I typically think of “Glue” in stages. My first step to “Glue a mix” is compression. I am currently mixing a country EP. Modern country is hard simply because they want vocals LOUD, LOUD, LOUD. Drums need to be powerful yet sit very behind the vocal. On the mix I did yesterday I used a parallel drum buss to really beef up drums and then took the parallel drum buss and sent it to another parallel buss. Both of these parallel busses make the kit sound like it has muscle. You can have drums quiet and they still sit in the mix.
I really try to mix the first stage of tracks without any F/X and make a great dry track that works. After that adding verbs, delays and modulation f/x do the final stage of glue. If done right I can often get away with only a smidgen of delay on vocals and a little on snare. Rarely do I put reverb on everything unless it is a softer jazz or classical recording.
OK so I tried some reverb on the two-bus of my most recent mix (tried it before many times) and this time I preferred it. I wouldn’t say it made eveything sound in the same space, it was more a suggestion that all elements were part of the same recording. I guess you could say that’s semantics but in my mind’s eye ‘space’ was not brought to mind. But it did apply some glue, so on it goes!
One side-bonus:
I often agonise over whether to keep something dry or to put reverb on it, for example backing vocals. These decisions were easier for me because in the back of my mind I knew that even if they were dry, they were going to get some two-bus wash anyway.
I’ll accept the semantics. I just uysed “same space” because reverb is space in my mind’s eye.
And I share that dilemma over whether to add verb or not to individual components (they cary depending on the track) .
And I love that “two-bus wash” phrase.
Understood, but’s also the same notion that many others put forward, and I’ve never been able to wrap my head around it as a concept, whereas gluing a mix together - I can totally comprehend that one.