Multiband Compressors, how should they be used?

[dboy1612]

Chango loves using Multiband compressors all over his mix from what I've read, but how exactly are they used? Only example I've found so far is crunching down the bands ~4db and bringing the gain back up again like so. I can hear that for example guitars feel a bit tighter, but not 100% sure I'm doing it right.

EDIT: Forgot picture.

 

[egan.]

I'm sure people will hate this answer but if you don't have a clear goal when multi-band compressing you are far more likely to do damage than good.
For me it's about addressing issues (palm mutes are too big, sibilance, etc) but if you really want to learn how to use them, start with one band and get a comp going and then split to two and see what that buys you and then work your way to 3.
If you just start banging some reduction on 4 bands you're likely to cause weird eq changes that get ugly at the crossover points and potentially phase smear.

 

[He's Dead, Jim]

The point is to compress only certain parts of the audio. If you have a rhythm guitar where the palm mutes are too loud, you could just throw a normal compressor on, but that would compress both the highs and the lows, and your problem isn't the highs. So put a multiband compressor on, make a band from 50-200 (or wherever you think the problem area lies with the palm mute) and bypass the other bands, and compress it like you would anything else, thinking beforehand about the attack/release/ratio settings. Don't use presets; they're worthless for this kind of thing. Just play around until it sounds good. I've never needed to use a multiband for guitars but I would think that, since palm mutes start off at a normal volume and get louder over a second or two, you'd want a medium attack and a slowish release, so you catch the thumpiness but don't castrate the guitars, and the release will let it fade out like a normal palm mute.

Multibands are really for solving problems in difficult or muddy instruments or vocals. They're great for bass sometimes, definitely for vocals, and occasionally for guitars where the mic'd cab was too thumpy, but if you just want to tighten up your rhythm guitars I would use a normal SSL channel compressor or something. Ola uses the stock Cubase comp in one of his videos and it just adds 1-2db of "glue" by evening out the volume of palm mutes and normal notes.

 

[Hawkevil]

It's all been covered pretty much but when I was learning about multiband compressors, one simple way of looking at it that I read was to think of it being like a dynamic EQ. Like the examples above. You have your palm mutes that create more bass than the rest of the playing so you don't want to lower the bass with an EQ but you do want to lower them at each palm mute. A multiband compressor allows you to target that zone of frequencies only when it's needed.

I know it's pretty much what has already been said and is a bit more complicated than what I said, but thinking of it as a dynamic EQ allows you to recognise when to use it a little easier.

 

[TPMusic]

I quite enjoy multiband compression and everyone has addressed the idea of it. I just wanted to mention that you can try it in place of EQ, for example on vocals which want to usually sit on the top of the mix. In a dense part of the mix maybe the 400hz wide cut sounded good, but then when you reach the less dense part of the mix the vocals are sounding thin, if you use a multiband for that then the vocals will usually be more consistent.

Just one idea.

 

[dboy1612]

Thanks for all the comments guys, gave me a much better idea on how I'm going to take it from here.