having the classic setup of a high-level compressor. Changing the Master Release and making the release times significantly faster will still preserve transients and markedly increase the average level.
Multi Electro Mastering
The other end of the spectrum, insofar as the mastering goes, with much more aggressive settings throughout than the Opto setting described previously. With fast attacks and releases, deep Range, steeper slopes, ARC system, Electro release behavior, and hard knee, this one is starting to be a little dangerous if you push it (although certainly not over the top). With this setup and the Multi Opto Mastering preset as bookends, there are many levels in between to provide varying levels and behaviors. Working with both of these presets defines a very broad range of high-level compression settings to create. (We’ll leave that to you!).
Adaptive Multi Electro Mastering
The same as above but with –12dB sensitivity in the Adaptive control. This will let you see how the adaptive behavior loosens the attenuation for a band when there is higher energy in the band below. Try toggling between the Multi Electro and Adaptive Multi Electro to audition the de-masking that the adaptive control makes. You can try to further raise or lower the adaptive control and if you raise to 0dB or higher for hyper adaptive behavior you may want to lower the thresholds for the top 4 bands and see how they become more dynamic and hyper sensitive.
UNcompressor
Since there has been so much work done in the direction of multiband compression and limiting, it seemed only fair that a preset that tried to go in the other direction would be added. Admittedly, there is most likely a bigger challenge in undoing an over-compressed signal than in the original mistake! Wideband upward expansion is probably the first method you should try (with the Waves C1 or Renaissance Compressor), unless you can positively identify a mix that has already had some multiband or DeEssing (parametric) type of compression misprocessing. Otherwise, trying to use a multiband upward expander to fix a mix that had wideband over-compression is not advisable, as the gain changes applied in the first place would have been across the entire band. However, as flexible as the Linear Phase Multiband Parametric is in the other areas discussed in this manual, it certainly is equally capable of producing amazing UN-compression in the multiband arena. Keep in mind that the attack times are what create the transients, and if you’ve already got good transients in the mix but the audio after the transients is what is over-compressed, make your Uncompressor Attack time longer, to avoid making even bigger transients. Soloing each band and adjusting its Attack and Release times so that the transients are natural, the compression is relieved and the audio sounds more relaxed and open is the trick.
The preset has not attempted to set attack and release times, as this is so highly dependant on the source material, we simply set all 4 bands to attack times which are moderate for the frequency band, and equivalent release times across all 4 bands.
