Running your 2-bus full slick

1. What’s a full slick?
2. Why?

My guess is Alan is running thru a console, so it's not really "full slick". (Didn't know what the heck that meant either @johnkenn). Haha.

If I mix on a console I often don’t use anything on the mix buss. I think that’s a bit of a “modern” (last 20 or 30 years) thing to do as console and tape machines have gone the way of the doo doo bird

Interesting.  ITB you are more likely to use 2bus FX, though.  Console emu's on the individual tracks and master don't replicate the vibe I guess.

I usually end up with the Ampex ATR-102 Ultralinear Ampex 456 30 IPS 1/4” setting on the mix buss mixing in the box. Just seems to make the song sound more “finished”

Sometimes with Cytomic The Glue before with a 10ms attack, fastest release. Barely moving. And maybe I’ll mess around with the Chandler Curve Bender or Maag EQ4 because sometimes just a click of low end, or a dip of 160Hz or a dip of 400 or 500hz or a click of 12 or 16K is nice. But if I do more than 0.5dB boost or cut than there’s an issue in the track that I need to address

I don’t have any harmonic stuff on individual tracks very often. I try to just keep it to EQ and a compressor when needed

But, I’ve had decent success with the Studer A800 plugin on drums that are just lifeless or sometimes if they have overly harsh or aggressive high frequency cymbal “shit” 😆 like those insane 15dB spikes that happen sometimes. It’s like cymbal sibilance!

It’s funny I’ve been mixing a record I didn’t track and it’s a struggle, I worked hard to get 4 songs sounding decent trying every trick I could and still hated it, and then mixed 5 songs in 6 hours doing minimal stuff and they sound better

There’s an old saying that if a song isn’t sounding like a mix in 20 minutes just pull all the fader down and start again. That’s not as easy in a DAW. But, I think it’s easy to get lost in the plot/options

If you want the sound of a mix bus compressor pumping the mix, the only way to get it is with a mix bus compressor. And generally speaking, I want that sound. 🤣

John Congelton works this way too. You can hear it in his work. Lots of bold processing choices which probably stand out in starker relief, but things tend to feel a bit untethered at times too.

Even in my budget analog days I had some bus processing going. I like the glue

Welcome back.

I see it as follows. No, you can never achieve the same result without a 2bus processing as you would with one (not saying it's better or worse just that the same can never be achieved). It's just due to the physics of it. An EQ and a comp will work different when activated by all the built up tracks in regards to each other than it would on a single track or even a bus. But it does makes us lazy very easily I believe since a 2bus processing will bring u closer to a result of some sort very fast. Lately I've been going back to check bypassing the 2bus more often just to verify that the base of it all still sounds balanced and intact.

And what kind of defeats the whole mixing with 2bus or not discussion I think is that there are no mixes without the 2bus processing when you really think about it. Either you do it in yourself in the mix and define and commit to the sound of your production, or you outsource it to the master engineer who will make those decisions for you. If you screw up the 2bus, there is way less the master engineer can save but if you nail it, there is not too much work for the master engineer.

Make it sound right. Keep trying things until you know what works for you.

I've been going this route for a while. Just take the 44k mix and upsample to 96k and do the final moves there with a hardware compressor, fusion minus vintage drive, and saturator. Then chain some plugins like Basslane Pro, PQ, Silver Bullet, and Cedar Adaptive Limiter 2. If you've never tried the Cedar, that thing can be incredibly useful if a mix doesn't have the best balance. I've used it to solve issues with mixes done by other people. Cedar allows payments, so you don't have to cough up the full amount. To me, it's 10x more effective than Pro L2. These days we seem to get vinyl releases that have the full dynamics largely intact.

I'm not sure what they do for vinyl mastering, but the needledrop I heard of the new BOC record sounds very, very close to the unmastered mix Don posted a while back. I've been downloading a lot of other needledrops lately because so many albums just sound better at DR10-14 instead of DR4-8. People on forums claimed before that labels would just stick the low DR cd master onto a vinyl disc, but modern vinyl sounds like it came straight from a source with little 2bus processing. I guess that begs the question of what the aim of a lot of 2bus processing is. Cohesion? level? loads of compression and limiting? It may have been a full in bloom Randy Burns interview I was listening to where he said they tried to get stuff right while tracking so that mixing was about levels primarily. He was saying that ITB mixing is completely different from what he did with tape and consoles largely based on how he wouldn't be doing all this processing at the mix stage decades ago. From what I've read about mastering over the years, I guess that used to be a much simpler process too. Simpler meaning less processing. Albini also has that sort of philosophy, I think he called it "mix itself" by putting so much focus at the tracking stage.

I'll say again that using Satin on tracks and sub-mixes makes the cohesion thing much much easier, even against another tape plugin like Cranesong Phoenix. Using Dopamine for that Dolby Type A effect also adds some compression too. Satin in Type A mode is a little more pristine and clear-sounding with less of a compression effect, but cpu limitations don't allow me to use two instances of Satin on every track(or even one instance on everything at times). But Dopamine is still very usable if the recorded tracks are solid.

Another thing I'll reiterate is that I'm not a huge fan of all this 2bus processing. I've seen videos where someone has a 10 or 15 piece hardware or plugin chain and they bypass stuff one by one. A lot of the time, maybe most of the time, I preferred it with certain stuff bypassed. One could listen and see that they could just make a couple adjustments on the other pieces and leave the current bypassed piece on bypass and get a better result. It's very easy to take processing to excess.

I've been running the following for a while. All hardware 2 bus:

LTL RGB's with Pentode circuit and Royal Blue - Wes Audio Prometheus - Audioscape SSL style bus comp, RND 542s. Pieces of that can be bypassed but it's pretty good. Apart from the compressor(depending on how I run it) and the 542s(again depending) it's all pretty light treatment. Just does nice things. Hm.