Just wanted to hear some peoples thoughts on upward expansion..

I know Bob Katz has some very interesting techniques using low-level upward expansion rather than compression, but i rarely put it into practice myself other than standard expansion to un-compress a maximized mix.

Does anyone use it on a regular basis?

Hard to beat for adding density to otherwise sparse program material...

quote:

Originally posted by Earwax-Audio-Mastering:

I know Bob Katz has some very interesting techniques using low-level upward expansion rather than compression, but i rarely put it into practice myself other than standard expansion to un-compress a maximized mix.

Does anyone use it on a regular basis?

I've used something similar on a couple of tracks that were a bit flattened at mix. It was a bit mad, but I had to bandpass the upper mids, and upward expand that with a very low threshold to open it all up, and put it back in and compress it again. Not subtle, but at least everything was audible and still separated, and it was on a punk band (as in a 70s UK group) so subtelty and smoothness wasn't exactly conspicuous by its absence.

I took this approach because everything else was sounding like I was just brick-walling it, and I kind of stumbled across doing this mad thing, and it worked.