Voxengo TEOTE automatic spectral balancer plugin released – Page 5 – Effects Forum

It’s very easy to overuse multiband compression. I used to overuse it and it would introduce a ridiculous amount of phase distortion. The track would occasionally sound ‘better’, but then it would begin to sound much worse on a second listen. Every time you listen to a track that’s been heavily processed through a multiband comp, something is bound to be off; in other words, it can completely destroy the balance of your track and in such a nebulous way you will never know what hit you. This is why it’s better to avoid it as a sweetener, it’s completely not about that.

If you don’t use MB compression as a way to fix things in a makeshift manner, you should think of it as another flavor of regular mixbus compression i.e. 2-3 dB reduction max. I oftentimes use different ratios as well as attack and release settings when compressing the low end and the rest of the track. It’s simply because different bands may require different compression settings. If you have a lot of high frequency content, then you can also introduce another band with different compression settings fit for the high end. But overall, I would say multiband compression should be seen as just another form of glue compression, as something very subtle. It can completely destroy your mixes unless you know and hear what you’re doing.

TEOTE and dynamic equalizers are about taming resonances and things of that nature, so it’s much surgical than a regular MB compression, which is more about broader strokes and taming large portions of the frequency content rather than about reining in spikes and very specific frequencies.