A Possibly Wonderful Example of Overcompression

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BrentDomann

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Well, I have been demo-ing some new tunes with a singer lately, and I was just mixing this one tonight. Everything seemed to work out fine until I mixed down and polished a little with a plugin. For fun, and since the song is called "Rain," I went 110% cliche and added some rain samples. In order to preserve the amazing dynamic range of rain and thunder, I wasn't using the limiter on my mix much (on a -4dB threshold with my mix RMS after limiting running still maybe at -18dB during the quiet parts of the song and -10dB during the louder parts) but when the song gets going at about 1:45 the drums just lose all of their punch.

I'm not 100% sure it's overcompression, but I have a hankering that that is what is doing it. I'm going to mess around with the compressor a bit, but I bet there's an EQ trick somewhere that can help too. If anyone has any tips, they'd be appreciated.

By the way, if I am right about the overcompression, well, here's an example of dynamic range before the limiter kicks in and absolutely no dynamic range after it does.

File (direct link):




And remember, it's a demo! A good demo, but a demo nonetheless.
 
Not bad.

Honestly, I would just turn down the distorted guitars relative to everything else. When they kick in, they overwhelm the mix. And if you find you're over-compressing everything to keep up, just turn them down.
 
Yep... I think steve is right.... the guitars are way too loud. When they hit the compressor hard, it will do nothing except drive the apparent volume of everything else down. What are you using for drums? It sound like to me that they could use some more EQ and compression on each individual drum, and compress the guitar at the track level too. That way, when everything gets to the output buss, that limiter/compressor will barely need to work to glue everything together.
Overall, I think it's a good sounding track. Good job there, michigander!


Peace!
 
Opened it up in Sound Forge to see what the file looked like.....
 

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