I FINALLY UNDERSTAND COMPRESSION

[willryan042]

anyone name me a good compressor i can dl/buy? atm im using abletons standard 1 and ive heard its a bit aids

I'd also like to know of any good compressor vsts out there.

Also, what's the {DIV} in that equation chaddub? Everything else makes sense.

[sunny_b_uk]

anyone name me a good compressor i can dl/buy? atm im using abletons standard 1 and ive heard its a bit aids

I'd also like to know of any good compressor vsts out there.

Also, what's the {DIV} in that equation chaddub? Everything else makes sense.

my favourite free ones are Endorphin and Classic Compressor. they should be payware id say, theyre pretty damn good!
Classic Compressor has no latency so its nice for dry/wetting (parellel compression) and it adds nice warmth too!
and Endorphin is the only compressor iv heard thats totally "in your face" yet has a clean none colouring sound
for paid i dont know, maximus is nice also i demo'ed a couple voxengo compressors once and they all kicked ass

[Artie_Fufkin]

I feel I must add this:

- Chad's explanation was pretty good but missing what attack and release does : Attack is how long after the transient (peak at beginning of a waveform that triggers the compressor) the compressor kicks in. So if you want a little bit of snap in your snare before you squash it into a brick of noise, you set your attack accordingly to how much snap you want. Less attack means the compressor kicks in faster. The release is....um... "Release time is the time the compressor uses to return to unity gain after the input signal has fallen below threshold."

Here's where I got that quote: http://www.barryrudolph.com/mix/comp.html

-There's some other parameters that may or may not be included with a compressor. To understand those, look at that link above or google/youtube for a tutorial on dynamics compression.
- Not all compressors are the same, as it says in that link I posted. It seems some producers really prefer certain compressors and/or multiple compressors for different jobs.
Take a look at some of the different compressors from Antress Modern: http://antress.blogspot.com/
I think I read somewhere that some of those emulate well-known hardware compressors. I've heard that some compressors color the sound or add distortion/saturation too. Another good plugin is the Ferric TDS, which can add saturation.

-Compressors with a threshold of 10:1 or more (up to infinity, where the compressor pushes anything over down to the threshold) are called limiters.

To me, it seems like most of the things I've recorded (with my humble equipment) have needed a little bit of compression for them to sound "real" to me. I think someone on this forum said that the human ear is a compressor itself, which would explain that. I'm guessing a microphone "hears" a drum/gunshot/anything a lot different than a human ear.

If any of this is untrue, someone please correct me! I'm pretty sure I've got this straight.

[Y_H]

I rarely use one.

[ChadDub]

anyone name me a good compressor i can dl/buy? atm im using abletons standard 1 and ive heard its a bit aids

I'd also like to know of any good compressor vsts out there.

Also, what's the {DIV} in that equation chaddub? Everything else makes sense.

It means divide.

[SunkLo]

Chad let's get this straight. You are not now, nor have you ever been a 'beast'. You just post noob threads big upping yourself and posting swag photoshops. Get off it son.

All compressors are far from the same. Feedback vs Feedforward, attack and release curves, saturation, frequency response, loads of differences between compressors. You might be thinking of eqs, most of the clean modelled ones are pretty much the same, but there's still some phase differences between them, not to mention analog modelled ones.

Whether compression is necessary depends on your source material. If you're using vengeance samples that have already been compressed to piss along with a square wave synth without a lot of dynamics, compression will do very little. But if you have organic sounds, compression is clutch for keeping things audible. Compression on the drum bus is vital, along with parallel sends for sound design, reverb, etc. Transient designers and expanders are awesome too, all the other dynamics tools never get any love.

[therapist]

Chad let's get this straight. You are not now, nor have you ever been a 'beast'. You just post noob threads big upping yourself and posting swag photoshops. Get off it son.

All compressors are far from the same. Feedback vs Feedforward, attack and release curves, saturation, frequency response, loads of differences between compressors. You might be thinking of eqs, most of the clean modelled ones are pretty much the same, but there's still some phase differences between them, not to mention analog modelled ones.

Whether compression is necessary depends on your source material. If you're using vengeance samples that have already been compressed to piss along with a square wave synth without a lot of dynamics, compression will do very little. But if you have organic sounds, compression is clutch for keeping things audible. Compression on the drum bus is vital, along with parallel sends for sound design, reverb, etc. Transient designers and expanders are awesome too, all the other dynamics tools never get any love.

+1 on Chad being a klunt.

[ChadDub]

Guys, would a not beast be able to make THIS?

Soundcloud

No I didn't think so.

[-[2]DAY_-]

As far as I know all comps are the same basically. idk.

[ChadDub]

DUDE

I SAID IDK

IDK

MEANS

I
DON'T
KNOW.

[SunkLo]

Jefferson was actually asian and had three testicles. Ghandi was fond of fingering his bottom while masturbating and secretly wanted to be a famous ballet dancer. Sadly he had to settle for jazz performances in front of his drinking buddies. Also I invented the first manned aerial vehicle, it was a helicopter with one blade and had a snowcone machine in the back. IDK.

[psychedelicatessen]

Say you have a kick drum and it's weak and it's peaking at -8. Change kick drum

Fixed.
Just kidding, not trying to be a rude tnuc.

Compressors are really nice tools and all, but I use them on maybe one or two tracks these days, and any ratio higher than 3:1 is too much for me. I don't like to hear them working, and I don't really care to bump up the rms on my drums, because they're always the loudest part and I've encountered the problem of people telling me "turn your drums down and the rest of the stuff up man."

Not to mention that with percussive instruments, there is a really quick attack, and the transient (at least to me) seems to make up a huge chunk of the way it sounds, not to mention is the highest peak of the sound. Short attack times will "dull" the sound, prime example being a kick drum. If you compress it with a very short attack time, it sounds more like a thump, and compressing with a longer attack time will leave the kick sounding like your average kick drum. This is personal choice, as sometimes I like the sound of a heavily compressed kick drum in a tune.
However, if you have a longer attack time to prevent changing that transient, when you reach for the makeup gain, you'll boost the transient past the original peaking point (or I have shitty plugins) and instead of the kick peaking at -8 after makeup gain, it'll probably peak around -7. So you'll only end up turning it down back to -8, thus making the whole reason you reached for that compressor useless.

I'm no expert by far on compression, but more often than not, drums don't need compression usually. I've found that the bus compression after I group my drums together is sufficient enough for dynamic reasons. /rant

[ChadDub]

Well without compression, this would sound like shit:

Soundcloud

[Artie_Fufkin]

[ChadDub]

jelly on toast
bitch I'm a beast
I eat your mom's pussy
like a thanksgiving roast

[SunkLo]

Compressor -> Limiter =
No more stray peaks and you still get to keep your snap!

[Kaslo]

I've always found compressors to be kinda like calculus, to be honest.. You can read explanations about it all you want and think you understand it, and make sense of what the examples are saying, but you can just as easily forget it the next day and get utterly confused as to what each parameter does. Just like calc you'll only learn by practice practice practice

[Electric_Head]

jelly on toast
bitch I'm a beast
I eat your mom's pussy
like a thanksgiving roast

that was lame

[legend4ry]

I remember when swag meant something was sheitty, how slang changes.



I didn't read the whole thread but this is how I learned..


If you want to "hear" how a compression works (for our friends who find this stuff hard via text).


Grab your compressor on a kick drum.

TURN DOWN YOUR MONITORS/HEADPHONES

Put the threshold to as far down it can go.

Ratio 0:0.

Attack : 0.

Release : 0.


Then play your kick and move the threshold up slowly and you will hear what the compressor is doing.

Now take it back to where it was before you moved it back up.. Now mess with the attack, take it back to 0.

Now the ratio move it up slowly so you can hear how each thing is effecting the kick!



You don't need the terminology or be able to explain the ins and outs unless you're studying music so don't worry about knowing everything about how you do something just know how to use it effectively.

- Hope this helps.

[SunkLo]

Schwag vs swag, different things.

The ratio would need to be something higher than 1:1 though, otherwise it wouldn't do anything. A good way to set attack and release times is to do something similar, set the ratio as high as it goes, set the threshold fairly low, set the release to moderately long depending on the signal. Start the attack at 0 and slowly pull it up until you have the desired amount of snap, then adjust the release until it has just the right amount of bounce and it has let go fully by the next hit. Then adjust your ratio for how much compression you actually want and adjust the threshold if necessary. Note if you raise the threshold, the signal will fall below it quicker (depending on the sound) so you might have to lengthen your release a bit.