Composed and captured on a snowy day in Minneapolis (despite a total fail on my part in capturing my snowy surroundings), this crisp electronic track was my first foray into using the physical modeling engine on the Mutable Instruments Plaits, and I remain pretty satisfied with the timbres I selected. The modules themselves, however, are not going to be the focus of today's post.
Instead, let's talk about the importance of a single piece of gear in my (and potentially your) chain: the SSL bus compressor. When you hear famous audio dudes in mix/recording magazines talking about "gluing" their mix together, about 90 percent of the time they are referring to this inimitable piece of dynamic range reducing goodness. How is this relevant to modular world? Because this incredibly quick, incredibly squash-y compressor uses VCAs not remotely unlike the twelve or so in my modular rig to surgically compress the final mix and, for lack of a better buzzword....glue the damn thing together. There I said it. Fine, I give up. It really does glue the mix together and lives somewhere in the spaces between transparent and vibe-y compression in a way that is difficult to quantify. Their are a ton of DIY kits available that can put this kinda mix bus compression in your world (I have the superb OVERSTAYER SVC which adds some additional master bus specific functionality like eq and saturation) ... and I cannot recommend it enough for electronic musicians trying to self polish their mixes at home before posting. The difference between the stuff I do live on the road and the masters I'm able to compress at home is night and day!!
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