Making the M7CL sing
I’ve been blessed to spend the past 4 years or more mixing on some really great, really big desks. When I first arrived at Kensington, we owned a Yamaha PM1D that, while I’d had previous experience on years before, I enjoyed learning inside and out. Then 2 years later we changed directions and embraced the Digidesign (now Avid) platform. Along the way I also was able to get my hands wet a bit with Yamaha M7CLs.
There are some tricks I’ve learned along the way from absorbing content from accomplished engineers in the field that made life mixing on the Venue and PM1D a bit easier and gave me better mixes. A new challenge since coming to NLC.tv has been trying to find creative ways to get the same bang for the buck out of the M7CL. I had already started exploring some of this process in my last few months at Kensington but I’m working now to flesh them out a bit more. I’m going to share some of my favorite M7CL tips and tricks over the next few entries (there’s too much here for a single post).
Today we’re going to tackle parallel compression. I’ve written on this before, as have others, but in its simplest form, parallel compression means double bussing a set of inputs to two different signal paths on the console. In the first path, everything remains clean and unprocessed. In the second path, a nice compressor is placed over the signals and they are compressed as a group, usually pretty hard with variable attack & release times depending on the song. Then the clean and squashed signals are recombined before going to the stereo bus on the mixer, for me usually at a 2:1 ratio of clean to squashed. This is especially magic for vocals and snare/toms for me. Mixing the styles of music that I do, vocal intelligibility is normally one of the most important goals I’m fighting for and getting the vocal to sit nicely in its place with the rest of the band can be challenging. Since I started implementing this parallel compression trick last fall, it has done wonders to the ease with which I can accomplish vocal consistency I really like. It becomes an even more powerful tool the larger the vocal group becomes. At Kensington it was normal to only have a single lead vocal and perhaps a BGV or two. At NLC.tv, 5 to 6 vocals is the norm with sometimes as many as 7 or 8 on a given weekend.
Doing the parallel compression thing on an M7CL is really easy. First, I like to set up 2 busses as fixed busses instead of variable so I don’t have to worry about making sure the sends to them are all at unity. This can be accomplished under Bus Setup in the console setup menu. Next, as long as I have enough mix busses available, I like to set up one buss for the clean group and just call this one VOX. I unassign the VOX channels themselves from going straight to the L/R buss and instead route them to this VOX “subgroup”. While I plan to keep the processing here as clean as I can, especially the larger the vocal group you have, it can be really handy to have a single place you can grab an EQ and deal with a problem area that effects all of the vocals during the heat of mixing.
Now I also route the VOX channels to the 2nd group that I call VOX Smash. This group is setup just like the first one except on this one I engage the compressor on the buss, set to a 6:1 ratio with a medium attack and release. The M7CL has an excellent feature called automatic delay compensation so even though the same channel is going through two signal paths with different processing times, they stay perfectly in sync so that when they are combined into the master L/R buss, they are still in phase with each other.
If you’ve never tried this concept before, I can’t suggest strongly enough that you do. I always had the preconceived notion that a trick like this was only available to execute on larger desks but have been very pleased with the results I can achieve on our M7CLs and have started sharing the love with all of our engineers on this easy and effective mix technique.
10 Comments
Leave a Reply
Introduction
My name is Tim Corder. I started this blog in February 2007 because there were so few of what I considered good church audio resources available at the time for my team. Fast forward over 5 years and I'm still at it, sharing learnings about the journey towards making audio great. I go through periods where I post a lot and other times when I don't. I'm thankful for the opportunity to share it all with you. Thanks for visiting! 
Just curious if you still put compressors on the individual mic channels as well?
I’ll normally still do gentle compression on individual voices as needed…just to smooth things out. Parallel compression is more of a group thing to me…a tool to gel the whole getup of vocals or drums together and help them sit better in the mix. Does that make sense?
Great tip. I might try it this weekend. I’ve been running the Rack compressor called Comp 276 (which appears to copy a Urei), one side inserted on a mix for lead vox and the other side inserted on a mix for bgv. This thing sounds great! I wish that Yamaha would make the first four rack spaces available for something other than EQ’s, because the rack has a bunch of good stuff in it.
What is the purpose of the first group that you setup? For example, I have an SC48 and I send all my vox to group 1 (which has the Vox Smack plugin enabled) and I send that to LCR. Then, I send all my individual vox channels to LCR. Same concept, right?
The first group gives you an uncompressed bus to combine with a compressed bus. I find that I like being able to adjust that balance on a master/global level for VOX. If the uncompressed were just routed to left/right, it would be more difficult to adjust the ratio between conp-uncomp. If I had more busses I would do the same for my kit buss but there is no room so the kit goes to left/right and a smash buss as you describe on your SC48.
The uncompressed buss is also handy in the heat of battle to have a place you can quickly EQ all of the vocals as a group if something gets out of hand in a full room.
Tim, are you saying that the Venue and the PM1D have the sync feature automatically working in the background? What is the compression doing on the smashed group that enables you to bring it up under the clean channel with having feedback issues? I have tried this before with two groups with neither having compression and getting below average results. BTW, we have no processing except for system processing.
Great article.
Hey quick question.. do you put your lead vocal in the groups as well?
I usually just put all of the vocals in the groups…both uncompressed and smack. I know some guys put energy into changing the routing of vocals both to these groups and to effects on a song by song basis. I guess I don’t lean into either the compression groups or effects that heavily to think much about this very often. My philosophy is to have tools that are simple and ready to be put into action because the time I have to work with when building a mix is so tight.
When I am mixing a band with a clear lead vocal front man and BGV group, I may only put one or the other in the smack group. When mixing worship, the whole vocal group goes in because through the course of a 5 song set, the lead vocal often moves around the band and I just want to treat everybody as a cohesive group.
Yes a lot of digital consoles have the automatic delay compensation on some level to correct potential timing issues if channels were assigned to multiple busses in the desk. By combining an uncompressed group with one that has heavy compression, often times you can get some of the benefits of the smack but it is more subtle then just compressing the individual channel and calling it a day. I’ve found you’re exactly right that just like anything else, the key to making this work is in moderation. Normally I’ve found my ratio to be at least 2:1 level wise of the uncompressed to compressed group…often times it is more like 3:1. Just a little bit makes a huge difference and too much will sacrifice gain before feedback in a hurry.
Great article Tim!
A few M7CL specific questions about this trick (sorry for the noob questions)…
1) Do the Vox and Vox Smack mixes occupy each one of the 16 available MIX bus channels? (or do you use the “Matrix” bus instead?
2) Do you send these two mixes directly to your main out?
3) Would you combine the two into a single DCA mix, to control overall vox level with one fader?
4) With this setup, if you need to change levels of individual singers, do you still do that on the actual singer’s channel?
I phrased the questions so that you’d be able to give quick answers without wasting your time.
Thanks for your ministry!