Ten of the Best: Compressor Plugins 2020

Native Instruments Solid Bus Comp

Price: $99

Among the many functions that a compressor can perform, perhaps the most coveted for producers of electronic dance music is the “glue,” that lovely mojo you get when running summed tracks through a buss (sometimes just bus) compressor. The buss compressor as we know it derives from SSL desks, particularly the G Series, made in the 1980s. The compressor sits across an auxiliary buss and squashes all the tracks passing through it together. The interaction of the sounds all affects the way the compressor works, resulting in an even, overall compression that makes it sound like everything was recorded at the same time—something particularly essential in this day of plugins and in-the-box mixing.

Native Instruments’ Solid Bus Comp is a firm favourite here at Attack Magazine due to its simplicity, low price, and of course ability to get the job done with little muss or fuss.

The panel is well laid out and easily mastered. Your main functions are threshold, attack and release settings, a ratio dial, and makeup gain knob. Input and output gains round off the controls, with a helpful dry/wet mix added for at-once parallel compression (useful for smashing drums while retaining the dynamics of the uncompressed signal). 

A look at the presets on Solid Bus Comp will tell you what this works best on: drums and mix buss. There’s also a preset for backing vocals, so don’t feel like you have to restrict yourself to buss driving. We love it on drums, as it adds cohesion and weight and really brings things alive.