Loudness & Rear Bus

Hey Andrew,
thank you for this amazing breakdown!

i saw that you didn’t use a lot of compression in the Mix, but your Mixes are often very loud like you also mentioned. How are you able to push a Mix loud, but keeping it dynamic and clear without using much compression, clipping or limiting on individual elements and with using only a single limiter on the Mixbus (all in the box)? ^^

Also why did you choose to compress the left and the right side different with a Dual Mono Compressor on the Rear Bus and don’t just use a Stereo compressor for the Rear Bus?

best regards
Jannis

Parallel compression will bring the level of the mix up without increasing the level of the transients, so the limiter won’t be working much harder than it would without the parallel compression. Lately I haven’t been using very much parallel compression either, so my mixes are a little quieter than they used to be.

I just like the sound of the multi-mono compressor. If something loud happens on one side, the other side doesn’t pump. It’s really just personal preference.

Thank you very much!

On this mix your parallel sends were much lower than the uncompressed tracks. In the past we’re your parallel sends a similar loudness? Also are you level matching the output of the compressor plugin or just adjusting the fader on the parallel track in your template?

I’m also curious if you think you not using as much parallel compression is a reaction to an industry trend of moving towards less compressed mixes (ie. The end of the loudness wars) or not needing your mixes as loud to stand out?