I notice that other DAWs like Ableton and Logic have dedicated “Glue Compressors” for adding cohesion to parts in a mix. Do either of Renoise’s built in compressors work well as glue comps, or do you guys have favorite 3rd party plugins for accomplishing this effect? I don’t really get it TBH, but with our new #Sidechain superpowers, it sounds like this is one of the main uses of sidechain in other DAWs.
a glue compressor is basically a very very light compressor with high attack and little ratio (max 2:1) and a soft knee… You can achieve this with any compressor.
BUT, a synonym for “glue compressor” is “bus compressor”, and you got one in Renoise
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Ah, very helpful, thank you!
Some freeware bus compressors you might find useful:
DCAM Freecomp (ssl semulation): Win and Mac
HBC: Win only
For sidechain: Meldas MCompressor is a good option. Very flexible with the drawable custom-response curves
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I think MCompressor actually is the best freeware choice, because you also can draw your very own compression shape into it. So a ton of compression variants are possible, for example real upwards compression.
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Definitely the most flexible. HBC is very good at weighty but fairly transparent bus compression though and can be quick to dial in. It also has a nice feature of blending between RMS and Peak compression.
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Be sure to check out Klanghelm’s both freeware compressors, they’re excellent at adding glue. They’re so cheap and good I’m sure you’ll buy them at some point too. No copy protection, so none of that ilok nonsense and all that. The SDRR2 distortion unit is excellent at adding cohesion to your mix, so be sure to check that out as well.
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Thanks all. How do these freeware compressors compare to the Renoise Bus Compressor mentioned above? Generally I find the quality of most of the stock plug-ins in Renoise is pretty good – how are these better? Especially now that we can sidechain and sculpt curves in the LFO tool, same diff, right?
Also, is this discussion related to New York (parallel) compression? I recently bought I Love New York from Baby Audio and Outlaw Compressor from WA Production but haven’t yet put then through their paces to see which is useful where.
From what I remember (I don’t use NY compression all that often, I prefer saturation), it’s an extreme form of compression you usually do on a send track and then you mix it in with the original audio source to boost the overall RMS level of the audio. The aim of this is to “thicken” the audio track. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
But it’s a different thing than bus compression. I guess NY compression is more about “enhancing” the audio, whereas glue compression or bus compression is about making all things sit together better in a track. You can usually achieve this through some subtle compression (2:1 ratio, 2-3 dB gain reduction max) and some subtle distortion/saturation.
If you use an SSL-style compressor emulation for glue compression, you can also make transients pop in a very distinctive way that many people find pleasing. This technique was apparently used across the board back in the day because of prevalence of these SSL compressors in SSL consoles and the specific kind of sound they would produce.
Try this for group track or final mix
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