Compressor Designer GEEKS OUT on DRUM COMPRESSION!

so getting beyond just simple squashing a signal or holding a vocal in place or gluing things together you start to think of compression as texture and vibe and movement you get into compression more as an art form as a way to manage density and transient and movement that's when things really start to get fun with compressors but before you can do that you gotta learn how to hear welcome to kush after hours my name is gregory scott tonight i'd like to do something hopefully very different for you than other stuff that you've seen maybe on youtube and other places other sources of audio information i would like to open up a session on a mix that i just finished and solo out the drums and something else for context and then show you how to hear compression specifically on the drum buss so for those of you who are new to this channel or don't know me at all and you're wondering who is this ask clown and why is he going to teach me how to hear compression i design compressors and eqs and distortion boxes both in the analog and the digital world cush audio is my company all this brown gear back here these are all my creations these plugins here these are all my creations and i'm also a musician and a composer i've been doing that for over 20 years i've been designing this crap for over 10. i'm not here to tell you i'm an authority i'm not here to tell you that i'm a great mixer great producer songwriter any of that stuff that's what you think of my r is your business not mine but i can tell you that when i reach for a compressor and i adjust the attack from 100 microseconds to 400 microseconds i can hear that i know whether or not you like what i do with that that's a different question right but i can hear it and i would like for you to be able to hear it too because the more you can hear these things by definition the more options you have for your own productions whether you're a mixer for hire or an artist doing this in your own bedroom so there are a few tricks to learning to hear exactly what all these little nuances of compression do and i'm going to exaggerate to cartoonish levels some of the things that i'm doing again this is because i'm not telling you how to compress things i just want you to be able to hear exactly what the attack knob does on a compressor and not just like hearing what it does but maybe understanding what the textures are what emotional qualities this brings to your productions i could yammer on all night about this stuff but let's get to it let's open up some sounds just for your edification this is the sound of the production [Music] you and me all right now that may or may not be to your taste at all but i think most of you would probably agree that the drums let me just pull up these drums here and drums on the roads piano i think most of you would agree these sound good they may not be the sound that you want but they sound good the high frequencies they're smooth they're silky even that's the trick i get that sound in large part because it's running out through this gear back here my drums always go through these first four pieces of gear on the rack and i'll talk in the future about what my settings are and how i use this stuff and why but for now just know these drums are in pretty good shape so again the point here is to not show you how to compress these drums it's to use a good sounding source and bend it so that you can hear what the compressor does and maybe start to get a sense of why you would want to use the various settings on the compressor to achieve emotional textural and movement kind of effects so let's start off with the attack and specifically let's get into the attack and hearing what's called transient control packing those transients in transient is the initial burst of sound on a waveform so when you hit a symbol or you hit a drum that initial of sound is called the transient and the compressor really gives you an astonishing amount of control over the size and the speed and even the texture and the tone of that transient so let's start off here with the drums and i'm going to bury them inside the roads meaning i'm going to turn the drums way down until they're like under mixed inside the roads and there's there's a couple of reasons for that but the main one is that compression especially shaping the attack is really easy to hear at low volume that's true when talking about the source being at a low volume in relation to other sounds in the mix it's also true with the volume of your mix that you're listening to in the room so here's a little pro tip for you when you're learning about compression especially things like mix plus compression or drum buss compression where you can really whack out a transient and you're not sure what's going on turn the volume of your mix in the room that you're listening to turn it down so quiet that you can barely hear it and then play with the attack knob on the compressor on your mix or on the drum bus or both and you you should be able to hear at that super quiet volume what that attack knob is doing that's that's different than knowing what to do with what you're hearing but at least the first step is being able to hear this crap so let's get into the drums here first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to dial up some what we call generous compression right i'm gonna speed up the release a little bit here for demonstration purposes call this a fast ish release uh somewhere between 50 and 100 milliseconds i consider fast let's let all the transient through all right so that's very compressed we turn this way down okay at this point all you're hearing pretty much is the transient on these trunks that initial burst of sound coming through the compressor before it clamps down [Music] now i'm gonna speed the attack up and let's just listen to what happens to the sound of the drums there's very little sound coming through now if i go even faster [Music] there's no transient left here compared to this [Music] so that's the first thing that your ear needs to understand with compression is exactly what the attack knob is doing to your transient because a common beginner mistake we'll call it is to have too much transient and to over mix it to mix it too loud in the mix and so you get these really it's sort of a viscerally powerful feeling or sounding thing but what happens is your drums are just too loud in the mix and when you listen outside of the studio you lose the power of the music itself so you got these big thwacky drums but nothing else is really happening in the mix that's interesting and most people don't really care about big thwacky drums they want to feel the power of the music of the song so getting an ear for the attack and transient is crucial and the great way to do that is to turn your sound way down when you're shaping the attack i would call this a snappy transient [Music] versus like a thwacky it's a very punchy sound so we start thinking about textures [Music] attack is a way to shape the punch the attitude of the sound on the front edge the brightness when you let less sound through like that on the initial burst the sound sounds mellower compared to this you can shape that for clarity you can bury a sound deeper in the mix when you have just enough of the right kind of pop coming through on the front edge of the sound the ear tunes into that and knows the sound exists sometimes that's all you need is to just kind of remind the listener the sound exists it's not the focus it's not the point but it's keeping time it's dancing away in the background it's doing something so this is a tool in your toolkit to use so now that we've talked about the attack as a form of transient management and punch let's talk about it as a texture specifically let's turn the sound back up so we can really hear and then let's talk about hardness versus softness for a second emotionally this sound here it's got a it's got a strong tough feel to it this is projecting strength weight authority [Music] this is a soft sound this sound is now more about the sound is more about the release of the drums the tail end of the drums than it is about the attack of the drums it's a different vibe it's still got a fat chunky thing [Music] this draws my attention to the drummer hitting the drum [Music] versus they're just being drums in the mix so again what you do with this stuff is up to you but it's just it's interesting to to know what's going on and how that translates emotionally so this this is softness you don't have to dig in so hard with the compressor but you can make a sound tougher or smoother and softer with the attack all right so let's move on to the release release is fun and releases like everybody talks about attack and threshold and ratios and stuff with compressors but to me release is really it's it's hard to hear release but let's let's get you hearing it let's slow our attack back up and bring our down okay let's dig back in [Music] and now i'm going to bury the sound again [Music] okay so now what we're going to focus on is the movement of the high frequencies and in this case the high frequencies would be the ride symbol primarily there's a little bit of tickety-tackity from the bongos in there but we're not going to worry about that right now let's just focus on the ride symbol and the movement of it so if we think of the level being here and this is quieter this is louder what's happening to that ride cymbal is that it's ducking very quickly in response to the kick and the snare being grabbed by the compressor now you can see this on the activity meter here the gain reduction meter this meter is just jamming in response to the kick and the snare but it's getting back to zero pretty quickly so the effect that that has on the high frequencies and on the movement of the ride symbol is kind of a flicker all right listen to what happens when i slow this release way up we've got this sort of seasick reverse swelling happening on the cymbals now so why is this interesting or useful let's get into the blend knob what happens when we take this groove here [Music] over compressed seasick groove and we blend it in parallel all right let's revisit the uncompressed signal so here the kick and the snare are the loudest things and the ride cymbals just kind of ticking away underneath and behind them now the drummer is dancing the kick and the snare sound kind of the same there's a little compression on them but by and large but it's the movement of the high frequencies because we got a low parallel blend about 30 percent of an over compressed signal with a lot of swimmy bumpiness on it it's a cool sound because it changes the group it's not really obvious compression if we go back to 100 blend and go to our fast release flicker [Music] speed up the attack a little bit [Music] now let's put our blend back what happens to the groove it's not a swimmy but it's still making the hi-hat stance and the ride symbol dance there's hi-hat checking away under there too but now the symbols are just filling in the space between the kick and the snare without swelling back up a great effect somewhere between that crazy slow pumping and this more flickering dancing thing there's other forms of swing you can really tune the way the cymbals are kind of doing this thing here it just opens up a world of possibilities for you in terms of groove management all right so one more thing on release i'd like to talk about release as a texture control and specifically i hear faster releases as brighter and more aggressive forms of distortion so it's less about pumping and it's more about growl and conversely slowing the release up makes the sound literally a little darker and smoother and it makes the compression feel more relaxed and so those are colors that i will use all the time especially on drums and on vocals as well let's get in here for that so i'm going to turn things up now because we're focusing more on the back end of the sound rather than the front end okay so what i hear now on the drums is i hear a bright ride symbol and a growling kick [Music] and i hear a bright kind of splatting snare those three things will change with the release check this out [Music] the kick drum now has lost a lot of that well sound and it just sounds more flappy the snare sounds faster it sounds tighter [Music] compared to here different envelope and the ride symbol is less bright it's also more diffuse spread out that ride symbol here sounds more like this is more individual hits on the ride [Music] it's more of a smooth wash so ah release so near and dear to my heart and that is how to hear compression on drums you've got an attack control which gives you phenomenal control over the transient and therefore the toughness and the punch drawing your attention to the drummer hitting the drum versus the drum sounding out in the room a hard and aggressive punchy thick sound versus a fast soft kind of smushy sound over on the release side you've got a tremendous amount of control over the movement of the compression if it's a fast flickering kind of crunchy distorted sound or if it's a slower more mellow kind of dancing swimming sound you have all these possibilities and then when you start to blend them in parallel you get sort of a universe opens up to you in terms of the colors and the textures that compression offers so getting beyond just simple squashing a signal or holding a vocal in place or gluing things together you start to think of compression as texture and vibe and movement you get into compression more as an art form as a way to manage density and transient and movement that's when things really start to get fun with compressors but before you can do that you got to learn how to hear it and hopefully this exercise has tuned your ears a little bit or that kind of thing and giving you some direction for your own productions so thanks for watching my name is gregory scott this has been cush after hours [Music] you

Channel: The House of Kush

Views: 407,681

Rating: 4.9786382 out of 5

Keywords: Drums, Guitar, Bass, Bass Guitar, Drum Buss, ubk, Analog, Digital, Analog Gear, DAW, logic, pro tools, reaper, ableton, slate, waves, producing, record producing, record production, how to mix, how to mix music, music production, EQ, Equalization, Compression, Equalizer, Plugins, Audio Editing, Sound Design, how to use compression, what is compression, what is a compressor, how to compress drums, hear compression, compressor plugins, basics of compression

Id: K0XGXz6SHco

Length: 20min 52sec (1252 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/enAblington]

This is the only video anyone needs to watch on compression, this video alone really took my mixes to a new level after the first time watching it

[u/SerLoon]

This was really good. Hard to find compression tutorials that aren’t a whistle stop tour of just what all the dials do at the most basic level and actually go into more creative or slightly unconventional uses.

[u/taliban_trim]

Is that Bob from Twin Peaks?

[u/S13Ni]

Only audio channel I watch alone in bathrobe with class of wine

[u/godisafantasy]

In this video Gregory Scott makes you hear compression

[u/spaceinthebeat]

This one really made me try to hear harder to make the compressor alter the swing/ action of my drums, I’ve been making music on and off for over 10 years and still learning to better my old lazy slap dash comp dealings. Great channel, great hair!

[u/tektite]

I asked him on his podcast how I could learn hear compression better and IIRC they told me something like spend more years listening to it, then made fun of my name and how I phrased the question lol. This is really great and useful. Thanks UBK!

[u/DetroitDaveinDenver]

This is cracking me up on how cheesy it is (I think that was on purpose.) What a great vid on compression. Great tutorial. I’m going to listen to it again tonight as I make love to my wife.

[u/dekaed]

the greatest thing about this video is that it isn't a tutorial at all.