Series Compression

[Sthauge]

I was listening to some 70's-ish stuff this weekend and just really admiring how smooth things were. Really smooth, but also really open, unlike some genres today that are really smooth and crushed. Any guidelines on achieving the former?
Donny

Well, I grew up in the 70's ad 80's. Let's take a bit history first. Back then, in the era of good, high quality and expensive hifi, we measured the quality in S/N ratio, freq response etc. as of today, but if you should have top notch hifi you looked for the slew rate performance of the amplifier. Today I guess most do not even know what slew rate mean, so slew rate is the power amps capacity to build voltages quick when a transient occur. I remember that a Peavy CS 800 (2*400 watt) was capable to deliver 20 volts pr microsecond. The best amp I knew of was a Tandberg 3000 series poweramp that deliver 120 volts pr microsecond. It was all about transients back then for the hardcore hifi enthusiasts.

So back to today: compressors can crunch your transients and make your mixes totally dead or as Alan Parsons(sound engineer on Pink Floyd - Dark side of the moon) say "When you compress something that's already been compressed it loses everything, it loses its life" and "MP3s are the worst thing to happen to the music industry in years.". Both these statement relate to crunching your transients and remove freq that are "not necessary". The bottom line here are - if you want music with life, air and space, DO NOT CRUNCH THE TRANSIENTS with compressors.

To be practical how to preserve your transients:

- If you have to compress something, make sure the compressor let the transients trough with slow enough attack time.

- use parallel compression instead of compression in the signal path. I'm very often have 3 mixbuses for parallel compression - vocal, drums and instruments, this because they need different settings and gain.

- compression on the masterbus to "glue thing together" very easily remove the transients and all your air and space is gone.

- If I use a masterbus compressor I always use a multiband compressor and only in the mid-low end. I almost never compress anything above 800 - 1 kHz and only 1 dB or 2 from 200 - 800 Hz with relative slow attack time. Below 200 Hz I might do some more aggressive compression just to get the lows right.

If you listen to many mixes of today you will hear the music is only "between your ears" as I like to describe it. It's flat and one dimensional. There are little or no 3D room around you. You can eg. hear the reverb making distance but it's still "between" your ears, it's not in a space around you. Your imagination of a 3D room do not exist, there's no dept in the mix due to missing transients. I'm not talking about binaural mixing though, but a feeling of space, air and room that are present if it's done right.

Hope this can give some ideas for making good mixes with air and space and the vibe of the 70's

S :-)