Compression Ear Training Masterclass in 12 Minutes

hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Devine hope you all are doing well today we're gonna be doing a compression master class now don't get overwhelmed with that term I'm gonna cover all this and it very easy to follow manner and we're going to be demonstrating the use of compression and better understanding why when and also how to hear compression with two extremely dynamic sources which are the grand piano as well as a lead vocal so let's go and dive in alright so I've got our two tracks here that I mentioned the grand piano as well as the acapella vocal and let's start with the grand piano and so what we're gonna do is utilize pro-c - for those of you out there who are getting more familiar with compression you want a very user-friendly interface and just something that's going to help you visually understand compression better this is definitely the one that I would recommend I'm gonna put a direct link to it below if you want to check it out let's go ahead and fullscreen it so we can get this nice visual representation and let's go ahead and play back the piano and I want you to just keep an eye on the visual representation here of level also the green signal that's going to be coming up on our threshold line [Music] you so very dynamic performance as you can see there big difference between the quietest parts and the loudest parts of the piano signal so what we're gonna do first is I want to dial in some compression and just focus on the threshold and the ratio control I want you to more importantly understand how to hear these what they're doing audibly the threshold is simply going to indicate at what loudest point we're going to start applying the compression so if we lower this down you'll see that representation of the grid here on the line and that just says that as soon as we go above minus 11 our compression will engage and start to apply gain reduction the ratio control think of this simply as an intensity of our compression once that signal goes above the threshold so as we go to a higher ratio we're gonna get more of an intense compression effect I'm gonna recommend to those of you who are having trouble hearing compression to dial in about 6 DB of compression initially just so that we can hear what's going on now that may seem like a lot to some of you out there but again this is just to start training your ears what's happening with the compression so let's go ahead and dial that in [Music] okay so you can see as I set the threshold every time we were going over that threshold you could see that gain reduction happening in proportion to how loud that point was we're limiting the dynamic range so we're taking those loudest points and we're reducing them and thereby making a more consistent dynamic and a more uniform audio signal the attack and release especially with something like a piano we want to try to retain the performance and the the front-end transients of those keys so in order to do that we would set a slower attack now if I set a really fast attack you're gonna hear the keys get more mushy there's just not as much of a sharpness to them [Music] you hear the difference as I adjust that so something to consider this attack control very specific to the source depending on you know what you're compressing and what you want it to sound like now the release this is just going to control how quickly the compressor will release the signal so if you increase this release you're going to get much more of a longer and more intense compression effect [Music] let's just bounce the wave file with the compression applied and let's take a look at that so there you go there's the difference this is much more of a flat dynamic and again that just shows you we did make this signal significantly quieter because we are again just taming those loudest points now the trick with compression is that it's also one of the most powerful ways to increase perceived loudness over pretty much everything in audio the reason is because we can do what's called make up gain or apply Auto gain which procede to has his feature just to turn that on so this is gonna bring up the entire audio signal as a whole now we have this more consistent dynamic but it's also brought back up to the original level I want you to keep an eye on the level of the original performance and then I'm gonna turn this back on so we'll have the compressed signal with Auto gain and let's see what we've got [Music] so right there at about minus 23 so now let's turn the compression on as well as the auto gain and let's see if we have any difference there [Music] so very very close what you're seeing there is the power of perceived loudness in action because we've got essentially the same level in terms of Lu FS by utilizing Auto gain with the compressed signal but this compressed signal now is perceived much louder alright so moving over to the vocal I want to talk about how a vocal can really train your ears with compression because it can point out a lot of the things that compression can do that are not so pleasing to the ear if you get carried away with it and there's a lot of subtleties in a vocal that you want to keep an ear for so let's go ahead and open the compressor again I'm gonna play this back dry and then we're gonna process us a little bit and talk about some of the things that you want to look out for when you're compressing a vocal and how to do it in a way that is going to strengthen the performance not take away from it once again another dynamic performance what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of slightly over compress this then I want you to take a listen to what happens to this vocal we're gonna point out a couple of things so you can clearly hear overly compressed signal now when we apply Auto gain bring it back up to where it needs to be now listen very closely every drink every vice it's killing me cuz it's killing you slowly I almost died trying to save you til I realize that I can't do when you hurt yourself are two pretty gathered by compressing this signal and then utilizing the auto gain we're bringing up a lot of the quieter aspects of the vocal which includes room ambience you probably heard a little bit of that if you listen closely you're also bringing up the sibilance or the s is you can hear that they got much harsher and you're also hearing that the breaths in the performance came up to be just as loud as everything else it's basically saying everything in the performance is of equal importance which should not be the case so you want to be very very careful about how you set this because if you overly compress a vocal you're setting yourself up to do a lot more work later you're gonna have to automate breaths you may have to automate parts of the performance to give it dynamics all kinds of things that if you just didn't over compress the vocal you wouldn't have to deal with so let's bring it back to a more realistic vocal compression setting something that's going to retain the performance and also fit better in the context of the mix much more pleasant compression they're keeping more consistency so now we'll turn on auto gain and then we're going to compare it with bypassed and then we'll engage it every drink every vice it's killing me cuz it's killing you slowly every curse every lie every drink every vice it's killing me cuz it's killing you slowly I almost died trying to save you till I realize that I can't do when you hurt yourself are two so much more consistent performance now higher perceived loudness and in the context of the mix with instrumentation you're not going to be picking up on all those things that we talked about yes some of that does come up but not nearly as much and it's not going to be noticeable as if you over compress a vocal this is actually how I compressed her vocal for the song and so just keeping in mind that you can train your ears with compression very easily by focusing on vocals because all the things that are wrong with it when you over compress it are going to be very noticeable to you alright so that was our deep dive into hearing and understanding compression knowing when and why to use it and how much of it to use you can train your ear to what's happening how that compressor is reacting with the signal and making adjustments from there you're gonna get more and more comfortable with this so I hope this is helpful you all if you have any questions about compression or anything that we covered here feel free to leave a comment below if you learn anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing we'll talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Sean Divine

Views: 29,665

Keywords: mixing, compression, ear training, mixing piano, mixing vocals, hear compression, learn compression, compressing vocals, compression masterclass, mixing r&b vocals, mix louder, mixing female vocals, sean divine, best compressor plugin, fabfilter, pro-c2, tutorial, vocal, mix, compress, perceived loudness, vocal compressor

Id: lIMVB75WafY

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 28 2020