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Rock music has stuck with the formula its fans know and love: big, bombastic drums, walls of distorted electric guitars & at the front of it all a singer belting out powerful, brazen vocals. A distinctive tonality comes with nearly every voice in rock that exudes confidence and authority in a way that no other genre consistently does. As the mix engineer on those sessions, how can you be sure that you’re enhancing your singer’s performance to showcase those features?
Truth be told – turning up the gain on the amp and the effects of gain reduction aren’t very dissimilar at all. They both add harmonic distortion and saturation to a signal. They both work to effectively even out the peaks of a signal, resulting in a smoother, more even sound. So if they’re virtually doing a lot of things the same, how does gain reduction stand out from other processes in the recording studio?
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So what’s an engineer or mixer to do when their cleaned tom tracks don’t have the same body and decay they did in the session?
At their core – Gain Reduction Deluxe & Gain Reduction 2 have all been developed for just that purpose: the reduction of gain. But what exactly does that entail, how does it work, what makes it different than everything else, and most importantly, why do you need it?
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Vocal compression is one of the few subtle techniques used in the studio that have been carried from decade to decade in the studio. Even before hardware compression was introduced, engineers would naturally overdrive their hardware or tape machines for an organic, natural compression – what many today simply refer to as saturation.
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