reverse audio before compression

[capitalK]

hi all,

i'm sure this has been discussed here before....
i've been tracking one of my own bands and have decided to take a little time to try this technique.
i flipped the snare and then compressed it, and using it to reinforce the original, uncompressed snare sound to great effect.
i've also used the technique on the bass, and wow, did it make a difference!
when i was listening to the original bass track, i had eq in the box scooping out the 300's mud, comp and then a bunch of eq after the fact to make it sound larger, but it wasn't quite "in the pocket".
after the reversed compression, i turned it around, scooped the 300's out in the board and it sound amazing!
thick, full and always where it needs to be down low.

i've been arguing with myself and just wanted to bounce this off you guys...
my question to you all is:
is it worth me doing this with all of the groups?
or am i just doubling up on what should happen in mastering....

i used josephson c34's on the toms and love the tone, fair amount of cymbal spill tho...
will the cymbals just turn into a splash, washy mess if i try this on the drum group in your opinion?
i want to avoid gog at all cost...

the beds are all tracked live (three piece rock band)and i wanted to achieve something wit a live, raw feel, but a reasonably polished sound without killing all the dynamics...(dont we all!)

[GlennS]

Hi Karl, thanks for reminding me of this technique. It's something a heard about back when I only had tape & never got around to trying, then I forgot about it. I'll have to try it now that it's much less cumbersome to reverse the audio in PT.

What do you mean by "what should be done in mastering." Personally, when mixing, I always aim to leave as little for mastering as possible (how close I get may be another story, but that at least is my goal). I think you should do whatever you can to make your mixes sound as close to perfect as possible. If you don't know if trying this on all of your groups will help then perhaps it's worth trying & then at least you'll know!

[capitalK]

Hi Glen,

i guess that I'm referring to my past experiences with mastering engineers, where if something is already "over compressed" depending on your definition of the term, they will usually say they cant do much with it...

this is probably a hang over from when i've sent mixes of my band (not necessarily recorded by me) to mastering and being disappointed with the results... usually an in the box mix and plug in city

i've since had great success with mastering engineers, and seem to have front of mind what mastering will do to the mix. eg, make the snare dominant to account for the inevitable limiting that will occur... perhaps i need to wipe the slate clean and make the record sound as finished as possible as you say...

i suppose it's worth trying, but reversing and recording each group flipping it and making sure i'm getting the effect right (because you cant really tell until you flip it back around) takes a fair amount of time.
if i do it in groups (eg all the drums minus oh's) i'd have to experiment with the balance a fair bit i think.. reverse, comp, flip, listen, adjust...
might well be worth it to get that little extra magic tho...
how do i explain that amount of time spent to my partner tho! haha... ummm, the reason i didn't come home last night is....well...

the whole this is definitely made easier by using DAW to flip... it's fun to... i had quite a few song ideas come from listening to the bass track in reverse.. and a rew bits of guitar spill that led to some Hendrix inspired reverse guitar into noise ect...

[The Tasmanian]

Do you really need that much compression on everything?
A good player/good mic technique/ nice mic pre's/good A to D and a really good mix - then you should not need heaps of compression on everything.
Unless you are going for a super smashed up hyper compressed rock thing.
Where reverse compression is best is things like piano chords where you don't want the release of the compression to upset the harmonics in the decay. sometimes bass on a player who has bad technique....
Anyway - for what its worth, I feel that the better you get at the craft of recording and mixing - the less compression you need - I do a bit on bass, vocals and snare, a touch on toms - maybe room mics to spice them up - but rarely overheads, guitars etc. I use fader rides before squashing stuff like overheads
Mastering is your friend in making a track "loud" -
concentrate on great mixing and let the mastering guy do the loud stuff - and also, a good mix means the mastering guy does not have to do massive amounts of compression.
That's my 2c after doing well over 500 albums...... I used to compress and EQ a lot when I did not have the experience.
I don't want to come across as anti compression - just sharing my experiences...

[capitalK]

hi chris,

all very fair and valid points!
i'm not looking to super compress the entire mix, when i used it on the bass, it was at a 3:1 ratio, and was fairly subtle really. but it really helped the overall tone and kept the bottom end there in the pocket, and i'm using a fraction of the eq that i was before i compressed it

i really like the tone that outboard comps add to the mix... like running a signal thru a dbx160 to get a grungier or thwacky tone, but not cook it in any way.
maybe i treat the compressor as more a tone effect than a fixing tool.

i dont mix into a buss compressor anymore. i generally like the mix to sound open overall. if i've compressed the individual elements, everything's generally sitting where i want it.
perhaps i'll try it on drums and run it parallel to the uncompressed signal.

i know for a fact that i always want to fiddle with the knobs on the console and outboard gear... another bad habit i've developed over a few short years!! they're just so damn inviting! haha. i restrain where i can.
probably due to the fact i have waaaaayy to many pedals in my guitar rig, i'm always giving them a tweak.

anyways, always good to bounce these things around with you guys, open up my thinking a bit more.

[Hybrid88]

Thanks for posting this. An interesting technique, I'd never heard of that before - have to try it sometime

[Ben M]

Hey Karl

I've found this technique only really works well (for me anyway) on bass and vocal. I'm sure you are doing this, but when you flip it back spend a moment making sure its all aligned well with the original.
I don't use the new file along side the original because I find there's sometimes a little comb filtering going on. And I'm only ever compressing the flipped version 2 db or so.

It does do wonders for bass though

[capitalK]

ta Ben,
yeah, i lined the compressed track up under the original, but i ended up filtering out a lot of bottom end out of the original bass track and putting some distortion on it. sounds pretty cool, but i'm yet to have a proper listen to see if it has any adverse effect yet. critical listening at mix time will give me the oppertunity to scrutinize this.

the running parallel idea was more for the drum tracks. in a normal compression situation on drums, i'll send them to a stereo group and comp that, leaving the original drums open, that way i can really smash it up if the song calls for it and keep the original untouched.

[capitalK]

Hi Richard,
it's definately fun, and something i've only read about previous to this.

when i used it on a solo snare drum, it created a gated effect, wich was really cool.
i think generally i't would work better on signals that have a slow releas, thickening out the tail of the signal without to many crazy comp pumping you might otherwise get when you really give it to the comp.

try it on your friends.

[Manning]

PT 10 has the reverse plugin feature now built in - you can keep the waveform in normal mode but apply the plugin to the reversed wave. Saves a few steps of editing.

[capitalK]

that feature sounds very handy. can you listen to the effect and adjust it before applying it? or do you have to render the effect to the reigion at all?

no good for running to outboard comp, but you cant have everything....

[Manning]

I only saw it at a PT10 demo, so I haven't tested it first hand. But as far as I could tell there was no pre-rendering required and you could tweak away.