building my own 4 band compressor

B

banjo71

New member
I'm a novice at mixing, and a clueless novice at mastering. But anyway, I have a good song I've mixed pretty well I think. At least I'm happy with it. I wanted to see what happens if I take that song and try mastering it in Pro Tools. I wanted to use the EQ - Multiband Compressor - General Compressor - EQ - Limiter - Dither chain. Except I need to upgrade my Waves C6 seeing as it doesn't work in PT 12.5.2 on Win 10. So I built my own multiband compressor using 4 EQ bands on 4 auxillary channels. Does anyone else do this? I'd rather have the C6 plugin, but I got a pretty good sound out of it after farting with it for a few hours. I'm going to try and attach a picture of my screen shot making the print audio.

pt mastering.jpg

I used Pro Tool's Channel Strip for compression and post eq, then added a stereo image to each band. Along with all these changeable settings and the volume faders, there are so many ways to get different sounds. I don't think this is how anybody probably masters, but I don't care...lol
 
First thing - Understand that the (probably vast) majority of mastering engineers use maul-the-band compression as an absolute "last resort only if the mix is so screwed up that nothing else will fix it and I can't get a remix" tool. It's a band-aid (no pun intended) for a broken leg.

No matter what the marketing department says about it being the "Mastering Engineer's Secret Weapon."

You've essentially built an "old school" maul-the-band compressor -- Back in the day (before they really existed), we'd use multiple compressors after a crossover -- Basically, a LMH PA system setup summed back to stereo.

Long story short - If this is working for you, there you go. But I'd much rather find out why such extreme measures are needed and fix that instead.
 
Massive Master said:
You've essentially built an "old school" maul-the-band compressor -- Back in the day (before they really existed), we'd use multiple compressors after a crossover -- Basically, a LMH PA system setup summed back to stereo.
Click to expand...

And one problem with that sort of thing is phase at the crossover frequencies. The variable gain of neighboring bands effectively moves the crossover frequency around so even if you got it in phase at the crossover with no gain reduction the effective crossover frequency, and the phase relationship between bands, will change when there is different gain reduction. It's a variation on parallel eq with the same basic problem.
 
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