Tape, saturation on 2-bus; limiting

Videos Tchad Blake Mixing Arctic Monkeys
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Hi Tchad. I really like this whole album and the two Shadow Puppets records as well, so great stuff to see you revisit one of the songs. Two things that caught my eye:

  1. I know you’re big on tape/saturation on the 2-bus and I tried to incorporate that into my workflow as well. Do you look at the meters and try to stay away from the reds when it comes to these plugins? If so, does that add enough of what you’re looking for? I was maybe under the wrong impression that you need to push into these sort of plugins more to get that extra harmonic touch on the mix bus.
  2. In terms of dynamics, I saw you used a limiter on pretty much all of the main buses that sum into your 2-bus (lead vocal, bass, drum bus) with quite a bit of gain reduction showing around -4 dbs at times. Is that something you do often/all the time? Anything special that you do to make sure enough dynamic range is retained in spite of bus limiting?

Thanks a lot!

Bogdan

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The signal coming into my stereo bus is quite low. Usually around -15bd so I’m not hitting those very hard. Most of time I don’t prefer hitting plugins hard. Digital anomalies at hi levels aren’t often desirable to my ear (totally unlike the analog world). This is why I use so many plugins. Each one does a fraction of what it’s analog counterpart would do but sums to give me the flavour of the analog.
To be clear, I’m not trying to sound analog. I don’t care. I’m just looking for a flavour I find interesting.
Most of the time many of the group bus comps aren’t engaged. Lead Vocs, yes. Drums, yes. Stereo bus, always.

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Thank you Tchad. All clear. I appreciate the reply.