Using a Vocal Subgroup When Mixing

If you have 3 voices (each on their own track) in a podcast episode and you want to use the same plugin (say, a multiband compressor) on each of the 3 tracks, essentially you have two choices:

Put an instance of the multiband compressor on each of the 3 tracks. In this case the computer has to process 3 separate plugin instances.

Buss all 3 tracks to a vocal subgroup and put an instance of the multiband compressor on that vocal subgroup track. In this case the computer only has to process one plugin instance, which will lessen CPU usage and speed up rendering time quite a bit.

On my typical vocal subgroup when mixing podcast episodes (and I don’t always activate every single one of them, but) I use multiband compression, saturation, limiting, reverb, de-essing, and perhaps one or two other secret sauces 😉 Booyah!

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