A lot of stock compresors are pretty transparent so don’t do much obvious difference. I generally compressed with eyes and ears, tweaking just enough so there’s no audible change to the sound, but gaining more headroom. Mixing to the master channel level meter is key.
Now I quite proudly compress the hell out of stuff. Often because I use heavy sweeping fx, it’s required and heck in my ableton favourites I have a rack that includes an instance of glue compressor with soft saturation turned on and have a macro set up that turns a utility gain downwards as the makeup gain goes up. Flattens stuff completely. No attack or release required. Then sometimes I just love the character you can get outof a compressor.
I decided to try the slate digital subscription for a year and I’m loving the compressors in that thing (eq’s too but off topic). Bomber is very interesting for adding transients. Really adds a tasteful punch to things. Then there’s the opto’s, fets and the rest… sometimes I just add that with nothing dialled in because I like the character. Stressor has become my compressor of choice.
A lot of occasions I’ll use saturation in place of compression on a drum bus. Something magical about when an open 808 hat hits at the same time as the kick and it sizzles like bacon.
But you can have so much fun with compressors on drum buses dialling in heavy reduction and playing around with attack and release. Using the right character of compressor you can almost hear them breath. Associating their use with a lack of dynamics is just wrong. You can use them to add dynamics, sharpening up attacks and dropping tails vica versa.
Usually it’s a « set it and forget it « option I use. This is even with dynamics and tempo changes within a song. Unless a passage of a song keeps peaking with the most subtle ratio and makeup gain settings. When that happens you may have to highlight that area and gradually trim the levels then check how it gets handled at lower ratio such as 1.5:1 or less. It might not even be a « peaking » issue that passage of the track can’t handle but rather it doesn’t sound right once you listen to the mastered track then it’s back the drawing board.
Usually that doesn’t happen so again « set it and forget it « is the way to go and compare against each version. This is why I love Ableton’s session view because you play one version against the next then fade out to make your observations / decisions. It becomes easier to weed out the settings that don’t work as well.
If you have vastly different dynamics/different sections on a track, it makes sense to chop those and place them on separate tracks, then bus them together again. Now you can apply compression to different sections and tweak accordingly.
This is not always necessary of course, if you have a consistent source/performance, set and forget will do too.
In general the only “hard rule” to follow is: if it sounds good, it’s good.
I said upthread I hadn’t learned enough to start GASsing for compressors. But there’s exceptions. The engineer I tea-boy’d for would use these a lot, in a few different ways. Definitely worth playing with at least a software version to get a feel for them.
This track lets me describe one of my compression “hurdles”. To me, those cymbals sound awful. Nothing like what the dummer wanted, confusing, arhythmic mush. And yet when I pull back my focus, I can hear how the extreme ducking puts them far back in the mix, leaves space for other instruments, and peppers the song with audio curiosities throughout. So, not awful, after all.
I find it very hard to know that’s what I need to do, when I’m mixing or composing (perhaps because I tend to smudge composing, sound design and some mixing into one activity).
I find compression on single sources like kicks or snares rather straight forward.
Busses on the other hand are really hard to hear when it comes to compression. To that it depends if you want to glue a little or create some movement. For movement I always compress the living shizzle out of the signal. Fast release to start with. Then I’ll dial in the attack first and find the sweetspot I want. Then I’ll dial back the release until I like whats happening. Then all you have to do is bring down the threshold and/or dry-wet until it fits. Works pretty good for me this way. Learned in some youtube video.
The aspect of this I want to explore is how ones goes from “that sounds nothing like a cymbal any more” to “I like that and I want it in my recording”. When faced with those opportunities, I typically “freeze” and retreat to less extreme settings. I’d like to get over that hill but I have no map.
I think that compression is truly needed mixing a live sounding band. I mean: if the drummer hit too much or the singing is too loud in the wrong moments, compression helps to minimize the problems. On voice and drums can be truly a lifeboat. But why I should need to compress my home made electronic loops? There’s nothing I can’t fix with mixer’s volume knobs. EQ is more important IMO, to attenuate annoying frequencies.
theoretically good envelopes could be an alternative to compression on individual tracks at least.
its just that compression sounds more organic, as it gets elements to interact with each other (release), also its automated.
on the other hand i think that all the music we ve been listening for the past 50 years probably has had some kind of compression happening, so our ears have grown to like it, we find it pleasing.
maybe if someone makes otherwordly / cold music, it could work with no comps. but for more standard genres i think its really important.
I did not read in details all the thread, but I can feel the pain
I don’t recall an ‘aha’ moment, rather constant NOPE moment when I open Ozone’s multiband compressor (which has also limiter on each band, so, effectively about 40 parameters per patch)
I bought a Syntrx in early December. I find it very easy to end up with a sound where there is a loud texture that is covering up a more interesting but quieter texture. The Octatrack’s compressor has done an amazing job at allowing me to tease out those textures. My next studio gear will probably be 1176 clones, per @Airyck’s suggestion.
One of my frustrations in turning drone and noise jams into albums is that it is easy to fixate on a particular sound while creating only to find that it is lost in a sea of chaos on playback. Compression seems like a great tool to find and highlight the interesting part.
If you said EQ and fader-riding/clip-gain, I might agree with that, but that statement also assumes that you have the time (or money, if you’re paying someone else to mix) available to ride the faders or draw all the volume automation by hand.
Compression isn’t an alternative to clip gain and volume automation, however. Just a complimentary element.
25 years and my life is still…
