ashcat_lt
Well-known member
There's nothing wrong with the OP idea. It's perfectly valid and actually makes plenty of sense for a lot of things. Sometimes I actually do this "destructively". Apply Item/Take Volume envelope as necessary to hit the compressor consistently. Often some long RMS compression to level things even tighter and then whatever "transient shaping" is necessary. Then I'll just render that to a stem and apply automation to that to make it follow the actual dynamics of the mix.
There are a number of other ways one might handle this kind of thing, too, depending on about everything.
One option would be to automate the threshold of the compressor to be lower on quieter parts and higher when the input is louder.
Another was kind of a fad for a minute. A variant of parallel compression that was called "two stage compression" where you do like normal parallel compression then run the mix of dry and compressed through another compressor. The parallel compressor is set to handle things in the quiet parts, but then as the input gets louder, at a certain point it will basically mask the compressed signal and then you set the second compressor to handle those louder parts. I've honestly never tried it, but it was all the rage in the TapeOp community a few years ago. Here's a vid explains it. He shows mostly drums, but does mention doing it on Vox too.
There are a number of other ways one might handle this kind of thing, too, depending on about everything.
One option would be to automate the threshold of the compressor to be lower on quieter parts and higher when the input is louder.
Another was kind of a fad for a minute. A variant of parallel compression that was called "two stage compression" where you do like normal parallel compression then run the mix of dry and compressed through another compressor. The parallel compressor is set to handle things in the quiet parts, but then as the input gets louder, at a certain point it will basically mask the compressed signal and then you set the second compressor to handle those louder parts. I've honestly never tried it, but it was all the rage in the TapeOp community a few years ago. Here's a vid explains it. He shows mostly drums, but does mention doing it on Vox too.
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