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Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 4:37 am
by DeadlyKungFu
seriously sticky worthy. 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) <- 5/5 sunglasses at night smilies.

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 4:43 am
by Pitch Black
mercyplease wrote:Numpties I can think of a gazillion better ways to add distortion rather than through and aux send. The only way I would ever use it on an Aux is if I had the channels pre fade otherwise its a pile of crap because your distortion is highly affected by the level of your signal so if you have multiple sounds being sent through your aux sends it will affect the sound of your distortion.

Over the past few years every fucker out there has become an engineer and the reality is that good engineers are few and far between. you think cause you have a daw and a few plugs your suddenly an engineer, BULLSHIT BABY!. And this quote thats so common
There are no rules
Well yes and no its a fine quote for amateurs to use on forums but talk to any engineer who uses lots of distortion you will find in every case they wont strap a distortion on an aux return. there are much better ways to use distortion. This sounds like the beginner who puts a compressor on the aux return. Oh sure there are no rules and Im sure some toddy got a great result with added phase for good measure.

I can imagine Butch vig recording his guitars clean and strapping his footpedlas on an aux return channel :roll:
A "pro" engineer wouldn't dismiss ANY method out-of-hand. I'll stake my Curriculum Vitae on it.

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 9:28 am
by dr.wackler
mercyplease wrote:This sounds like the beginner who puts a compressor on the aux return.
Actually it's quite common for sound engineers to put compressors on aux returns and then mix the compressed signal with the uncompressed signal. Especially usefull in surround mixing, or to apply compression to split bass frequencies of several channels.


Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 9:41 am
by hoffman2k
Pitch Black wrote:
mercyplease wrote:Numpties I can think of a gazillion better ways to add distortion rather than through and aux send. The only way I would ever use it on an Aux is if I had the channels pre fade otherwise its a pile of crap because your distortion is highly affected by the level of your signal so if you have multiple sounds being sent through your aux sends it will affect the sound of your distortion.

Over the past few years every fucker out there has become an engineer and the reality is that good engineers are few and far between. you think cause you have a daw and a few plugs your suddenly an engineer, BULLSHIT BABY!. And this quote thats so common
There are no rules
Well yes and no its a fine quote for amateurs to use on forums but talk to any engineer who uses lots of distortion you will find in every case they wont strap a distortion on an aux return. there are much better ways to use distortion. This sounds like the beginner who puts a compressor on the aux return. Oh sure there are no rules and Im sure some toddy got a great result with added phase for good measure.

I can imagine Butch vig recording his guitars clean and strapping his footpedlas on an aux return channel :roll:
A "pro" engineer wouldn't dismiss ANY method out-of-hand. I'll stake my Curriculum Vitae on it.
How can you really argue with a PRO like mercy :wink:
The dude got skillz. Just look at the many sticky worthy posts this dude has.
You can learn a lot from this guy. Unfortunately the knowledge you get from him is more suitable in the field of psychology instead of audio.

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 1:47 pm
by Pitch Black
anyway not to spat in this otherwise useful thread.

Nice posts Matt - thanks!!

8) 8) 8) 8) 8) Now if you could please pull back the curtain and show us how to write a synth hook as killer as "Sunglasses at Night" we'd all be deeply indebted to you! 8) 8) 8) 8) 8) :D :D :D :D :D

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 4:39 pm
by dj superflat
i love people categorically stating what pro engineers just never do. and, of course, it's always false, because real pros will try just about anything to get different sounds, for inspiration, etc. and there've been so many records made that people have tried everything not just once, but hundreds of times.

put another way, there are guidlines, but there aren't rules. so put whatever you want on a send (even if only to irk mercy).

Posted: Fri Oct 20, 2006 6:36 pm
by DeadlyKungFu
you guys seriously made me laugh my ass off!!!! :lol: :lol: :lol:

That song did have a killer synth part in it!! nice ears!

Posted: Sat Oct 21, 2006 6:36 am
by Electix88
Niceeeee, thanks for the link. 8)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 11:58 pm
by djsynchro
There's a name for using a compressor in a send/return configuration:
Parallel compression, and it's something all pro engineers know about.

Parallel compression is for example used in mastering to mix compressed and original signal and get compression whilst preserving transient detail.

For drums there's a technique called "New York compression" Where you squash the hell out of a drumset (with for example a 1176 in all buttons mode) on a bus and mix that under the dry signal.

More about New York compression here:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/showthread.php?t=82888

Last video on this UAD page shows parallel compression with their Neve compressor plugin:
http://www.uaudio.com/webzine/2006/october/index.html