Are You Using This Multiband Compression Trick?

hello and welcome back to the channel after the last week's video which was a detailed look at compression we're now going to look at multiband compression which is a great tool and it can help you out in some very tricky mixed situations I have two very very beautifully performed examples to show you one is some guitar and cello and I'm going to be using studio one and FL studio to demonstrate these techniques but you can use any workstation and any multiband compressor so why don't we start by just listening to the music just to get a feel for it and then we can dive into all the technical stuff so let's get right in so the first example is a group of cellos which I recorded right here there's between one and five cellos at any given time and I'll blend in the mix with it and I'll explain what we're doing later on let's just take a listen for now [Music] the second example was some guitar which was recorded right here again [Music] you can hear that both of those are really full frequency examples the cello has lots of instruments combined together and we're going to be using multiband compression to fix a few little problems first thing with multiband compression is that while with other effects it can be good to just you know try things out and hope for the best multiband compression tends to work best when you have quite a clear aim in mind and you really know what you're trying to achieve and I hope that these examples can sort of inspire and help you think of different ways to use multiband compression there might be a little bit out of the box and secondly if you don't know how a regular compressor works please watch my tutorial I'll leave a link right here because multiband compression is an advancement on that same principle overall there's nothing really wrong with this cello you want to keep cello as a really dynamic instrument you don't want to over process it at all but there is an issue because I've layered so many of them together and that is that there's these two sort of pluck sounds right here and right here that really interfere with the rest of the mix so I'll let you hear them on their own [Music] listen to those one more time and when I introduce the rest of the mix around that you'll actually hear that they just cut through in a really sort of unpleasant way that sort of distracts you from the music now what I would like to do is just remove those not entirely but just reduce them quite a lot so the first thing you might reach for is an EQ great choice so without any cue let's listen out for where these resonances are and you can see that it really centers around about 200 which is right here so if I were to remove that the issue is I'm cutting out loads and loads of bass so let's take a listen and I'll throw that mostly remove the problem I don't want to cut away my bass all the time I want to keep the cello really bass heavy really dynamic so what I'm gonna do now is use a multiband compressor so in this case though nine dynamics a multiband compressor works in the same way as a standard compressor it's just compressing your frequencies but a multiband compressor splits the frequency spectrum up into maybe three four or five different sections and then compresses them independently so you'll have a low mid section just like this you'll have like an upper mid section highs on its own and you can take all of these bands and just compress the area that you want to compress which is excellent and in almost all multiband compressor is you can adjust the regions to make the bands really really small and precise or make them really really wide and the reason this is going to work for this example is that I want to compress that low mid band only when those plucks occur but I want to keep everything else really open and vibrant because you don't want to compress a cello an awful lot it just starts sounding very unnatural so what I'm gonna do is Solo in on this band and I've already set up the compressor just like I did in my last video I've got my threshold set so that it's triggering just on those plucks I've got a nice ratio they're fast attack fast release and what you can see on this is that there's gain reduction on those plucks but there's no gain reduction leading up to it so we keep all the base and then we just cut down on those - plucks so this is perfect because it means when there's not that issue all the base gets let through but when there is that little issue it just cuts it down and gets rid of it basically so if i bypass the compressor and take a listen the first one's gonna be loud the second one's gonna be very loud one more time kick in the compressor the second one especially is just vastly vastly reduced let's take a listen to the whole mix with the compression turn off so you hear the - plucks come through quite loud I've got to play it through twice and then I'll play it through with the compression on where they'll be greatly reduced [Music] so when I had the compressor turned on all the bass was still being allowed through but those - plucks especially the second one they were just reduced so much that unless you really know they're there I don't think a sort of casual listener would actually notice them I'm going to move swiftly on to my second example now but you could see from that first example that this opens up a whole range of possibilities with multiband compression say for instance you're using a microphone and the singer drifts in and then drifts further away and the level of bass is changing all the time when they're close to the mic you might want to cut the bass away with an EQ but then if they drift further you actually want all that bass so you could set up a compressor to compress the low end so that when they move close in there's not such a drastic boomy bass sort of sound muddying up your mix then anyway let's go on to this guitar example we'll take a quick listen to it and then I'm going to tell you what I want to use dynamic EQ to achieve so in this case the problem is that my mic placement was a little bit off and it meant that I picked up a lot of low-end transient information these sort of strums here and some of them are just a little bit boo me in this case I'd actually like those to sit back further in the mix not be so aggressive but when I put a regular compressor on it it compresses that but also takes away all the sparkly high-end so what I want is a middle ground where the low-end transients are being compressed only when they're active but there are all times all my mid-range and high range is just really sparkly really shimmery because you can hear if I play again there's so much detail in the high end that I don't want to lose and I just want to clarify again this is just one guitar stem I do have one on the top but that's muted so there could be several ways to fix this problem the first is EQ but that just does the same as the cello it removes the bass all the time the second would be to automate those strikes down the problem is I've got a really sparse arrangement and if I start doing that the guitar is just going to sound really unnatural the next solution could be to use a typical compressor but the issue with this is that when each strike occurs it's going to compress that low mid information but it's actually going to reduce the gain of everything together just like I showed in the last video about compression so I lose all the sparkly highs just for a second and what happens is this makes the compressor sound like it's breathing or sort of pumping up and down and it just sounds really unnatural so if I demonstrate with the EQ quickly it sort of sounds a little bit like the high ends being reduced like this so I'll play and I'll sort of show you what it will sound like and then you can listen out for yourself [Music] that's a really extreme example but that's the sort of thing I'd like you to listen out for when I turn this compressor on it does handle those low mid transients but it also reduces the gain of the high end as well so let's take a listen now if I play it again whilst turning the compressor on and off you should notice that when I turn the compressor off all this high end comes through and the guitar opens up and it actually sounds better without the compression especially just here if you listen back to that a couple of times I hope you can hear that the compression is just sort of ruining that guitar so the middle ground is to use a multiband compressor in this case it's called multiband dynamics it does exactly what the iZotope one does it just splits the frequencies into different bands let's take a listen to the different bands I have a low band a low mid band a mid band and then a high band and what I want to do is basically leave these two bands here I want those to be super open and bright the whole time and I want to just compress this low mid band where that transient is so I've set up this low mid band already just like I did with isotope and I've got all my settings here and you can also see the gain reduction just here and it's just compressing those transients whilst leaving everything else open so let's take a listen if you look closely at the graph here you can see where my threshold is set here with this dot this is my ratio and whenever the signal jumps over here it's being compressed so just take a look out for that as well [Music] so it's really only on those loudest strums than it occurs if I just jump over to this icon here in studio one it shows you all the routing and now I can just turn on and off the compressor or multiband compressor and you can hear a big difference when I turn the compressor on things just sound squashed with the multiband compressor they sound controlled but you've still got all the wonderful high end so let's take a listen and I'll put up on the screen what I'm doing [Music] in that example when there was no effects the guitar sounded really good just a little bit unstable put the compressor on everything sounded squashed and it really sounded that way no matter what settings I used and then I put the multiband compressor on and it just sounded so good so balanced so bright open but I just didn't have any of those really aggressive strums anymore another technique which can achieve this and that is dynamic EQ which I have a whole video for what it is is basically an EQ that you set up and you can just choose a certain band to compress just exactly the same way a multiband compressor does but it can give you so much more control you can have a lot more bands you can choose your filter types and it is a really really special and magical technique so I would highly recommend watching that video as sort of like a further reading topic but hopefully this has sort of inspired you to think of some different ways to use multiband compression really go at it with a solid aim for what you want to achieve and you'll be surprised by their power of this tool so thank you very much for watching I hope you have a great week and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 135,598

Rating: 4.9731684 out of 5

Keywords: multiband compression, best settings, how to use mutliband compression, compression tutorial, in the mix, how to use compression, how to use multi band compression, how to compress, multiband compress

Id: gg2xN8_dcW0

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019