Michael Brauer's Parallel Compression Magic on the Rolling Stones' 'Saint of Me'

The Rolling Stones’ 1997 album Bridges to Babylon was a genre-hop that mixed blues, gospel, and electronics – and engineer/mixer Michael Brauer was a big reason why it didn’t fall apart. Brauer mixed about a third of the tracks, including “Saint of Me,” and he brought his trademark “Brauerize” parallel compression technique to the sessions. Instead of the usual single compressor, he ran the drum bus through multiple compressors in parallel, each set to grab a different part of the sound – one snare, one kick, one overall punch. The result was a drum sound that felt both huge and tight, aggressive but never flabby.

On “Saint of Me,” this approach turned Charlie Watts’ steady backbeat into a shotgun blast. The track already had a stuttering gospel organ riff and Mick Jagger’s snarled vocal about a religious hypocrite, but Brauer’s mix gave it an almost digital shove. He pushed the drums forward so they locked with the organ’s accent pattern, and he used harmonic distortion (another Brauer staple) to make the bass and vocal sit in the same gritty space. The song’s chorus hits like a brick – that’s Brauer slamming the compressor threshold just as the band cuts in.

Interestingly, Brauer had never worked with the Stones before this album. He flew to Los Angeles, set up his gear in a rented space at Sunset Sound, and the band sent him digital multitracks. They approved his mix of “Saint of Me” almost immediately, which surprised even him. The track became one of the strongest on the album, and the Stones kept Brauer around to mix their next record, No Security.