The Bus Compressor is based on the VCA-type mix bus compressor from a world-renowned and recognized British large-format desktop mixer from the 1980s. It has been used on virtually every hit album and major production from the 1980s to the present day. , so much so that their sound almost became a trademark. This compressor was so widely used that it later became a stand-alone rack-mount unit so that it could be used separately from the large format console. And this brought even more success, something that led to the emergence of many clones in hardware and software that try to imitate it.
This legendary processor has been thoroughly analyzed and measured down to the simplest component, compression curve, soft knee behavior and detection circuit; all of this in order to achieve an exact reproduction of the original that will provide a cohesion to mixes that is often called the "glue effect", where each instrument blends very well with the others and mixed tracks suddenly start to actually sound like "music ".
Like many of our hardware-based modules, we've added several nice and useful features not present in the original; In this case, we have added the "Grit" switch which will reproduce a slight boosted second harmonic distortion from an external calibration unit, a behavior used by many engineers for its more characteristic sound.
The Sidechain HP filter has been added to filter low frequencies out of the path of the detection circuit so that they do not overmodulate the compression, thus avoiding the "pumping" effect at the lower limit and higher ratios. When not active, however, the "pumping" effect delivered by this module is surprising, making it equally comfortable in loud rock or dancefloor mixes.
A 1.5:1 ratio has been added for subtle, level compressions, making mixes "shine" through even compression without sounding compressed.
We like to see it used on your DAW's mix bus, where it was ideally designed to be, but it also looks great on other stereo sources, like drum submixes or parallel bus mixes: this use is also well known to engineers and producers from all over the world, a very effective for "obscene" amounts of compression, punchy drum rooms and creative effects.
