Joy (2021 Remastered For Vinyl)
MAXIMO PARK – The National Health
NEWTON FAULKNER – Live from Somewhere in Europe EP
DEPECHE MODE – So Cruel
BOWIESONGS1 – David Bowie Piano Project By Clifford Slapper (Endorsed By Harry Maslin, Mike Garson)
JACK WHITE – Love Is Blindness
THE ROLLING STONES – Archive Music And Testimonials from Johnny Depp, Martin Scorsese, Iggy Pop ..
THE KILLERS – Ultraviolet
U2 – U22 – Live Double Album (360 World Tour)
U2 – From The Ground Up – Album (360 World Tour)
U2 – Breathe (Acoustic Version For Nelson Mandela ‘Miracle Rising’ Documentary)
JAZMIN BEAN – Worldwide Torture (Universal, Island Records, Interscope Records 2021)
ONEREPUBLIC – Love Runs Out
AMY MACDONALD – Statues (2021)
LINKIN PARK – Lost In The Echo
TOPLOADER – Seeing Stars (2017 Album)
THE 1975 – Heart Out (MFiT Radio Edit/Conversion Polydor)
THUNDER – Wonder Days (Top 10 Album)
SNOW PATROL – Mysterious Ways
THE ALARM – Back Catalogue Album Remastering
MARCELLA DETROIT (Shakespears Sister) – Gray Matterz
THE FRAY – Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World
PATTI SMITH – Until The End Of The World

Find any pro engineer/master engineer and tell me they don't use anything to process dynamics on mixes/masters. Of course they do. It's down to degree - how much you process. If your mixes are not dense you may not need much squashing, even dense mixes can get away with light mastering. I do mainly electronic, so it's completely different to your genres. I do find my dancey beat-based tunes get more heavy processing, but I can get away with far less for things like dub and definitely less for more ambienty music, but even with those - bare mixes just jump all over the place and lose impact. Whatever you call it, if you don't control dynamics in some way, your mixes are going to sound thin and amateur with levels up and down all over the place distracting from the song. TBH even only light compression with only 1 or 2 dB control is going to vastly improve most mixes and might be all that's needed. Electronic music might be using huge amounts more than that. Master engineers want unprocessed mixes only because we're more likely to f**k up the mixes by doing it ourselves badly compared to how they do it, not because they won't squash at all.

I do agree that Eqing can mostly be done at mixing/channel stages. I rarely use much in the way of Eq or any at all. But pros can and do use Eq, especially if it's for getting more than one mix to sit together. Sorry, but I can spot an uncompressed track a mile away - it's the one that sounds thin, weak, disparate. Way back when we released - we tried our own mastering and I wasn't any good at it, but my partner was far better at mixing and mastering than me. I though he did OK, but when we sent off to the label and they insisted on the bare mixes then mastered pro - it was light and day. And we were both astonished by how much squashing had gone on. Still sounded leagues ahead of ours though. I couldn't even tell you what Eq etc they used - whatever we did it was butchered by comparison. I can remember some studio time and it mostly went over my head, but the engineer processed...a LOT. And it all made even our good mixes sound on a different and better level.

If it's for your own home enjoyment, you can leave it as bare as you like. If you want it released etc, you need some dynamic control, end of. Organic vegetables grown with no additives are great. Music is not a carrot or cabbage and it needs plenty of tampering with. Sorry but I see some of the above posts as being pie-in-the-sky.

Short answer - yes. How much is your choice.

[cantaloupe]

Sorry, I'll go opposite and say absolutely yes.

The opposite of buss compression isn't "no compression", it is "no buss compression".

[Blizzy-Blim]

Sorry, I'll go opposite and say absolutely yes. Depends on what your aims are as to how much - from the little you say about genre/style it seems at least you have drums/guitar/bass/vocals so there is some density to your songs and bare-bones mixes are usually not very good IMO. Dynamics are great, but too much in most styles don't lead to mixes that sound like a whole gelled unity song. You said yourself how gluing things together makes them sound better. The vast majority agree with you. Songs that go up and down all over the place just sound thin, lacking power, lacking cohesion and distract from the whole. Anyone who tells you shite like "pro bands don't process their mixes" are talking utter garbage. Of course they do, always have. Huge name bands don't use highly expensive studios and engineers to just record bare instruments. Going way back, mixes were compressed/limited/Eq'd all over the place, often quite heavily. 1176s are not subtle in any way whatsoever but they were and are used all over the place.

Doesn't mean you have to use them heavily. Think of any successful guitar band and please try to tell me of any that used no mastering processes. You will probably struggle, as will those that say no to mastering. Just use Youtube, check out the stats on a wide range of pro songs on there and you very quickly see they are all compressed/limited. Even songs that you think are fairly sparse are often very heavily squashed. Adele - you'd be amazed how squashed most of her songs are. U2 are one of the biggest names that aren't highly squashed but they are still most definitely processed. They obvs do a lot of processing at channel/instrument stage, but their mixes are processed without fail. Here's from Pete Maher's own website:

"Pete Maher is the UK’s No1 independent mastering engineer working with the worlds leading artists, producers and labels. Established in Camden Town, London in 2004. Recent projects include U2, Peaky Blinders, The Pixies, Nick Cave, BBC Introducing, MTV, The Rolling Stones and Eurovision. He uses valve multiband compression and all the best digital plugins to give your mixes more height, depth and volume. Your masters will sound perfect on CD, vinyl and radio and will be fully optimized for digital release. All work is PQ encoded and iTunes/Spotify approved. From hip hop to heavy rock, Pete will optimize your tracks to their FULL potential. As a huge supporter of new music Pete offers lower rates to unsigned artists and independent labels."

Here's just a short list on his site of who he's mastered:
U2 – Invisible (Superbowl Edit)
LIAM GALLAGHER – Live In Blackpool DVD (Upmixed to 7.1)
PIXIES – Baal’s Back (Album)
PEAKY BLINDERS – Full Score 2019 – 2021
KATY PERRY – The One That Got Away
ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY – The Boy In The Dress (David Walliams, Robbie Williams, Guy Chambers)
LA LA LAND – City Of Stars
GOLDFRAPP – Thea (Sa Dingding, Universal China Release)
PAUL WELLER – The Poacher
NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS – From Here To Eternity
DAMIEN RICE – One
LANA DEL REY – Westcoast (Favela Remix – Polydor Official)
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN – Damage And Joy (2021 Remastered For Vinyl)
MAXIMO PARK – The National Health
NEWTON FAULKNER – Live from Somewhere in Europe EP
DEPECHE MODE – So Cruel
BOWIESONGS1 – David Bowie Piano Project By Clifford Slapper (Endorsed By Harry Maslin, Mike Garson)
JACK WHITE – Love Is Blindness
THE ROLLING STONES – Archive Music And Testimonials from Johnny Depp, Martin Scorsese, Iggy Pop ..
THE KILLERS – Ultraviolet
U2 – U22 – Live Double Album (360 World Tour)
U2 – From The Ground Up – Album (360 World Tour)
U2 – Breathe (Acoustic Version For Nelson Mandela ‘Miracle Rising’ Documentary)
JAZMIN BEAN – Worldwide Torture (Universal, Island Records, Interscope Records 2021)
ONEREPUBLIC – Love Runs Out
AMY MACDONALD – Statues (2021)
LINKIN PARK – Lost In The Echo
TOPLOADER – Seeing Stars (2017 Album)
THE 1975 – Heart Out (MFiT Radio Edit/Conversion Polydor)
THUNDER – Wonder Days (Top 10 Album)
SNOW PATROL – Mysterious Ways
THE ALARM – Back Catalogue Album Remastering
MARCELLA DETROIT (Shakespears Sister) – Gray Matterz
THE FRAY – Tryin’ To Throw Your Arms Around The World
PATTI SMITH – Until The End Of The World

Find any pro engineer/master engineer and tell me they don't use anything to process dynamics on mixes/masters. Of course they do. It's down to degree - how much you process. If your mixes are not dense you may not need much squashing, even dense mixes can get away with light mastering. I do mainly electronic, so it's completely different to your genres. I do find my dancey beat-based tunes get more heavy processing, but I can get away with far less for things like dub and definitely less for more ambienty music, but even with those - bare mixes just jump all over the place and lose impact. Whatever you call it, if you don't control dynamics in some way, your mixes are going to sound thin and amateur with levels up and down all over the place distracting from the song. TBH even only light compression with only 1 or 2 dB control is going to vastly improve most mixes and might be all that's needed. Electronic music might be using huge amounts more than that. Master engineers want unprocessed mixes only because we're more likely to f**k up the mixes by doing it ourselves badly compared to how they do it, not because they won't squash at all.

I do agree that Eqing can mostly be done at mixing/channel stages. I rarely use much in the way of Eq or any at all. But pros can and do use Eq, especially if it's for getting more than one mix to sit together. Sorry, but I can spot an uncompressed track a mile away - it's the one that sounds thin, weak, disparate. Way back when we released - we tried our own mastering and I wasn't any good at it, but my partner was far better at mixing and mastering than me. I though he did OK, but when we sent off to the label and they insisted on the bare mixes then mastered pro - it was light and day. And we were both astonished by how much squashing had gone on. Still sounded leagues ahead of ours though. I couldn't even tell you what Eq etc they used - whatever we did it was butchered by comparison. I can remember some studio time and it mostly went over my head, but the engineer processed...a LOT. And it all made even our good mixes sound on a different and better level.

If it's for your own home enjoyment, you can leave it as bare as you like. If you want it released etc, you need some dynamic control, end of. Organic vegetables grown with no additives are great. Music is not a carrot or cabbage and it needs plenty of tampering with. Sorry but I see some of the above posts as being pie-in-the-sky.

Short answer - yes. How much is your choice.

Hey, thank you so much for chiming in. Really considerate and informative response. I always find it interesting when i finally discover who has mixed/ mastered work for whom -Really cool...

Perhaps i should've been more specific in my post?? -It's not that I necessarily have an aversion to compression. I totally use it at-will and am always ready to do whatever is necessary in order to get the job done. Also, I just emailed a mastering engineer to see how he prefers to receive the tracks -My dilemma is that I'm not really certain whether or not I should be doing any master bus processing MYSELF during the mixing stage. I fully expect there to be a bunch of stuff (or not) on my master bus/ track at some point -I just don't know if I'll be the one doing it...

As I mentioned to another poster above, I've noticed even 1 or 2 db gr making my mixes smaller. Also, it just adds another level of complexity to the whole scenario (putting a compressor -or any processing on the master fader for that matter...) which I don't too much care for at this moment in time...

[VELLTONE MUSIC]

I am interested of using professional online mastering for upcoming tracks,but hesitate about cheap services.
Some guys rate 200- 250 euro,other 40-50 why there is such a big difference?
This guy Pete,i'm listening now some of his stuff,nice sound,but why no pictures or list of equipment he is using so on,isn't this standard practice already or i just miss it somewhere on the site....

[kritikon]

Perhaps i should've been more specific in my post?? -It's not that I necessarily have an aversion to compression. I totally use it at-will and am always ready to do whatever is necessary in order to get the job done. Also, I just emailed a mastering engineer to see how he prefers to receive the tracks -My dilemma is that I'm not really certain whether or not I should be doing any master bus processing MYSELF during the mixing stage. I fully expect there to be a bunch of stuff (or not) on my master bus/ track at some point -I just don't know if I'll be the one doing it...

As I mentioned to another poster above, I've noticed even 1 or 2 db gr making my mixes smaller. Also, it just adds another level of complexity to the whole scenario (putting a compressor -or any processing on the master fader for that matter...) which I don't too much care for at this moment in time...

If you're going to use a master engineer, then the odds are almost certain they'll want your tracks unmastered by you. Not even buss compression. Whether they'll want stems to mix or just full unprocessed mixes will likely differ (as will price) but they won't want you buggering up things that they have difficulty undoing. There's nothing stopping you doing some mastering yourself - it's not that bad an idea to try to get a mix version to the kind of thing you want so the engineer gets an idea of the style/outcome you're after, but he'll do his own thing with his own tools on the bare mix. Talking in words about how you want your song to sound can mean complete crossed purposes, so even if you master badly, it might help him know what direction to go in. But you never hear master engineers saying how they love getting home-mastered mixes to fix.

It can be a difficult thing to get over sending someone a poor mix. When you send in a bare mix, you know it sounds pretty rough, and the natural tendency is to try and make it sound as good as you can - by trying to master it. But the engineer is going to know the bare mixes they get are going to sound rough - that's why they're being hired. Of course you can still do whatever you need to in the individual channel stage for the recording, whatever processing you think you need, and obvs it makes sense to get the mix as good as you can - but that means level matching, noise reduction, panning etc, not master buss manipulation. And if your bare mixes are so bad - the engineer will likely tell you what's going wrong and what you need to do to fix some of it. If your mixes really are bad, then probably it's a good idea to use an engineer who will work with stems etc and actually do your mixing and mastering. Which TBH is not a master engineer, but that's the name that seems to be used nowadays.

[kritikon]

I am interested of using professional online mastering for upcoming tracks,but hesitate about cheap services.
Some guys rate 200- 250 euro,other 40-50 why there is such a big difference?
This guy Pete,i'm listening now some of his stuff,nice sound,but why no pictures or list of equipment he is using so on,isn't this standard practice already or i just miss it somewhere on the site....

TBH I'd be wary about using any engineer that boasts about what gear they use. You're hiring an engineer for their ears and mastering skills, not their equipment. Odds are they will have variations of the same gear/sw anyway. If an engineer is trying to hook you by listing expensive gear - dodgy. Also you're getting an engineer for completely the wrong reasons if you hire based on what equipment he has. If you hire a studio etc you might want flash gear etc, but an engineer is not about that - I would expect any engineer hiring out his services to have decent equipment already. I don't need to know what it is and if I'm swayed by what equipment he has then I don't know what I'm getting an engineer for, because I can buy that equipment myself easily. In the same way - do you judge a band sounds better because they use a reissue Moog Mini that costs $12k rather than cheapo plugins? That's a pretty weird thing. Similarly weird to hire an engineer based on what his gear list is.