Send / Return Compression

Combine the best qualities of multiple compressors, and you can make your lead vocal the star of the show.

Typically, engineers use auxiliary sends for effects such as reverbs and delays. If an aux is sent to a dynamics processor, it’s usually as a way of setting up parallel compression. But it doesn’t have to be...

In this article, I will explore the send‑based compression technique renowned mixing engineer Michael Brauer uses for processing lead vocals in his famous ‘Brauerize’ setup. Matt Houghton briefly touched on this in his October 2022 article about multi‑stage compression, but here we’ll go into detail. Brauer himself credits fellow engineer David Kahne with developing and showing him this sophisticated send/return approach to compression. At first glance, it looks like your typical parallel compression setup, and in a way it is — but the key difference is: there’s no dry signal!

The idea is to send the lead vocal to multiple different compressors, using faders to balance their returns to craft the desired lead vocal tone. So, instead of using only one of your favorite vocal compressors, or two in series, you use them all, independently from each other. They are in parallel in the sense that they each process their own ‘mult’ of the vocal signal, but there’s no dry signal.

Float Like A Bus

The best way to set this up, in any DAW, is to set up a group or bus that ‘collects’ all lead vocals and ‘floats’ them out to the different compressors. This is why I like to call it ‘LV float’, but feel free to use whatever name you prefer. What’s important is that the output of this group or bus is not routed anywhere. We want to ensure it does not pass (unprocessed) audio directly to the stereo bus.

What’s important is that the output of this group or bus is not routed anywhere.

This diagram illustrates the basic signal flow involved in the author’s send/return compression setup.

Next, we need to create mixer channels for the different compressors. In his original hybrid setup, Brauer used five. Now, in the box, he uses as many as seven different processing paths. In my setup, which I’ll describe here, I’m using four different processing paths.

But first, let’s take a minute to understand the reasoning behind the concept. At its heart lies the fact that many compressors not only reduce dynamic range, but impart character to the sound in other ways. Some push the midrange, some put a sheen on top, some distort, and so on. Michael Brauer uses terms like “throaty” or “chesty” to describe what the compressors he uses sound like on vocals. I love this idea of attributing emotional and physical terms to gear and sound.

So, when selecting your weapons of choice, try to think along those lines. I’m sure you have some favourite vocal compressors. What is it that you like about them? How would you describe their sound? What do they contribute to the emotional impact of a vocal? The idea is to find a collection of compressors that sound distinctly different from each other, where each brings something to the table that the others don’t.

A good place to start, obviously, is...