Push frequencies into dynamic processes

Longer-term readers of Jamie’s list have probably picked up on the idea that I like to foster systems of interactivity within my mixes. It makes everything feel more alive — and also it reduces the burden on me of having to think of everything!

If I can set up an interesting bussing schema, with some sort of dynamic process living on it, anything going into that bus will compete for space — and that can lead to results that I wouldn’t necessarily have come up with on my own.

When I talk about “dynamic processes,” of course there are the obvious ones — compression and 1176- or Fairchild-style limiting. That’s kind of the old-school perspective on this thought. Think of a classic drum bus: you put all the drums into an aux, and you put a compressor or tube limiter on the aux return.

And that’s fine! It works in a lot of situations, and it’s a perfectly valid thing to do. But these days I find myself more interested in next-generation and nonlinear dynamics processes.

Tape is a biggie. Especially crappy tape models. When you push a few signals into a crappy cassette model, they will compete in unpredictable ways. It can be kind of like soft-knee compression with an infinite ratio? Or like a weird elastic lo-fi limiter. I love SketchCassette and Fuse TCS-68 for this. The UAD ATR-102 is also excellent in this capacity if you use the lower tape speeds (and of course it shines in hi-fi capacites also).

I’m also a fan of soothe2 on ad-hoc busses: drums, guitars, and vocals often get some soothing around here. soothe2, if you’re not familiar, is a dynamic resonance suppressor. And when you combine a number of signals together, and then suppress the resonances on that combination, you can arrive at a sort of “group sound” for the bus, in which one sound tends to dominate and push the others out of the way a bit — but in the frequency domain, not in the loudness domain.

And here’s an excellent and extremely useful twist: when you’re using busses to aggregate signals, and treating them dynamically, you can influence the outcomes greatly by pushing frequencies into the dynamic treatment — either via EQ on the individual channels or via EQ on the bus itself (placed before the dynamics plugin).

The dynamics approaches that I like to take tend to be downward in nature — everything I mentioned above exerts a limiting or compressing effect on the signals coming into it. But they do so in a nonlinear fashion, meaning that the results can be a bit unpredictable.

For example: if you make a drum bus, and you put tape on it, and you push a bunch of 8000 Hz via an EQ right before the tape, you can get a lovely smearing of the hi hats and cymbals along with the top end of the snare drum. And the snare drum will kind of dominate whenever it’s hit, pushing the metal bits out of the way, but not in a compression sort of way — more in a saturation sort of way.

Similarly, if you put a limiter on a drum bus, and then push low frequencies into it from the kick channel, you can get your kick drum to sort of duck the rest of the kit — but really fast and smooth, so you almost don’t notice it’s happening. But the kick will just sort of effortlessly speak, in a really natural way. If you tried to do this with compression it would sound really obvious.

Or imagine that you are working on a rock mix with a couple of super-aggressive guitars that are a bit too forward in the pain frequencies. You could put the guitars into a bus, and put a lo-fi tape treatment on the bus, and push the bad frequencies into it hard. Those frequencies will saturate. Then you can put a corresponding EQ dip after the tape plugin, to set that frequency range precisely where you want it.

You’re effectively just saturating and compressing that frequency range — smoothing it out while also giving it more harmonic interest and detail! It’s magic. You can do this with vocal busses too.

By setting up situations where sounds interact in busses with unusual dynamic treatments, and by pushing specific frequencies into those situations, you can cause interactions that you might not think of on your own. And frankly I can use all the help I can get — so I do this a lot. Thinking of everything on your own is exhausting.

What happens if I do this — jamie