Don't randomly change things
I got this email a few days ago from a mentee, talking about a mix update that they’d made:
I gave it a makeover with the Plugin Alliance mastering arsenal and the Plugin Alliance vocal chain. I feel like the song has lost a lot of its depth and interest in switching out the master & vocal chains for superior plugins. Do you have an idea on how I can reinject that dimension back in?
My reply: yes; take off all the new processing and put all the old processing back on!
Wholesale switching out of bus processing midstream is typically on a spectrum between "risky" and "bad idea." Busses touch the entire sound (master bus) or large chunks of the sound (vocal bus, music bus, etc).
When you change the processing on your busses, even in seemingly small ways, you're changing how everything interacts. When you full-on swap out plugins on your busses, those aren’t small changes, those are big changes. And in this case it seems like those changes were made kind of randomly! Like this legendary cartoon:
It’s okay; we’ve all done it. So if this is you, don’t beat yourself up.
The takeaway: don’t change things randomly, or because you feel like you “should” for some reason (having better plugins available, a shouty how-to video you saw mid-mix, general feelings of self-doubt, etc).
And be very careful in general about changing things toward the end of a mix that touch the mix in a sweeping way; it can go awry quickly. If you feel like you want to make sweeping changes, it might be better to start another mix.
Oh no — jamie