If you can’t, try turning threshold even further down to get more gain reduction. On the contrary, if the answer is no – and the balance is still an issue that remains – try to adjust the fader again to find a balanced point. Compressing too much adds up quickly and you could end up sucking all life out of your song. Try to turn the threshold up a little bit, and match the volume and see if you could get away with a little less compression for more natural outcome. If the answer is yes, the compressor has done its job. Ask yourself: Did you get more stable a track and solve the balancing problem? Then use the make up gain to compensate the “lost volume” so that when you bypass the compressor, the overall volume of the track doesn’t change. Lower the threshold so that the meters shows 3 – 6 dB of gain reduction at most. A preset gives you a nice starting point with attack, release and ratio, but you still have to adjust threshold and gain, because the person who made that preset has no idea how loud your track actually is. Insert a compressor on the vocal track and choose a vocal preset. Preset as a starting pointĪt this point, you have the vocal track on good volume most of the time (except the quieter parts). If using compressors is completely new to you, start out the following way. Let’s continue with the earlier example, lead vocals, but this time focus more on to the “how” part. It shows how many dBs of audio is turned down. When using a compressor, you want to focus on the gain reduction meter. ![]() There’s also an Auto Gain function, but turn it off as you want to match the gain manually. The point is to “make up” the volume loss that is made by compression. Gain (make up gain) is used to lift up the overall volume. Ratio of 1.5:1 reduces the audio just a little bit, whereas 12:1 hammers it down like crazy. Ratio determines how aggressively the compressor turns down the audio. If the threshold is set to 0dB (which is usually the starting point), no gain reduction is happening. You have to turn down the threshold to increase gain reduction. Threshold chooses the point where the compressor “starts working” and starts turning audio down. The faster the release is, the faster it will reset before the next transients arrive. Release determines how fast the gain reduction resets. Use slow attack for more energy and fast attack for more sustain and fatness. Think it like this: the slower the attack, the more dynamics and transients are preserved. Īttack determines how fast the compressor reducts gain of the audio. A bass player can’t play as tightly and consistently as is needed in most mainstream genres.īefore going more deeply on how to use a compressor, let’s take a look at the main controls, which are attack, release, threshold, ratio and gain. ![]() A guitarists picking may not be constant all the time. A drummers snare hits can be uneven throughout the song. No musician maintains a perfect balance, so you might want to even that up. The other reason to use a compressor is to make a performance more even. Most of the time it’s on a good level, but then you want to lift the volume up a bit when you can’t hear the quieter part. When you can’t find a static position to a fader, try compression. How do you know if you should use one at all? The most simple clue is that you want to figgle the volume fader in different points of a mix and adjust it back and forth. When do you need compression?Ĭompressor can be a handy tool, but there’s a time and place for it. As a result you’ll have a more even vocal performance. It reduces the volume differences between loud and quiet parts of your vocal track by turning down (compressing) the louder parts and then lifting the overall volume back to the point you’ve set earlier. This is where a compressor steps into the picture. ![]() Let’s stick with the first option for now, where you can hear most of the vocals fine. As you can see, fader by itself can’t give you a balanced outcome. If on the other hand, you set the volume so, that you can hear the quieter parts, the majority of the vocals are way too loud. You pull up the fader so that majority of the vocals are audible and easily heard, but the quieter parts are lost in the mix. You have a vocal track recorded and you start to set it in the mix. Let’s dive in with a straightforward example: lead vocals. What is compression and how, when and why to use it? Let’s dive right in. The main idea of a compressor can easily be forgotten with all the controls and functions staring right at you. It just has the ability to do balance changes automatically.Ĭompressor is simply just an automatic volume fader. It doesn’t have to be that way, because in the end compression is the same thing as a volume fader. ![]() Compressor seems to confuse many home studio owners more than any other mix processing.
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