Quote:
Originally Posted by kirk1701
Okay, I'll bite. Splain how.
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Well I guess when it comes to the mix bus all I end up doing is loudness leveling and peak control. Smash it down to constrain the loudness range some and in the process give it some of that glue and cohesion that we’re looking for. Then I just found off the tippytops of the loudest peaks until my overal crest factor sits where I want. If I’m mixing, I don’t need any fancy limiting here, just good predictable soft knee but hard ceiling saturation.
I have two presets that I made for ReaComp that I just toss around my mixes like salt and pepper. They go on individual tracks, in amongst chains of other plugins, sometimes in multiples or different orders. They can go on buses and always end up on the master.
Lookahead Leveler does exactly that. Precomp all the way up, A and R all the way down, RMS time 500ms because it’s double the maximum precomp, on a mix bus, the ratio is usually just 1.1 but you can get pretty aggressive on other tracks. Then bring threshold down so that it just barely does anything in the loudest sections. Then bring the knee down so it’s barely doing anything in the quiet sections. Then mess with those two controls til you get what you want.
Rail is named after the “voltage rails” that constrain the outputs of analog stages. It’s just sample by sample curvy saturation with a good hard ceiling. All time four constants at zero, ratio infinity and knee at 6. You can mess with the knee to get some different feels, but I found that 6 comes closest to the tanh saturation I had been using. If you want it to act like an input gain or one of those maximized plugs, turn on AutoGain, set the wet slider to your ceiling - the loudest single sample you ever want to come out of the thing, and then bring the threshold down until it does what you want. It works as well as any other straight saturator. Better than some. We usually try not to push this too hard at the mix stage. It generally doesn’t take much. You can get more aggressive with it at earlier stages. In fact, it’s because I have this at various stages along the line in the mix that I don’t need quite so much at this point.
So but then I use ReaEQ on either side of the lookahead leveler for emphasis/deemphasis. Well the first one focuses the action of the compressor - usually shelving out some low end and often really pushing the upper mids and air bands. Then the second one sort of corrects for that but also just shapes the final overall balance. Both of these are also “bookended” with a highpass down around 20 and a lowpass up above 19K. There can’t be any EQ after the rail, because that could cause peaks to overshoot our hard ceiling and defeat part of the point.