how would you describe/explain the term called glue mentioned by many mixing engineers regarding compression, thanks!

 

it's kinda like how 2 or more in the trunk still sound like it's coming from the same car.

 

It's interplay between elements.
In bus compression case, it's signal power interplay, when drums and bass overpower and damp everything else under them. If subtle, it imitates how our ear reacts to loudness and feels like all the sounds come from the same space.
In case of bus saturation, it's intermodulation distortion. Once again, if subtle, it feels like it unifies the sound sources.

 

Equalising loudness of the compressed elements - making the compressed track sound more flat or "glued".

 

Perfectly put. Which begs the question why spend so much time getting instrument separation to only want them to gel back together again at the end. Oh the madness of mixing!

 

That pretty much describes what I heard on a mix of mine after adding a glue-style compressor.
In my case the vocal got seated into a pocket of guitars, everything held together and nicely present.

Haha, indeed. I does make sense if you think about it though since mix separation and mix glueing don't counteract each other as they achieve different things.

First, you want solid separation of instruments so you have an easier time "digesting" the mix in your head.
Unclear mixes are tough to listen to, especially when you try to focus on one specific instrument.
Glueing the mix together afterward is then supposed to improve what's already there, the mix gets more exciting to listen to as it sounds like one coherent thing coming out of your speakers or headphones.

 

That's why I neither separate or glue anything anymore.

 

but i guess you basically clean the dirt around them before putting them back together? which makes it stronger? unless you were not referring to eq'ing i guess maybe its different what u said

 

he is talking about doing work to avoid frequency masking, or overlap of frequencies created by two or more instruments occupying the same sonic space.

But for the music genres I am into, the glue effect is most commonly used on the drum subgroup mixbus. It puts the kit pieces all into the same space, without making them sound stacked up on top of one another. .

 

By the way frequency masking can also be seen as the third type of "glue", partially doing the same thing as IMD.

 

Well, it all depends of the situation, and as someone said, it's not necessarily applied on every thing.
The drum bus is one classic place for glue compression.
Multi part guitars too. You may equalize 3 different guitars to "separate " them by frequencies, and once done, you want to fusion them to sound almost like one big guitar. That's 1 example of separation, then glue.
Horns or backing vocals can also be treated that way.

Sometime it could be called fusion instead of glue.

 

Last edited: Aug 12, 2022

Michael Brauer is famous for separating 4 groups of instruments and applying different aproach and compression to each one of these and then sum it at the 2buss. Separation -> submix glue -> 2buss glue. Bus compression can be a very nice tool to separate those you don't want together and blend those you want together. Don't treat it like it's a different scenario, because it isnt

 

THIS!

It's stripping away the essentials so that they glue together in a uniform manner, instead of overlapping each other and nulling each other out.

Think of mixing as building a walkway with a bunch of stones. You could throw them all down and walk on them, might fall, might not be a good walking experience, but if you layed them flat so that they contour each other you could walk a lot easier. This is totally just a metaphor before somebody decides to jump down my throat.

Glue is making those "stones" or "instruments" sit on the "walkway" or "mix" more uniform for better walking upon or "listening experience".

 

Cohesiveness, (the right)groove or movement.

 

In practice, a glue compressor on the mix buss makes e.g. drums fit nicely the rest of music. Without such a compressor they tend to either make too much noise and stand out too much or drown in the mix and have too little punch.

 

Last edited: Aug 12, 2022