"Michael Brauer is an engineer who uses a technique he originally developed in the mid-1980s working with Aretha Franklin called multibus compression. "
Hello,
Here is a try on a Brauer mix template.
This is a work in progress. Please contribute with your own variations.
The brauerize thing could be dissected as:
- Group your instrument tracks into compresion buses 'by role'. A (top end), B (Base), C (center), D (dimension). Inter-bus sends are allowed.
- Split the lead vocal into 5 parallel compresors. This can allow you to dial in for example 'aggressive' vs 'mellow' by simply varying the mute sends.
- Send to Drive for distortion and to Clean as a path to avoid the bus compression from any of your instrumental or vocal tracks.
It's easier understood by just looking into the attached project.
The idea is to compress with the faders into the ABCD buses. You start mixing and the more you push your fader the more compression you get. As long as you stay within the -20dB mark you get no compression. You go over that you start compressing signals.
Calibration
Bus compressors must be calibrated to compress -1dB when the signal raises -18dB.
If you insert a new compressor in the multibus, then you must calibrate it by soloing the corresponding tone genertor track (called TONE BUS). Then hit play and set the compressor to reduce -1dB and the output not to increase volume.
Latency
Avoid plugins with latency (see Performnce meter).
Because of the intensive use of cascaded parallel buses itīs important for all of the inserted plugins to be phase consistent among them. The DAW is supposed to compensate for latency, but the problem is that some plugins report 0 latency but are phase-delayed at the output.
You can check for any phase inconstency among buses by soloing a TONE generator (ex. track TONE INST) and record the output of the bus tracks. Then zoom in. Just make sure that every track is phase-aligned before trying to start mixing.