A Little Compression Never Hurt Anyone...

Here's a continuation of the compression lectures!

4.18.12

First, we recorded bass through the millenia into protools and mixed the signal back through the millenia to experiment with compression!

Compression is program dependent meaning that the settings of compression are dependent on factors specific to each piece. For example, tempo and time. Two major factors of things that are program dependent.

Fast releases on low frequencies create distortion because the release is happening on every peak! This is bad for low frequencies.

Pumping and breathing is also an affect that compression can have. Its bad to have too fast an attack or release. The idea is to make compression sound natural and musical, not falsified.

Fast attack is good for snare and bass drum because the attack can get through.

Everything generally has a quick attack so too long an attack causes the signal to already be at the decay stage when the compression attack happens.

If the release is too long, the following transient is being cut off because the first one overlaps it. This ends up being a compression war. And this can also result from too low of a threshold.

Through the distressor, we can change one variable at a time to hear the differences. Use extremes of each variable to hear the differences. Once you know what is being changed, you will understand compression better.

The input affects the threshold as well and the higher the input, the more is being crushed.