Friday, February 12, 2016

Vocal Compression - Bus Driver & MJUC Jr.

Last week I worked out a nice-sounding vocal compression process. The goal was to figure something out using free plugins. Since I was able to get the Bus Driver for zero dollars I decided to play with it as well. What I came up with essentially is a dual-compression chain: two compressors with an equalizer sandwiched in-between them.

First, I had IK's Mic Room providing the tone I wanted, followed by a gate to remove as much background noise as possible. I'll note here, though, that the gate was bypassed at this point because it is nearly impossible to hear the noise without the two compressors working...

I put the Bus Driver in the chain after the gate. I used an 8:1 ratio and set the compression level to give me something like 3 to 5 db max attenuation, as shown in these two images:



The tube driver knob can be used to dial in a fuzzy tube-like distortion, which can be a nice effect.

The next thing in the chain is an equalizer. It doesn't matter what eq is used, as long as it is able to give the desired shaping to the sound after the Bus Driver.

Next up is MJUC Jr. Use the fast time constant and an aggressive compression setting that gives you around 10 db or more attenuation, then raise the makeup gain to bring it back.


Once you've got these two dialed in, your vocal should sound thick and juicy. All that remains is to go back and activate the gate, which should be easy to adjust accurately now.

No comments:

Post a Comment