6 Rules of #Compression

hey this is Joe Gilder from home studio corner and today we're gonna talk about the six rules of compression now let me just go ahead and preemptively say to the person who's dying to comment there are no rules of course there are no rules but the same time there are there's rules of music theory now you can break those rules as much as you want all the way to making atonal music that sounds like garbage but these are the rules that I've come up with with how I use compression in a way that works well for me and helps me get mixes that I'm proud of and that sound good to me so if you're feeling like your compression game could use a little bit of a booster shot that's what this video is for can help you get better mixes by getting a better handle on compression okay we need some boxes for our rules because you know rules tend to box us in and you know we push back against being boxed in I get that but boxes can be good and can be helpful now of these six rules I would say rule number one and rule number six are the most important rules two through five still important but these are going to be the biggest two game-changing ones for you if you get those under control so let's zoom in and let's talk about rule number one rule number one is very simple but very important and it's simply this don't compress everything you can call it human nature if you want but there's something about having a tool that we love and that we know how to use that makes us want to put it on everything the same is true for EQ or reverb too much of a good thing is of course a bad thing so just because you look over and you see your insert section on your channels and you think oh it would be so nice to put a big fat juicy compressor plug in right here don't do it don't do it if the track needs it sure but before you put any plug-in on a track you should be able to answer the question of why am i putting it on this track what sound am i going for what's not in the track what's not happening here that requires me to put a compressor on the track otherwise you might just want to leave it alone I've had so many mixes where I put nothing on some of the tracks and that ends up being the best decision okay don't compress everything alright rule number two once you've decided that you want to use some compress and try this try compressing the bus first now what do I mean by the bus let's imagine the easiest explanation for this is to imagine we've got a bunch of drum tracks so let's say we've got a bunch of drum tracks here these are these are faders can't you tell they're beautiful and so these are things like we got our kick drum or snare Tom overhead room mics okay now all of these are typically if you set your session up kind of the way I I do these are all routed to our drum buss which I usually call like drums in all caps the the best place in my opinion to put a compressor is right here if you're thinking about compressing your drums why not put the compressor on the drums bus first you can always go back and put it on individual channels as well but a lot of times if I know that I want to compress the kick drum and the snare drum and then you know a lot of times especially Nashville they like to put compressors on the rooms I could do all that but what if I could just do one compressor here on my drum buss and that solved all my problems that did some compression on the kick and also the snare and also the rooms with just one single compressor that's the approach I like to take this what I call you know backwards mixing or top-down mixing one compressor here can maybe do the job across five or ten or twelve tracks to where maybe I don't end up needing a compressor on my kick drum or my snare drum or I can compress it differently because this compressor is already giving me some of the tone that I want now the important thing here is to just try this you don't always do it there are times when I don't do that but especially on drums I find this works really really well okay rule number three has to do with the age-old question which do i do first eq or compress i've got a basic rule of thumb that works really well for me so guys it's kind of a two-parter if it that's supposed to be an ear if it sounds good compress first okay the second part of this if it that's a better ear sounds bad EQ first okay so what do I mean by good and bad obviously we want to get things right and we want to make our track sound as good as possible at the source but sometimes that doesn't happen and what happens with compression compression tends to just amplify so if we take a track that has a lot of good and a lot of bad and we compress it we're just turning up both the good and the bad no matter what we do good and bad get turned up however if we use some EQ let's say there's just a few bad frequencies in that channel we can turn those bad frequencies down a little bit get them more in control so that there there's less bad in relation to the good the bad is like this size and the good is this size now if we come in and we slap a compressor on this and the compressors turning up both the good and the bad look now it's turning up the good and the bad is staying lower in relation to it okay so if you think about it use the EQ to fix some problems and then use the compression to do its thing and to enhance things all right rule number four has to do with the attack knob and it's very simple treat your attack knob as if it is an aggression control in other words how aggressive do you want your compressor to be so if you set up a compressor with kind of the normal you know two-to-one ratio and the threshold is in a spot where it's it's compressing a just a decent amount of few DB and then you would take your attack knob and you turn that sucker down so you're going from let's say 30 milliseconds over here down to one millisecond over here guess what by doing nothing else but changing the attack time you're gonna see more compression on your compressor you're gonna look at the gain reduction meter and you're gonna see that with the 30 millisecond attack it was maybe compressing this much and then when you brought it brought it down to 1 millisecond it's compressing this much we're basically just saying I want you to more of the signal be more aggressive in your attack because it's faster and so we end up with more compression so if you think about that way that's what these these things that usually have fast attack times like for example I don't know vocals and snare drums a lot of times we use if I were to say what what channels what kind of audio do I tend to use the most aggressive compression on it'd be stuff like this because the faster attack times grab the vocals and the snare in such a way that sounds really cool and pleasing so it doesn't mean I have to have a ton of compression happening it just means when it's compressing it has more of an aggressive quality to it the opposite is also true if we go from one millisecond and we turn the knob back over to 30 milliseconds we get a smoother compression we get less aggression there so think of it in terms of aggression rule number five you might have guessed has something to do with the release time so if attack is aggression then your release time is your tone so I think of the release knob as a tone knob so I'm a guitar player tone knobs on my guitars and on different pedals that I have change the overall sound of what's happening and that to me is what release does more than anything else it's affecting the tone so let's transform this attack knob into a release knob now and let's do the same thing we did before if we set the release at something like 30 milliseconds versus one millisecond what happens so let's start with the 30 millisecond one so here's here's our waveform this is kind of the journey of the waveform here okay we the waveform starts compressor turns it down and then the slow release happens okay so it goes on this journey kind of like that alright so that's with the 30 millisecond now what if we turn it down to 1 millisecond release time what happens then well here's kind of what that would look like the beginning does the same comes back down but then it comes back up so the release which is kind of right here on the audio is pretty quick so if you compare these two all things being equal this one let's the sound back in more slowly this one lets the sound back in more quickly now let's imagine this is like a wave form like a kick drum where the beginning goes boom and in the end goes boom if we have a slow release like this that womb is gonna get turned down we turn down the womb so this would sound like on a kick drum something like this this on the other hand the release is allowing the rest of the signal to come back in pretty quickly so this would sound like and then you can adjust the release time so if we adjust it anywhere in between then we get variations of this so maybe instead of waiting that long it goes mmm or it goes mmm you see I'm saying you can let as much or as little as you want back in by adjusting your release knob and finally arguably the most important rule especially if you're gonna find yourself using quite a bit of compression always always always always always level match your compression what do I mean by that let's take for example let's say we're going in and here are two tiers two of our signals here's the before and here's the after and then somewhere in the middle is compression so compressions happening here here's the signal going in this is the input of the compressor this is the output of the compressor a lot of times what we end up doing let's say the input is coming in like this that's the level of the input we do our thing with compression and that's the output we've made it louder and guess what if it's louder we tend to think it's better so we may go through take a bunch of tracks that were at this level compress them till they're at that level and we think hotdogs look look how much better it sounds mmm no louder is not better what would be better is to take the input and then do our compression thing have lots of fun with it but then make sure that the output is the same as the input make sure that the before and after are exactly the same in other words if you're using you know something like studio one you know how the plugins have this power button on there if you've got that and you engage and disengage you bypass the plug-in the levels of each should sound the same that way you can hear okay what is this compression actually doing instead of just seeing is it making it louder is it making it better and by doing that you'll realize hmm I actually made it worse with a compressor or Wow actually made it a whole lot better so this is hugely important and maybe it's the opposite the input signal is way up here and you compressed and turned it down same thing you may think it sounds better here because it's louder but reality this was a better sounding signal and better for the mix but you just couldn't tell because they weren't balanced that's why the every compressor you ever use will have some sort of what they call sometimes it's called gain sometimes it's just called make up gain and it's just a knob that allows you to adjust the volume of that output of the compressor so that you can match what's coming in and what's going out that alone if you don't do anything else that alone right there will help you make better compression decisions because you're you're you're not working with one hand tied behind your back you're listening to the same thing before all right so those are these six rules of compression I hope this was helpful what rules do you have that I missed out on leave a comment below and let me know hey thanks so much for watching this video I hope it was well worth your while and I hope you get better mixes as a result if you'd like to check out my five-step mix guide which will take you kind of through my process of taking a mix from the starting line all the way meandering to the finish that will help you do it and it's a quick and easy read just go to five step mix comm for your free copy thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 282,725

Keywords: mixing, gear, home recording, equipment, joe gilder, presonus, studio one, home studio, compression, bus, attack, release, aggression, makeup gain, compressor, compresser, drums, eq, order, first, second

Id: LX-DMXKWeNs

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/teeshaww]

Really interesting how he describes release as the tone. Haven’t heard that correlation before, but it makes since.

[u/dbercht]

This guy has some pretty great tutorials. He's not in the EDM world (I think he does rock/country), but most of his information is translatable. For those beginners/intermediates and having a hard time grasping compression, this might be a good video to add to your arsenal. I particularly liked how he described attack/release .

[u/ElPincheGrenas]

His eq video is great too

[u/deltadeep]

Great video thanks for sharing.

It's pretty amazing how often rule #1 is skipped. Thinking compression is just something you always do or have to do in order to sound good, and not being able to specifically describe what aspects of the signal you want to change and therefore not knowing what type of compressor or settings to use, or whether or not you got closer to your vision. Likewise for rule #2. Even top pros get tripped up by this one, I think it was Andrew Scheps I saw give a talk once about how he abandoned a compression technique he'd used for a long time simply because he realized eventually that it was just louder.

Regarding rule 3, I think it's worth noting that setting zero attack will kill 100% of transients and while this can be described as the most "aggressive" compression, the resulting sound is anything but aggressive or hard-hitting to the listener. Transient energy is key to drums hitting hard (having an "aggressive sound"), and zero attack isn't going to get you there. I would personally say that the most "aggressive" sound be a short to medium attack, low threshold, high ratio, and fast release. So, differentiate "aggressive sounding drums" from "aggressive compression."

Also to nitpick about wording, with rule #4, I think "body" is a more accurate word than "tone." Tone connotes things like high/mid/low balance and THD. His description is accurate that fast release will bring out the "oom" of the kick, but this is what I think of as the "body" of the kick not the "tone." I also think of the release knob as "tail" or "room sound." But who cares about the words so long as you know what the practical meaning is in the situation.

[u/Music_4ddiction]

Good stuff here, love me some Joe Gilder. Even though he mainly mixes for more non electronic genres his content is super informative and helpful

[u/FelineFantastic]

Thnaks for sharing. Really simple and thoughtful video. Never seen this channel before, and really like the bite sized chunks of info. Great find :)

[u/hasser964]

Incredible video man! Thanks for the effort

[u/elevenjointz]

This was really helpful, and prompted me to do some experimenting of my own to train my ear on how it affects the sound. Thanks for posting!

[u/JRL1981]

Really great! For beginners this would be extremely useful.

However I don't entirely agree on rule #1. Personally I compress everything, either on the mix channel or on the bus, but, the compressor should not necessarily be working all the time! You always see how hard it is working (the gain reduction), and it's perfectly okay to let it remain at 0 dB. A compressor should only work when it needs to.

In EDM it's important to have an even and consistent sound, and that's what a compressor helps you achieve. Depending on what kind of sound I want to achieve I may have the compressor working all the time with a gain reduction of about 5 dB, or I could just have it shave 1 dB off the loudest peaks every once in a while.