Confused about vocal sends, aux's etc.

[tempe]

Bussing vocals to more compression only tends to be a problem when you have overlapping lines as the tail of the last line will duck the beginning of the new one

Nothing a little automation can't fix though, generally I bus all vocals of each kind to a respective bus and treat them as one track, so I end with a bus for cleans / screams / backing vocals and gangs. I do this so I have less faders to deal with and to save a little CPU.

 

[crillemannen]

Also crillemannen, I'm a bit confused when you say you would use l1 limiter, then compression? Don't you normally put limiter last in chain?

Well i use the L1 to take away some dynamics and like a gain button so that i can hit the hardware compressor even harder. So the needle stays at -20db haha. You wont get ugly artifacts driving the hardware madly hard as you would have gotten if you used a plugin.

 

[amarshism]

Except Tempe, that when you're riding into buttloads of limiting and compression, you sometimes have to move the fader fucking heaps to get the desired ride. Ime anyways. Not saying its not doable as obviously you must work that way, just annoys me the way I do it lol. If I have vocals that overlay quite a bit ala bury your dead, I'll set up two busses so it's always line a, then line b. Sometimes bussing those two together for a touch of glue and final tweaks but no major compression or limiting, I'd just run into the same problem again

 

[JayB]

Thanks for all the tips! Lots of great help here.

 

[TwoGOneSee]

Doubt there is a way you "should" be doing anything. But if it helps you out, I have comps and eqs on each vox track. then route those to a aux that has delay and limiter on it. (i dont use verb on vox)

^ THIS (but heavy on the "do whatever sounds good" ethos)