So I have a tune where I go from saturated chord work at the beginning of a chord progression and by the end it evolves into a chuggy, palm muted solo-ey thingy.
Problem is, I have to set the VU meter to have a low volume on the open chord work, say -6/7, because by the time the chuggy stuff comes up, the VU peaks almost over 0 and into the red. The bass transients are different, I guess. There's a definite thump to the palm muted stuff that isn't there in the open chords. I love that, but it comes with its problems.
Question is, how do you tackle this? Should I tackle it? Will something like an compressor level things out? (It doesn't help much, from what I've tried, using my limited knowledge of how to set one up).
Any ideas? Should I worry about things like this?
Ideally I'd like to raise the volume of the open chords, tbh.
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One more thing, if you want the compressor to even out the volume of your guitar parts, make sure you keep it last in the line of effects.
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Maybe try a light limiter on the Main bus also as experiment.
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Before non-linear editing was a thing you'd just ride faders on the console between the quiet and and the loud parts, but that isn't necessary now.
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In which case cutting into sections might not work unless there are natural places where each processing change could occur.
If that's the case you could use some automation to bring in processing to tame the low end as the part progresses, maybe a low cut. might also be worth looking at dynamic EQ or multiband compression if all you need to do is tame the low end on the chug riffs while leaving the rest of the signal relatively untouched.
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1; is the actual sound happening in the room what works best for the song? ie if going to palm mutes = much louder sound, is that definitely what you want? If so, move on to 2. If it's actually not what you want, change the settings, or the mic technique, or the guitar you're using, to make the part more coherent over the course of the song. Because if it's turning into a problem on record and it's *not* what you want it to eventually sound like, it strikes me that it's an easy problem to resolve at source.
2; if the change in volume is a technical problem in terms of peaking, that's easy to resolve by turning the mic's input gain down. If it's an artistic challenge in that it doesn't fit the song, you can either go back to 1; and try to change the source, or you can deal with it in mixing. Simple volume automation is the most powerful tool you have, I think. Beyond that any technique listed above is valid, from compression to MB compression to EQing out low end resonances in the palm mutes to splitting the performance into multiple tracks and processing them accordingly. Once it's a mix decision I think you take whatever route to a solution feels most natural to you, and that's not something someone else can decide really.
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that way you can totally bypass any fiddly automation or processing.