Compression for Voiceover

truck going by but wait we'll wait for you friend what's happening boot junkies Mike delgadio here back with another video on home studio recording and setup for voice-over artists as you can see we are not in my booth today we are in an apartment I'm on vacation but I still want to record something for you guys so here we go I've gotten a couple of different messages and email address mails to me asking if I could do a video about compression and sure I'd be happy to compression is a is a tricky tricky subject it's a tough one to learn because the concepts can be a little bit weird so I'm going to try and give you a basic overview basic overview to the different settings in compression we're not going to cover every possible setting and every possible thing we're just going to cover what compression is what it does and how you set it up if you're a musician and you came here and you're looking for like how to compress your drums bus going by awesome not the booth it's loud so if you're looking for like how to compress your drums or guitar or compression for music this is probably not your video so you can just punch out now because this might not help you that much we're going to concentrate really on on voiceover and it's not going to be super technical detailed we're going to try and just cover cover the basics so that you know your jumping-off point on where to start working for compression so let's first talk about what compression is and we'll try and keep it as layman's terms as possible compression is turn making the loudest parts of your video or loudest parts of your audio quieter it's just like a magic high-speed customizable volume knob that turns down the loudest parts of your audio whatever you deem to be the loudest parts what that effectively does is it's called a reduction in dynamic range so the diamond the dynamic range is the difference between the quietest part of your audio and the loudest part of your audio so if your if your loudest part is off the top you want to be able to or if it's too loud you want to reduce the volume here's the best layman's explanation I can give you you're watching TV right and you're you're watching the program and it's at one volume and then the commercials come on and it's like super loud right and so what do you do you reach for the remote and you turn it down you reduce that loudest part to whatever is acceptable and then when the commercials are over now the TV is too quiet so you raise the volume back up so that you've reduced the difference between the loudest parts right you've reduced the dynamic range you've made the loudest parts quieter and that's what we're doing in that case you with the remote control you turning it down to your the compressor that's the easiest way I can figure out to explain it to you and so luckily there are some different configurations and there are some different settings that govern how you turn it down like that's all compression is this is how you're going to turn it down when to turn it down how much and literally how to turn the knob it's all it is so I have some sample audio here and we're not going to work with voice today we're going to work with a sine wave so just a tone because I think that's the easiest way to listen to and hear the different effects the different ways the compressor works so I'm also recording my screen here so let's let's turn our attention to the screen before I start in the beginning in order to make this work it's going to be loud so be your own compressor and turn it down because I'm going to have a really loud part and a really quiet part so that you can so that we can show how the compressor reduces that dynamic range right we're going to the loudest parts down okay so go adjust your headphones because this this could get this could get kind of loud what I have here on the screen is I have two seconds segments of tone and it's just a pure sine wave there's a loud part and there's a quiet part and right now in the beginning with the compressor turned off its going to be really loud and really quiet and watch the meter on the right-hand side of the screen okay so try and save your ears the loudest part I have super loud it's practically at zero dB like as loud as it can possibly be without clipping SuperDuper loud and the quietest part is a minus 24 DB very quiet so if this were a voice that would be the equivalent of somebody screaming into the microphone and somebody whispering into the microphone huge difference in dynamic range and if you were watching a show or listening to an audiobook or a podcast that would mean that the listener would be like oh my god is too loud turn it down oh my god it's too quiet turn it up too loud too quiet too out squad and so the engineer you in this case you need to reduce that difference and we do that using the compressor so let's pull up a compressor and let's look at the different settings the let's first activate the compressor so there's a couple of different settings and I'm just using the stock one that comes with Reaper it's called recom and there are different settings that we need to pay attention to the first one is the slider on the left and that's called the threshold by default me just go all the way back to reset it to factory default the first one is the threshold and the threshold is how loud does a sound have to be before you need to start turning it down and luckily there's a little green meter right here that as you're playing you'll actually see where the tone where the where the maximum is so it's going to go probably really high and really low so brace yourself again here it comes we can so we can see that that that first section is practically all the way up so but that's way too loud we want to be probably closer to where the quietest part is I'll just play that quietest part and let's see where that meter lives okay so the threshold let's set our threshold just above where that point is okay everything louder than that we're going to say is too loud and we're going to start to make it quieter so now we've set the threshold everything above that quietest part that's the part we need to moderate we need to start turning turning it down that's the first setting threshold the next setting is the ratio and that is how much do we want to turn it down based on a ratio between the loudest and the quietest and really it comes down to simple the simple sentence the the second half of the ratio so it's it's like four to one so for every one decibel louder in your headphones how many decibels does it need to be so in a ratio of four to one for everyone add additional decibel of loudness in your headphones you need for additional decibels of your source sound so four gets reduced to one if it's eight it's going to get reduced to you'll hear it'll be two decibels louder in your headphones so it's just for every how much louder doesn't need to be in real life for two to get one additional decibel in your headphones and it can be any we're from - you know for every - 2 decibels allowed us you get one decibel loudness or it can be all the way to like infinity no matter how much louder it is it's just going to be one decibel louder in your headphones for voiceover we typically keep it pretty moderate three to five to one so a three to one ratio or a five to one ratio is generally all you need for voiceover because our dynamic range of our voice is really not that huge it's not like we're recording the difference between a concert and a whisper it's usually a loud voice and a whisper right our dynamic range in our voice is not huge if you have parts where you were screaming and whispering you might need to compress more but you would just compress that scream a little bit and it wouldn't be your whole setting but generally in order to keep it so that people aren't jockeying that volume knob for your new recordings 3 2 3 1 5 2 1 ratio is pretty safe so let's first mess with the ratio setting and see what that does so brace yourself we're going to go back to that loud part here so if I put the cursor back here we're going to go from loud to soft and the thing to watch is the red meter next to the output this little red meter here the red meter shows you how much we're turning it down so we'll start with no compression so for the ratio of 1 to 1 so for every one decibel of volume out in the real world you're going to get one decibel of additional volume in your headphones and we'll start - we'll change that ratio and you'll see how much 1 how much compression is is going by that by that red meter but also how much quieter it will be in your headphones so this is going to go between the loud and soft headphones get ready loud sir so you can see that as sorry that was loud I know that tone gets a little annoying sorry about that but you can see that as I increased the ratio the quieter that loud part became until it was practically the same as the quieter part because we set the threshold to right where that quiet part was and we told it that by the end it was it could be infinitely louder we're only going to get one decibel louder in the headphones so it only really ended up being one decibel louder so let's watch the output meter right next to the red train your eyes on that as I adjust the ratio and we should see that that doesn't move much as I increase the ratio the output meter should should the the highest peak should get lower and lower until it's about that minus 24 there abouts that minus 24 DB so I'll set the ratio back headphones get ready here we go loud now minus 15 now it's like minus 19 now it's like minus 20 and it's really staying about there so it really we go a little bit louder than what that minus 24 DB is and so that's that's the ratio how much we're turning it down so I'm going to now I'm going to reduce that loudest part so that I don't keep blasting your ears out sorry that that happens so let's just let's just reduce that loudest part just so we have it a little bit more sane that's better okay so now we would set that let's say at a five to one ratio let's just start at a five to one ratio the next two settings are the attack and release the attack is how quickly we react to the knob to the to the threshold being exceeded so in this case by default Reaper's recom pecet at three milliseconds so within three milliseconds of exceeding that threshold we're on that knob and we're turning it down the release is after the volume has gone below the threshold how do we turn it back up and that's by default it's set in 100 milliseconds generally you want a longer release because some words tend to taper off they're breathy at the end the has a quiet ending and there's that little tiny puff of breath that you need so it doesn't get you don't want it to get cut off so you want that release to turn up a little bit after the threshold after the threshold the sound is gone below the threshold so we want to attack quickly and we want to release a bit more slowly if we release too long then it never turns all the way back up and you'll hear this like what they call a pumping effect you'll hear it going back and forth so let's keep the ratio let's we'll start at five two one and I'll adjust the attack and then watch the red bar of the compressor watch how that takes longer to to get down to the maximum compression as it that volume changes alright so here we go we're going to play so you see that each time I went through that every time that that threshold got exceeded that that knob took a little bit longer to turn so it just just we just turned it more slowly and the same thing with the release now now a mess with the release and you'll see that the compression that red should take longer to go back up see a toned until the points that it never actually turns all the way back up because it's take the sound already exceeds the threshold again before the volume comes back up so that release takes it's a slower longer release so you generally need it to be a little bit lower and longer to catch those words but you don't want it to be so long that the compressor catches again by the next word so those are your big settings attack release and ratio there's another setting that people really get wound around the axle for called the knee and really for voice the knee doesn't really matter that much what the knee does is it adjusts how things get compressed during that attack so they had to explain the knee the knee is so let's say it's going to compress this much try and keep this simple it's going to compress this much so write that red bar is going to move this much or in this case the compressor is going to move this much so the knee says for the first bit that you exceed we won't compress that much but as we get closer to that threshold we're going to compress more and more so there's a there's like a the short version of it is is we're going to turn that knob at different speeds as the attack engages so it'll be a little bit at first but then I'm going to crank it down more as that threshold gets more and more exceeded and there's a diagram for it just keep the knee basic I mean just set it up a little bit 3 or 4 DB and it won't matter the idea is for music you might want to you might want to have that exceed you might want to adjust how you turn that knob I've never noticed it to really matter for voice you can set it at the extremes and you know it will be nice and linear or will be just like a limiter just perfectly flattened it's just never going to is never going to adjust that knob it's just going to be like I'm clamping it instantly or I'm not going to change I'm just going to do it in linear fashion the knee is really not something that I've ever noticed it makes a big deal for for just straight narration audio book narration it really doesn't happen that much it really only affects it as you get into longer attack and release and you're working with music and you want to get a certain creative effect but the knee is as that threshold gets exceeded more and more the you can adjust how that that volume knob reacts now let's talk about one more thing sometimes you'll hear where people will say that compression also raises the quietest part and that's only kind of true so as you've seen from the from the compression things that we've done that quiet part that was not above the threshold that volume never changed right where compression can make the quiet parts louder is now that we've made the loudest parts quiet the whole thing might be too quiet and so after the fact you may need to make that whole clip louder so that it can be heard and they don't have to keep their volume all the way at maximum so you've made the loudest parts quieter but then you can do what they call make up gain where you turn the whole thing up this loud do you see what I'm saying so in recom there's a button that says auto make up and that just turns the whole clip back up you arrange your difference between loud and soft is still only this much but you've just made it you've made it louder what some people do is they'll add an EQ we add an EQ to it and INRI comp I'm sorry in Riku you can just essentially disable all of the bands let me just reset this to a default nice and flat and there's a game knob on the right hand side where you can adjust the overall gain that's gives you a little bit more granularity than then using the auto makeup a lot of people say you never use auto makeup for voiceover you could probably get away with it because we're not going for super creative effects but you can if you need a more granular control over the makeup of turning everything back up if you really want to tweak it just add an EQ that's perfectly flat and use the gain slider at the end that's the way I always do it there might be another gain knob in there so but this is this works for me but that's that's the basics of it now for voiceover how should you set it by default what's a good place to start so your you've now sat through 20 minutes of Mike pontificating about it how do you what would your settings be Mike in the beginning I typically have my compressor set as a pre fault I've got a couple of different defaults but we'll so let's go and look at mine so I have my my compressor that I use in my my basement office my booth and I generally keep mine pretty close to stock so I start with a 3 millisecond attack 100 millisecond release that's always been fine for me and a three to one ratio that's generally how mine is I compress the whole spectrum so that low pass and high pass I don't change that there's the setting at the top that says pre compression pre comp so if you recording stuff that's already been recorded the compressor can look ahead and see am I going to need to compress and should I start to compress a little bit before that threshold is exceeded that way it isn't jarring so you can set you can adjust that pre compression sometimes you'll need to do that like if your if your if it is interacting with your gait in a weird way I usually gate before I compress because the order matters so you would gate any noise out before you compress it because you don't want to compress that noise because remember if you're going to make up that gain you'd be raising that that noise floor so you I usually gate first but if you have this weird interaction between the two you could say you could try and use that pre compression slider and you usually don't need to make it any longer than your attack so if it's going to take three seconds for that attack knob to turn then you could pre compress for three milliseconds that way it's already the compressors already engaged by the time the threshold is exceeded make sense or you could you could have it so that the compression is already in process before that threshold is hit so you could if it was a six second six millisecond attack you could do three milliseconds of pre compression that way it's not quite so jarring now you can you can do that the other two settings that you have over there is the wet and the dry if you're from from an my lingo video if you saw the lingo video the wet side and the dry side if you if you're unfamiliar with those terms dry is the signal before it comes into the compressor compressing try is the audio before it comes into the compressor and wet is the signal after it goes out of the compressor so you could if you could add some dry signal back in there's some compression techniques I think the New York compression technique not the booth what can I tell you city living always going to have that alright so the New York compression technique that gets used a lot to to to smooth it out if you find that your your your you can hear that compressor going in and going out because of this you know because of your settings you can bring your dry signal back in a little bit and that will help smooth it out that's it's usually a mastering technique at the end where you can you can add you can compress and add the dry signal back in at a slightly lower volume and that will tend to even make everything sound nice and even there's a preset in Reaper called the master buss New York compression and you can see from the settings that it mixes the dry signal almost all the way back in so that way your compression gets to be subtle and it will make it so it's a nice a nice even volume throughout the throughout the entire settings if you don't know anything about compression you don't want to mess with it after you've done after you finished recording everything you could you could try just applying the New York of the master buss New York compressor and see if that see fact that might just cover it for you that might even everything out nicely for you so Mike's settings three milliseconds three milliseconds attack hundred milliseconds only release three to one ratio and I compress the whole thing I can't tell you the threshold that's going to be the slider that you have to pick it's you need to pick whatever your lowest is whatever your your normal low volume voice and your highest voice you adjust the compressor threshold to that setting that's something that you have to figure out so I hope this helps I hope that gives you an understanding of how you would compress what the different sliders what they actually mean so that you can listen back to your recordings ago oh that part's too loud let's compress that part out compress that down a little bit so that we don't have to jockey that volume knob but if you think of compression as just being a magic volume knob that that turns down the loudest parts that's probably not technically perfect nicholae correct but it works so I hope this helps now go get in your booth record something and compress it until it sounds amazing

Channel: Booth Junkie

Views: 206,910

Keywords: voiceover, voiceacting, voicework, compression, audio engineering, voice over, voice acting, compressor, reaper, VST, plugin, AU

Id: DYOuClAWokg

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 26 2016