Question

I always work with several VST Instruments at a time but this one thing has always confounded me. When I use a drum VST, whether it be impact or something such as Kontakt with GGD, compressor plugins do nothing. I ALWAYS have a compressor on my mix bus. I Mix into it. However I also have it so sudden surprise volume spikes get snagged and if a VST Synth or drum has one of these spikes, the compression plugins don't catch it. More importantly, as a producer it means I can not tell how certain drum sounds are going to feel in the mix with bus compression or anything. Is this something I need to turn on in the options or a flaw? I can't seem to find the answer anywhere

Answer 1

Do you see a green Z anywhere in your mixer? Are you using software monitoring for virtual instruments (which would make them green Z monitored?) If so, you could be running into the latency limits of Green Z monitoring. Plugins will start to be disabled in the monitoring path if your latency rises to a certain amount.

For songs where I need to run VSTis through mix bus processing, I set them up specifically so this will all operate within the constraints of Green Z monitoring (because I find it more useful than turning off Green Z/Dropout Protection by setting it to Minimum)

If none of the above works or applies to your situation, hey I tried!