Don’t Overload Your Tools

The more you push your tools, the more side effects you create. 

Side-effects? 

Yes, off the top of my head:

• Phase shift.
• Pre-ringing.
• Post-ringing.
• Aliasing distortion.
• Intermodulation distortion.
• Increased floor noise.

And that does not include the collateral effects of heavy processing musically affecting things that you’re not actually targeting.

Now, you don’t have to understand what those side effects mean technically. Just know that they exist and the harder you push your tools, the more they come into play.

So what to do when there’s a task that requires heavy lifting?

Rather than pushing individual tools hard, do a little bit of processing at several stages.

This reduces the strain on your tools, fulfilling the task with less side effects.

Example:

I have an old breakbeat I want to bring up to modern standards. To do this, I will first need to do a lot of cleanup to make it easier to work with. Then I’ll focus on the dynamics, tonal balance, saturation, and stereo image. 

To do this, I will use a long chain of plugins.

I might do a little bit of dynamic EQ first, and then a little bit of static EQ on top of that. 

I might apply subtle transient processing from 2-3 different tools, each serving a similar purpose but doing their thing a little bit differently under the hood.

And so on.

Each tool is doing just a little bit of very focused work. But the cumulative effects of this process are night & day. 

This way of working allows you to achieve maximum punch and clarity because it keeps those nasty side effects at bay. 

To see this process in action, you can check out one of my videos in Patreon:

Processing a drum break – Loxy: Exodus (Resound remix).

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