Compression with Fabfilter Prо C2 Masterclass - Learn Pro C2

let's jump right into Pro c2 so here's what I'd like to do a little bit today is do a little bit of a boot camp of compression itself and then I want to really get into pro c2 and show a lot of different possibilities let me start this by saying that Pro see 2 is the best compressor it's the best digital plug-in technical compressor that I think that that is available in my opinion it's the most intelligently designed and it's the cleanest sounding and you know in our school when it comes to compression we're really looking at sort of like two kinds of compressors right we have musical compressors and we have technical compressors and an example of a musical compressor would be something like this right a UAD 1176 and this one is kind of on the fence because it's a little bit musical and it's a little bit technical there are some compressors that are even more just musical and not technical at all and the difference is musical compressors are usually modeled off - after classic analog gear and they have a level of saturation to them they usually have some really quirky designs they'll be missing stuff they won't have an attack and release or they won't have a ratio or they won't have a threshold and so we use them but they've been around for 40 50 60 years sometimes and we use them because of the sound of the circuitry the the saturation and also because that they're musical they they kind of roll with the music they're nonlinear usually which means that even though they're sing and compressors they tend to compress different parts of the input signal of the frequency in these very classic musical kind of ways you know so so we love our musical compression and we love our tape compression we're big fans of that and the first thing that we do typically is we will saturate and will either saturate with soundToys Decapitator or will saturate with a tape compressor a tape machine of some kind do a little bit of tape saturation some tape compression and usually after that we will do some musical compression which would be 1176 la to a dbx 160 maybe Fairchild you know something you know very simple la 3a and after that usually there is an instance of reductive EQ right our first level our first EQ is reductive and we're just taking out frequencies if the sound has lots and lots of problems to it we might do that before saturation um but but usually that's what happens and then after that comes our technical compressor and as I said to you know the best technical compressor that I've ever seen is this Pro C - I don't think anything on the market in my opinion comes close to well they really thought of everything and they made it very visual and they also made it musical and you know actually very versatile so let's take a look here at the layout of this new Pro C - and it is my opinion that if you become a master of pro C - it will change your life if you just dedicate some time to getting really really really really good at this one plug-in you will your productions will come up in in quality and in power there's no question to me so you know those who were here last week when we looked at pro-mb realized that within these dynamics tools there's really sort of like four tools in the pro mb right there's upward compression there's downward compression there's upward expansion and there's downward expansion and I hope hopefully people spend a bit of the week just practicing when upward compression would be good when downward expansion would be good upward expansion and of course it's multiband so that that we don't have that here in pro c2 pro c2 is a compressor but when we say it's a compressor it's a downward compressor really that's that's what it is in its essence what does that mean a downward compressor well a downward compressor means that as the signal crosses the threshold the dynamic stool turns it down right if once the once the signal you know crosses the threshold exceeds the threshold the the compressor turns it down and it is not just to be clear it's not multiband right this is single band so it turns the entire signal down that's what that's what this downward compressor does so let's look for a second at some of the different sort of things that are the basics of compression and we will start here with threshold and I know everybody knows this so it's a little bit of a repetition but this will also be a cool video where you can look back and sort of clarify anything that might be hazy and then we'll move on to some more advanced stuff so what threshold what is threshold threshold is the sensitivity control below which no downward compression happens no gain reduction happens and above which the compressor knows that there's something to do that is threshold and attack is the reaction time of the compressor once the threshold is is you know exceeded then the attack time is the amount of time it takes for the gain reduction to start to kick in and the release is of course once the signal has fallen below the threshold the amount of time it takes for the compressor to stop to begin to stop turning it down essentially and the ratio of course is an expression of the game reduction where the amount of a loud the the amount of the increase in signal that's allowed becomes a ratio or a sort of a fraction of the intention we'll talk about all this and then of course there's makeup game makeup game being you know with all this turning down that's happening with downward compression we're losing signals so that there is a gain stage after all this dynamic turning up and down by the voltage controlled amplifier there's a static gain at addition to kind of level it out for you okay so again just looking at these basics here threshold sensitivity parameter it's a voltage detector below which no gain reduction takes place and above which compression is activated the attack is time based so it's the amount of time that it takes the compressor to start compressing once the threshold has been upwardly crossed it's the reaction time of the compressor and just to be super clear if you want something more compressed in terms of the transients you want a faster attack time right if you want something to be more percussive you want a slower attack time so if you wanted to - if you want to have induce more compression and control and make things less percussive in terms of the initial transients you want a fast attack time the release is also time-based and it's the amount of time that the compressor takes to stop doing game reduction once the threshold has been downwardly crossed so so the threshold if if the attack is really an adjustment of the of the initial of the percussive transients of a signal then the release is your control for the sustain of a signal and if you want something more compressed it's the opposite of the attack you want a long release a long release creates more compression a fast release lets go quicker and it creates a less compressed signal that's also more dynamic a little more bouncy in the sustain right so it's sort of a sustained control in in hiding in a way the ratio um is a is is the severity of the compression once it crosses the threshold and the attack time has been achieved and the gain reduction kicks in how much gain reduction right so and and it always is an expression of the intention and the actual excuse me and the actual amount is allowed to go up so if you have a two to one ratio and the signal wants to go for DB above the threshold the two to one ratio will only allow it to go to DB up so that's the thing right it's still allowing it to exceed the threshold and to be dynamically expressive but it's cutting it in half right that's what a two to one ratio is um and a four to one ratio if it wants to go for DB above threshold it only allows us to go up 1 DB so that's that's more strict right or a 4 to 1 ratio and it by 2 to 1 ratio for D if it wants to go for DB above the threshold with a 2 to 1 ratio it only allows it to go up to dB so so now within the world of ratios it's good to think of them is as light medium and hard and high ratios light medium and high I guess so a gentle ratios is 1.5 to 1 or 3 to 2 and that's very very often seen in mastering compressors and in buss compression on fancier things a 1.5 to one or a three to two is typically the lowest ratio then we move to two to one which we said is sort of decreases the the increase in gain above the threshold by fifty percent to two one and it's a light ratio it still can be quite transparent and it still also keeps quite a bit of the dynamics 2.5 is a great ratio to use it's light but it's a little bit stronger than two to one and it's very very musical it works incredibly well and you know three to one is is also a nice light ratio for two one five two one and six to one or medium ratios and eight nine and ten are high ratios and they start to sort of become limiting now in so that's the ratio game the makeup gain is like this really auto makeup gain is sort of a digital phenomenon however API is sort of figured out how to do it in analogue and if you have the API vision console strip when you use that compressor even though it's analogue it has Auto make up game I don't know how they did it but they did it but usually on most musical vintage compressors when you start doing lots of game reduction you notice the signal get quieter and as the signal gets quieter it kind of makes you feel like it's making it weaker and sometimes it makes it hard for you to appreciate the compacting of the sound the power that you're putting into the sound so so you have to manually guess what some of the game reduction is and set it by hand the nice thing about Auto makeup gain and it's in a lot of digital compressors is as you as you make the adjustments to the threshold attack and release the auto makeup gain is very carefully looking at the amount of gain reduction that it feels that is happening and it's adding it back to the output so as you squeeze down on something instead of it feeling like it's getting weaker it feels like it's getting stronger and um good using the phone that's you know you cannot be stopped this technology will sort you out now you're new you're new to this new little online club will get you all thousand these you're here with some people have been doing this for a minute but it is so good to see you okay good use that phone so uh so now we know Auto make up gain also from limiters and you know maximizers right when we squeeze down on the threshold when we're mastering or we're putting a bus limiter on the bus to preview what the master is going to be as we pull down on that threshold it's squeezing down it's doing the limiting but it's adding that auto make up gain that just makes it sound louder louder and bolder so I'm a huge fan of the make up game let's look at auto release auto release is super cool auto release like a fixed release means that after the signal goes below the threshold the compressor will weight this fixed amount of time to to stop doing the game reduction and that works very good for very sent kind of signals um but for signals that are moving around for the compressor to track that signal is a fixed release sometimes some you know just is not your friend you know if you have a quantized snare that's program where every velocities is straight then you can set a fixed release and it's great but if something's moving around on you like a jazz vocalist or a solo guitar solo or anything where there's a lot of variety in the dynamics it's great to have the signal be able to be Auto tracked by an auto release so that is auto release and the knee is something that you don't always see on every compressor but what the knee does is once the compressor is you know once the threshold is crossed and the game reduction is kicking in after the attack time how quickly it goes to the ratio setting is the knee and um if it makes its way gently there over time that's a soft knee and if it kind of jumps directly to the ratio instructions that's hard knee soft knee tends to be more transparent hard knee tends to be more limiting like you almost have a sense of something knocking up against something and they're both very useful you know if you were doing some soft jazz singing it would be soft knee for sure but if you are doing some sort of compression on a picked guitar or maybe even a kick or a snare you may want to have it have that sensation that's knocking up or hitting against something so in which case a hardening is good the super dope thing about Pro C 2 is that has a variable knee and it's rare most times you have a hard knee or soft knee but not a variable name another incredibly cool thing on Pro C 2 is the range and so what the range does is it and constrain the amount of gain reduction to a certain depth it's like a depth limiter so you can do lots and lots of compression but only have it affect you know stop at 1 DB of gain reduction or 2 DB of gain reduction or 3 DB of gain reduction and this is very very helpful when you're side chaining right side chaining the the base and the kick the amount that it's ducking you know you have a threshold control but then you can really fine-tune the the ducking amount with the range once you get and it's something that you set typically last and once you get good at it it's just it allows you to dial in exactly the amount of downward compression that you're looking and then finally there is a super cool thing this whole thing and hold us is is something that they took out a pro G which we'll look at to this month um and gates are kind of complicated they're funny you think they're simple but they're not we'll get into our gating and essentially what it is is it the hold function delays the release by the amount of time determined by the hold and it keeps the game reduction in a level steady place and this is very very useful in on a couple things very very useful again for sidechain compression but also very useful for like a ducking effect where you know very very typical for like radio announcers when they're talking over music that they want the music to come up and be big so the music is big when they're not talking but when they start to talk the music automatically dips because it's triggered by a sidechain trigger by the voice but what you don't want is when the when the person is talking for the music to rise up in between every syllable gets annoying so when you lengthen the hold it overrides the release time and keeps the game reduction steady so that you could talk over the music even take a little pause to breathe and the music that rising up in those pauses but then when you're really finished talking the music ramps up right so so hold is very very useful especially for ducking stuff all right so let's do this let's go over to back to logic looking at pro c2 and let's just kind of go through some of the other little things here so here's the threshold right and you can see it visually below which no game reduction kicks in above which the game reduction alert is triggered and gain reduction will occur after the release time right so we can see the threshold here very very cool and but below the threshold is the knee and we can see the knee there you go that's it looks like a leg with a knee so hardly it goes directly into the game reduction and a soft knee there's a softer knee there it's got a rounded shape into the game reduction and the cool thing is you can kind of do some in-between stuff and get it exactly right which is very very rare very very few compressors have them this is also super cool this little headphone icon shows you can hear the portion of the signal that's being compressed so if you it was like a wet/dry sort of thing you could hear the wet signal the compressed signal and it's a very cool way to hear what's catching what's driving the compression what's what's what's what or what part of the signal is being compressed is probably the better way of putting it here's the ratio goes from 1 to 1 which is no compression at all don't don't sit there for hours compressing it 1 to 1 because there is no compression of 1 to 1 and if you notice look this is super cool from from from the first half of the dial is lots and lots of resolution in the light you know ratio numbers and then it goes up to a hundred you know like all that from a hundred to 220 like these are the high high ratios there's very little resolution there because you're not subtly fine-tuning it but there's lots of resolution in the dial here in the light ratios which allows you to really zero in on the light ratios and get a varied light-handed compression cool design right nonlinear super cool um the attack is here and it's in seconds milliseconds but it's a very program dependent compressor this thing here and I don't want anyone to get all mathematical with compression it's it's funny it reverbs you know there's a little bit of math to reverb but it never really works because the phrasing of the different elements and how that interacts with the compressor you got to use your ears I want everyone to sort of think about this as things are being fast medium fast and slow and don't get hung up on the milliseconds because it's actually not all that helpful same with the release same thing here um down so we talked about the knee here's the range and the range again I think the range see how it defaults to all the way off in a sense I think you want to you want to set your compression with the range here and then you can constrain it and dial it back and you will see how that works look ahead in dynamics is super super cool and it's they have some analog things that can sort of do it but it is essentially a digital phenomenon so you turn on look ahead here and we'll see this a lot in in the fabfilter stuff what does look-ahead do look-ahead uses the latency in the when I say the latency in logic for example if we go to audio preferences see this buffer size here this I Oh buffer size when you're mixing a mastering you want this to be at the highest value whether it's Cubase or Pro Tools or logic or Ableton when you're when you're composing you want the low values because you don't want the latency when you play your keyboard you want to hear the sound right away but when you're mixing a mastering you want to give your DAW and your you know computer all of the processing Headroom you can you can have and so we want this jacked up okay so what does this do when you hit spacebar and you're like kick drum are you ready snare you ready bass you ready compressor you ready reverb you ready all right play you're giving the computer that buffer amount of time that I just showed you to get everybody all ready and dressed for school and out the door at the exact same time and when I say at the exact same time I mean sample accurate the same time and that is no small thing when you're using third-party plugins that all have their own internal latency depending on the processing so this is why we give um we give the the the computer the maximum amount of time to get the job done now with look ahead look ahead takes advantage of that buffer and can actually load the program material the input signal the snares the kick the vocal whatever into a buffer and it can get in front of the transients in a way that analog sort of can only sort of can and you can trick stuff and you can there's there's all good really cool old analog tricks where you could have a like a ghost kick you can have a ghost track and then slide it earlier and to make compression or gates open up on time but we don't need to do any of that here we can use the look ahead which is so cool so as you push the look ahead you turn it on here as you slide the look ahead forward you can get in front of that snare hit you can get in front of that kick and you can get in front of that guitar pick now more is not better contrary to American thinking more is not always better the right amount is the right amount if you want for a kick to kick hard and you want that initial transient to have a smack to it you don't want to get in front of it right that would sort of tame it too much so sew-on kicks and snares that you want to have this the initial transient really have a snap to it um you might try a tiny bit of look-ahead or none however if you were dealing with a certain amount of using this as a ducking compressor you might want that look ahead to see the transient that's triggering it and get there early and pull down ahead of time and it might sound cleaner so use this creatively more is not better but be aware of it and it does certainly come in handy and you can even see visually as we look at the gain reduction visually here you can see the compressor getting in front of the transient which is really really cool here's the hold which we said smooths out from things releasing too quickly and uh here we have a wet gain and a wet pan and this the outer pan can do some mid side balancing which can you know as we get a little bit more advanced this month we'll do we'll end it a little bit more we'll have some more kicked up tricks to come with some mid side stuff the dry gain is turned all the way down but we can do parallel compression right and parallel compression as we know is - / compress something on purpose to get all of the little details of these little sounds that are getting masked by is more by these bigger percussive moments and then blending in some of that detail with the uncompressed signal and it's great on vocals it's great on lots of stuff it adds lots of detail but then you still have the dynamic so we can play with those as well and then the dry pan also has a mid side balancing over sampling over sampling you always want this on if your computer can take it there's no unlike look-ahead which sometimes you may not be desirable over sampling is never not desirable as long as it doesn't make a computer crime and what over sampling does is it internally up samples so that it can do more high-resolution work and and not distort in and create aliasing you know we know when analog distorts it distorts relative to the key of the song and it distorts in in musical intervals like fifths and force and octaves and stuff when digital distorts it distorts as a function of the sample rate and it in it it can't quantize things quickly enough and the quantization errors make it put in fundamentals that are unrelated to the key of the song and they sound horrible so this minimizes aliasing which is the injection into your signal of non musically related harmonics that are yucky so keep that cranked up if you can't afford to time four times do two times but always turn that on if you can stand it and then over here sneaky hiding is a little gain structure balancing thing with it you can do that you can adjust the input level the output level and balance the left/right input level and balance the left/right output level and then finally you have this cool bypass this is the good bypass to use because it doesn't make your computer hiccup because the way it deals with the buffering sometimes I think everyone will find when you bypass from here it makes it can make the computer hiccup kind of spaz out on you and throw things out of time and you don't get as clean of an a being so if you're really on top of your game you're going to a be here right it's buffer free you get a clean bypass and then finally almost finally is this little slider here and this is a cool wet/dry mixer for a compressor so you can compress it and then do a little bit of parallel compression right here blending the compressed and the uncompressed and you can also sort of hyper compress it and go up to 200% and make it even more compressed when you're setting this thing keep this at 100 but then you can modify a little bit and it can be actually quite helpful the metering is here you can go super zoomed in or zoomed out I think for the most part 9 DB is the best place to start if you're doing 10 DB of gain reduction that's a lot you know and usually you want to do something more subtle so you want to see better so you do it like that now we go to the sidechain section here and you can have an internal or external sidechain either one triggering you can monitor the internal or external sidechain and you can EQ the internal external sidechain so to do that you click on the dot and you enable it here and then we have these filters and you can change the slope of the filter to very very sharp or very gentle in analog world usually the the the slope of the filter is 12 DB per octave that's the way most equipment is built that's what you're going to see over the last 50 years for the most part 6 DB being gentle but in digital we can get much sharper and analog to so you can play with that be a warned a little bit if you go crazy steep on some of the stuff it's not always is musical is a little bit more of a gentle slope but you do what you have to do and here we can turn this on and um I guess it's in auto mode now and you can do some boosts and boosting in the internal side chain makes the compressor more sensitive to whatever frequencies boosted which means that it needs less energy to trigger gain reduction and that you're sort of you're encouraging more gain reduction at those frequencies even more than the input signal has what is this good for excuse me is sometimes really bright sibling stuff you know if you if you at you know if if 6k if something is kind of bright and a little painful you can push up the 6k and the gain reduction will kick in more quickly than it normally would make it when it's more sensitive to certain frequencies so this is a cool way to to sort of customize your compressor and then similarly it's critical with internal and external sidechain filtering that we do this for stuff like when we make the bass duct to the kick we want a shorter trigger for the game reduction and if you have we have a fat sub e kick it's not going to make it tight enough sidechain so we can filter that or if we put this like on a drum bus or on a mix bus we don't want the low frequencies causing the gain reduction so we filter them out same with the ultra highs too sometimes we want to leave those not triggering the game reduction as well so I do believe that that's the Grand Tour right there so let's do a little bit of compression here I'm going to up one more thing okay one more thing let's let's look at the personalities here uh and so so again one of the supercool things that they did here is that they gave us these different personalities different behavior of the different compressors so clean is feed forward and feed forward means that that the actual input signal directly causes the gain reduction these are topologies or designs of compressors so this is the fastest and the most reactive and the cleanest now in the analog world a lot of compressors are feedback style feed-forward as opposed to feedback feedback actually listens to the increase in the signal after the gain reduction circuitry that sounds totally weird like that could never work but it actually does and it makes this sort of codependent musical tracking of the signal that's really really dumb so feed-forward the input signal exceeds a threshold it triggers the gain reduction directly classic mode is feedback compressor it's listening off of the back end of the compressor for voltage changes and consequently it is not as quick and it allows some of the initial transients to be uncompressed which makes for a little bit of a more percussive and sometimes more natural sounding percussive event clean jumps right into the game and can really take your transients right away right away from you classic because of that feedback style of compression tends to allow for a little bit more initial transient energy and it's like what most of the these compressors are opto now Opta you see opto all the time right we see lots and lots of Optim why do people love opto okay here's why people love opto this is why you see it in all kinds of wave compressors all kinds of different compressors opto does this if you're doing a light amount of gain reduction opto releases quickly and if you're doing like between one to three DB of gain reduction if you're doing more than three DB of gain reduction five six seven DB of gain reduction that's a lot right if you want to make something twice as loud you turn it up six DB that's like an audio bit of knowledge right someone says make it twice as loud you turn up 6 DB is twice as loud so so if you're doing 6 DB of gain reduction things are moving up and down by 6 DB that's a lot so what what ops the circuitry does is if you're doing a lot of game reduction it releases really slowly it doesn't want to drop you you doesn't want to let go and snap back to the uncompressed signal quickly because that would create pumping and breathing pumping and breathing can be a good thing it can be very Musical and it can provide a lot of energy um but if you're looking for transparent compression opto has this really built in school release behavior that's smooth so I'll say that again if you're doing a little bit of game reduction it releases quickly so you don't notice it and if it if you're doing a lot of game reduction it releases slowly so you don't notice it and it is probably my favorite personality for bass compression opto compression on the bass is a beautiful thing also can be nice and vocals so that's the third um personality here is vocals and if you notice the ratio does greyed out on me for vocals I can't touch it it's got this sort of Auto ratio thing and it almost goes into what we were talking about earlier today it almost becomes at this point a musical compressor right when they take away controls from us and they kind of odd the ratio that's a little bit what an la-2a does or la 3a does or Fairchild does you know as you drive it harder the ratio changes automatically in a musical way so this this vocal personality is very cool for vocals it has it's it's not mellow you'll find it's almost a little reminds me a little bit of our Vox from waves it's a little it's got a kind of you know you have a variable attack but it's a bit grabby and it's a little limited is that a word limit or e it is now so it can work very well but don't feel that because it's a vocal you have to use vocal don't do that I use it sometimes but I use clean classic opto a lot on vocals and it sounds great I don't always use vocal and vocals but try it out it's got it's sort of a vocal limiter vibe in a way um mastering is for mastering and uh it's it's gentle but it it has a grabby quality to it that may not necessarily work for EDM right in EDM were so protective um and I'll take questions in a second so but go ahead and blurt them out so you don't forget them and we'll go back through them in EDM when we're compressing the master we're so protective of our low-frequency transients because if the low-frequency transients get choked people stop dancing and we need things to go boom boom boom boom so we're very very careful about using things that are grabbing and mastering so although this is an interesting personality for mastering uh I don't I typically don't use it for mastering that's the honest truth if I was doing some rock or some instrumental you know jazz or something classical maybe could work I don't know it's a little grabby so play with it but if you find that it's too grabby for your bouncy house music um you're not crazy I mean you might be crazy but that's not that's not why you're crazy um for like me crazy um the bus one is very very useful this is the closest thing to the SS l G compressor in terms of personality it's not grabby and in fact you're going to probably use this more in mastering than you would the mastering personality that's just my opinion uh it's more like a glue it's it doesn't it's not grabby and it doesn't release really quickly it's roly poly and it's a fattening effect fat maker which is really really cool um punch hat is is got a personality where it's got an attack release personality that is a little grabby and releases quick and it can make things kind of hit very hard good for kicks and good for snares and claps and things that need to have a little knock to them it's a very nice one to try and then pumping his got here's a fancy word hysteresis hysteresis is the speed of the decay of a signal and when you increase the hysteresis or that that drop down back to the uncompressed signal when it's really fast it can do a pumping effect and again pumping effects can really put energy into things in a way that is very very cool it's a little bit the opposite of this opto right this is by doesn't want a pump this wants to pump so really start to master all of these use them and flip through them where you end up it does not matter is absolutely personal to you but be aware of them and play with them because it's almost like for your the price of one compressor you have a rack of some technical compressors and then a couple kind of music compressors in here very very cool okay so now let's do this let's let's just do a little bit of acoustic picking everyone used this mix LR link I'm going to bypass this I've got this so alone I'm just using some Apple loops so that you can you know try this out instantly if you have logic if not you can sort of grab anything um and uh and tell me if you can hear an acoustic guitar give me a why in the chat if you can hear okay good good okay and I'll turn it up a little bit okay so so now here's pro C 2 and here's our beautiful acoustic guitar so the way you get good at compression because I promise today you know we're just starting out the month we'll do all kinds of crazy mousetrap stuff but I want to make sure that we're good with the basics because it's critical here's the best way to set up a compressor and it is to listen to the sound as we just did and then guess the settings and then make an adjustment one thing at a time right the thing that always throws people off with compression is that each one of these controls can increase or decrease the amount of compression but it does it in a very specific way so now if this if this is going to be like solo guitar and vocal I might allow it to be more dynamic just to because there's not as many instruments so it can take up more of the space and be the star if it's fitting into a dense mix I may compress it more because it needs to fit in as a peace amongst many pieces so let's pretend that it's in it's in a dense track and I'm going to set the compressor without it playing one of the things that kind of screws people up is that they start to try to set the compressor with the sound going and it's almost like a house of mirrors you sort of don't know what you're hearing so the good engineers listen to the sound and then they guess and so here's the guessing game so for the attack I if this is a pickie sound it's not like a a pad it's got this picking and I want to control the picking a little bit so I want a fast attack forget about the numbers I want a fast attack but I don't want to choke it right I don't want to completely choke the sound I want a little bit of percussive energy if I go too slow I'm going to miss those little picks if I go too fast I'm going to kind of give it like a bad facelift or something it'll be like a face that's being stretched too hard or something so I'm going to go for sort of like I'm going to that allow a little bit of attack time before the compressor kicks in right so I'm allowing a little bit of percussive energy for the release what do I want hmm let me guess if I go really fast the compressor is going to let go maybe in the middle of a transient sound kind of unmusical might get a little pumpy a little strange so cool if I go too long I'm over it I'm making for too much of a compression in the sustain I'd like a little bit of the musical sustain so I'm guessing that I want to release somewhere around 12 o'clock or so Auto gain is on that's cool and since this is a loop I can probably set a release manually if it was a crazy improvised performance I might go for auto release but for this I think I can dial in my release myself I look ahead I'll try it let's turn it on over sampling always good we'll open up the sidechain filter for now but we may not necessarily need it on this sound and for the personality uh I'm going to go for classic I'm going to go I don't need to get there right as fast I don't think is for clean I want a little bit of that initial percussive energy so I'm going to go classic I'm a classic man and uh and now for the ratio if I'm too mellow even though the signal crosses the the threshold I'm not going to do enough compression if I go to am here too crazy then it's going to be a limiter I'm going to go for a medium ratio on this one like maybe a four to one ratio don't worry if it says 4.12 don't go too crazy hard knee or soft knee I think I want to be right in the middle I want the range to be all the way off for now and so now I've guessed you see that I did all this setting up and this is what I want everyone to do and get good at I swear all the pros do this they don't do this with the sound playing it's it doesn't help you better to guess and then now all I need to do is I'm going to make the threshold insensitive and I'm going to just ease into this threshold look see how that you know my stuff is reacting Auto gains on so it's going to compact the signal make it stronger as I go and let's just see how good I guess and then I'll make adjustments one parameter at a time all right okay so what we can see there is we have gone for a more transparent style of compression and it doesn't scream hey you compress this it actually makes it sound like the guitar player had a better performance and that's why it is so important for me for all of you not to hate compression but to love it and to have it be your friend and for you to can't wait to get up in the morning and have some coffee and go compress stuff because what it for a control freak like all of us must be you know to dial in all of these performances even our own to get the feeling from those performances you want you can reshape a performance of vocal performance a guitar performance anything drum performance to sound like it has more energy and smooth out the playing so here we've gone for a we kind of guessed right but I've been doing this for 30 years and we made for this really kind of thing it didn't sound over compressed but it sounded fatter it sounded more energetic and less dynamic but in a good way right so now there's a couple things if it's if it's too picky is the pickiness is still too dynamic and I want to make something less percussive I go to the attack and I'll speed it up if I want it to be even tighter I can go to the look ahead and start to move this forward and if I want to even the tightest of tightest of compression here I can go clean and this this will get there right away so let me just go from where we were to where we can go and this is like hey I like it but I really want to get that picking under control it's it's it's too pokey that's the word we use in compression - pokey - Pokemon right so so in other words if I'm looking for a more compressed signal I can do a number of things each for a different reason I can go for a faster attack to get there quicker I can go for a slower release to hold it down longer and I can turn on the look ahead and get in front of the transient and I can go to a harder knee for a quicker onset of the compression itself right so so this this is this is really a you know compression it you know some some boot camp of compression but everyone has to be crystal clear about all of this to go a little bit further into what we're going to do so so let's do this let's go to another sound and we'll take questions in about five minutes I just want to show another sort of take on this so here we have a kick and let's throw a procede to you on here now you know the question is you know when things are played by humans with microphones and stuff compression is so critical because as we saw it kind of contains the performance it it can really compact the human differences in dynamics but what what do we use a technical compressor for on a programmed kick that every velocity is set every velocity is the same well at this point it really becomes an envelope tool right so if we have this kick here play it and there really isn't any dynamics to control per se but we can use this as as an envelope shaper so if we turn this on uh and it's a kick um it should be coming uh and we will do the guessing game again which is let's go for a attack not the fastest I don't want to choke my kick I don't want to be too slow either I won't get there in time so let's go for again a medium kind of medium fast attack and we can always change it but this I'm doing my guessing routine right released I don't want to release too fast I don't want to release too slow so maybe something like a nine o'clock release for the personality I'm going to start with classic and maybe go to opto but I'll try classic again variable knee in the middle is fine leave the range off for now um look ahead I don't really want look ahead on this one I want the the initial transient of the kick to smack through before I do that so I'm going to leave that off I will turn over sampling on for sure don't need any hold on this and let's go ahead and open up the side chain here and let's just do and the ratio I want it to be pretty light so I'm actually going to go to two point five four to one is is since we're really just doing some gentle envelope shaping I don't want it to be too severe so I'm gonna go to two point five and I love two point five it's a really cool ratio so now let's make the threshold all the way insensitive and just creep it up and you know this this envelope shaping that we're doing um is is making it sound like it's hitting harder it's compacting the sound it's just putting some energy into the sound it's not controlling the dynamics it's it's it's it's putting injecting some energy into the into the sound so now what we might want to do is leave have the lows be uncompressed and not triggered by the by by the lows and the internal side chain so that it's really sort of just reacting to the mid-range and so we can sort of slide this up and we'll we should hear the low-end come up a little bit when we do this and there you go um super super easy and you'll notice and it might be hard to hear during the broadcast then but when you watch this later um in your hammock you will hear that that that having the low frequency triggering the compression of the kick choke the kick and and by sliding this up all of a sudden the low frequency really starts to be free and be more dynamic and you get a much more dynamic low frequency bounce so so and this little trick is what we're going to be doing when we listen when we work on a whole track um you know we will use Pro c2 here as a buss compressor come here you and this this will and we'll get into this again next week we'll sort of continue next week with the more some more even more advanced tricks um but what when we put this on the whole mix we're going to go to bus because it sounds great we don't want to choke our kick right so we can slow down the attack maybe not all the way slow but pretty slow and speed up to release we know from today slow attack fast release makes for a lightly compressed signal we're in bus mode but then the critical thing of course oversampling is on and we're not going to really need look ahead on this we go to the side chain here and we're going to definitely when we put this on the whole mix bus as our little bus compressor hug we're going to definitely punch in the internal sidechain low-cut or high pass filter and dial this up maybe up to three or four hundred and this makes four right a nice mix buss compressor right very very very light ratio here okay so I know this might have been a little basic but I think it'll be cool reference just in terms of bootcamping compression in the context of pro c - and i will take questions in two minutes what is really important to me is that you master this plugin because this plugin for a technical compression is the best one available it has so many different personalities and it it's so flexible it's so clean and transparent but it will put so much energy in your mix by compacting some of these these signals and and hardening them up you don't have to over compress them but a judicious amount of compression on individual elements and on your busses who is what where the power comes from that is you know that compression sorry that saturation limiting is really where the power comes from and let me let me just throw in one more thing and we'll pick this up again next week which is this this slider which I didn't really show in the beginning but I want to show now this this is sidechain level so you you have a gain control if your sidechain levels too loud for your from your external side chain or your internal sidechain you can actually it's cool to have a little level control to push the sidechain harder or mellow it out so that's your side chain level the stereo link this is critical if you're used if you have a very stereo sound like really wide stereo guitars or a crazy silent patch or Nexus to where they're like you listen to this this synth patch and it's crazy crazy stereo make sure you go into sidechain otherwise it's hiding hiding from you and unlink the detectors we're going to do this with the pro SDS ER and we're also going to do this with pro L which we're going to do next week as well you know I for a long time I just slept on unlinking my stereo compressors I left them linked just kind of out of ignorance and as soon as I started to unlink my stereo compressors I got a much much wider stereo image from my very stereo tracks what is it doing well you know in a stereo compressor there's a there's a left turn right detector if you have a Center image like a lead vocal in the center and you're mastering you don't want to unlink the detectors too much because if a transient happens on the left and the left channels independent and the gain reduction pulls down the left but leaves the right momentarily intact the lead vocal will swing the center image will swing from side to side and I'm sure that you will get a call from Rihanna's manager if Rihanna's vocal is is Auto panning like the hand man from the left and the right right we don't want that so in order to prevent that we have what we call a stereo link detector for compression which means the left is listening to the left and the right and the right is listening to the left and the right so if anything happens anywhere they both come down equally and that keeps the Rihanna's vocal in the center that's cool for that particular thing but if I have a sick nexus patch with like mad stereo information I don't have Rihanna in the center I have just this wonderful bubbly left-right loveliness and I will if I want to preserve all that difference I unlink the stereo compressor right and if I'm mastering I can unlink them a little bit as long as Rihanna isn't pan Manning around on me right if she's staying in the center it's cool so we'll see on India Singh and on the Pro L limiter not to give away next week's lesson we'll do you know just little bits of unlinking but please don't sleep on this if you're using a presser on this track that is very very stereo unlink it and you're going to be like especially put some headphones on you'd be like holy man did that just get wider without using a fake artificial Widener okay so that is the that is the presentation for today you know fundamentals of procede too

Channel: Next Level Sound

Views: 112,205

Rating: 4.9035811 out of 5

Keywords: pro c, yt:cc=on, ableton, logic pro, Dubspot, fabfilter proc, Next Level Sound, mastering, mixing, pro c2, dubspot, Mixmasterwyatt, fabfilter, learn pro c2, compressor, tutorial, audio, mixmasterwyatt, vst, pro tools, pro-c2, aax, compression, cubase, easy german, limiter, plugin, plug-in (software genre), audio units, next level sound, pro-c, au, recording, rtas, sidechain, ratio, review, pro tools expert, plug-in

Id: ENZ8IOfGiec

Length: 68min 4sec (4084 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2016