FL Studio 12 - Fruity Limiter / Compression Explained Simply

all right guys i'm going to explain compression using the fruity limiter so let me show you what i've got going on in this project um i've got a sample here that i recorded this sample has some really quiet parts and some really loud parts so it has a very large dynamic range and this is perfect because this is really ideally something that you would want to compress so what have i got here i've got compression demo this sample on mixer insert two and i have two limiters both of these limiters should be [Music] should just be default there shouldn't be anything here sorry let me get this out of the way okay so let me just make sure that these are default and defaults okay so you might ask why do i have two and i'll get to that shortly but first let me just play this sample again and just look down here in the limiter windows you should see the data coming through as you would expect [Music] okay so nothing's happening right now neither of these limiters have any settings activated it's just totally default no compression is occurring so let's actually dive into what compression is compression is the reducing of the dynamic range of a sound so what is dynamic range dynamic range is the difference between the lowest low and the highest high of a sound so in our case this really low transient down here and the really high transient up here the dynamic range is the difference between these two points and compression is the act of reducing or compressing that difference in dynamic range so down here in the limiters why i have two of them is because i think it's really it it just helps a lot to have too here because what you can do is on the left you can turn off output peaks and on the right you can turn off input peaks so then you kind of have this in out before after kind of view here and it's really nice i'm only going to be applying the actual compression settings to the left side which is the first limiter in the effect chain on the mixer on the right i'm just going to use this as a visual aid that's all it's going to be i'm not going to touch any of the settings on it it's just going to sit here and show me the output that's all it's going to do so let's play this again and you can see the purple input and the green output which currently are going to be the exact same because we haven't done anything yet [Music] all right so hopefully i haven't lost it yet let's actually get into compression here so i'm going to go down here in the limiter these are called fruity limiters but they actually have a compressor in them as well all you have to do is click this little comp right here and you can get the compression settings you don't need to worry about what the limiter might be doing or what the compressor might be doing they're just kind of both active all the time based on the levels that you set so i'm going to leave the limiter totally as is it just has this default ceiling so i'll reset that and i'm just going to come down here to the compressor and start playing around with the compressor so the first two knobs the most important ones in the compressor i want to talk about is threshold and ratio so threshold as i'm dragging it around right now threshold is basically the line you set and everything that passes above that line any audio that passes above this line is going to be compressed so let's set this somewhere right in the middle of our data here i'll say 15 negative 15 db to start everything above this line is going to be compressed at a ratio the next knob at a ratio of we'll start with two to one so to summarize everything that passes above this line of negative 14 or negative 15 db every piece of audio that makes it above that line is going to be compressed at a ratio of two to one and by compressed it all i mean by that is the volume is going to be reduced that's all compression is it's just volume reduction so um what next now that we've kind of set a threshold um randomly pretty much in a ratio randomly um that's fine for now because you can hear and see that the the the impact these parameters have as we as we continue um i'll talk about attack and release so attack and release are are pretty standard they do what you would expect them to do if you're familiar you know with using knobs like this and synths or really anything else the attack is how long it takes the compression to actually fully fire so this is measured in milliseconds um and i'll leave this at 2 2 ms for now that that sounds fine again we can just play with all these knobs to get the settings that we want i'm just going to kind of set some arbitrary values for now so we can start to see this in the limiter windows release is the opposite of attack it's how long it takes the compression to to disengage once compression fires based on one of these transients that passes above the threshold the release is how long in milliseconds it takes the compression to disengage it how long it takes the audio to return to normal for compression to stop that's all that is and by default i think it's somewhere right around there yeah by default it's a 250 ms and i'm going to leave it right there okay so um when i play this again you are going to notice a slight difference now over on the right on the uh on the output limiter because of the settings that we just set up we set a threshold we set a ratio we set an attack and we set a release so now we're actually going to have some compression going on and you're going to see that compression up here on this white line so i suspect that only the very last part of the sample where it's really really loud i suspect that's the only place we're going to actually see compression and you'll see it on the left coming down it's kind of these white lines mirroring the uh the transient peaks here in the input data so let's let's take a listen and uh and and look to see what's happening [Music] okay so it's pretty much right here um at the end is the only part that the compression is actually firing this is your visual cue that compression is occurring that sound towards the end is is the volume is being reduced based on the ratio that we set because of how much data is passing above our threshold so we have data passing above our threshold at other points in the sound as well but the ratio isn't strong enough to actually apply compression to that it's it doesn't need to it there's there's there's no need for the compressor to actually work that hard yet based on the settings that we have so let me uh increase our threshold because we pretty much found out that that's not aggressive enough we need we need a lower threshold and probably a higher ratio to actually squash this sound and even it up because it's still very um it's still very different in its volume like we still have this really low peak down here in this really high peak over here so let's drop this threshold let's get real aggressive right away we'll go down to negative 30 db um that i i suspect should be enough and we'll bump the ratio up we'll just double it we'll go over to four here so we're going to be cutting down the loudness of everything that that goes above negative 30 db by a ratio of 4 to 1. so let's play this again and now we should see compression firing all throughout the sample and over on the right rather than rather than seeing what we're familiar with rather than having this output kind of represent our original waveform you're going to see it's much more uniform it's going to be kind of squashed down it's going to be much quieter but it's going to be a lot more uniform [Music] all right so we're making good progress this right here this is officially compressed we have just applied compression to the sample that's really all it is we've reduced the volume of uh of of the high peaks um we've kind of squashed the sound together now the only thing left to do is add makeup gain so now that we've kind of tidied up the sound and made it much more even we want to use this gain knob to boost the gain of this so once we boost the gain this uh kind of this level over here this kind of straight playing field we have should remain the same we're just applying volume to the entire thing so let's do that let's apply let's apply 8 dbs of gain to this and we'll see this kind of rise up and listen with your ears as well don't just look at the limiter listen to how different this was when we started [Music] okay look over here on the left this is what we started with all these this purple data and then on the right this is our this is our result after compression see the difference see how different the uh the dynamic range is here we have a large dynamic range on the left and we have a very small dynamic range on the right now let's let's talk about release so uh release here it's nice because the end of the note is easy to explain release so right here where compression is kind of ending this right where my cursor is this is kind of the last bit of compression that fires this is the last obviously no in the sample but this is the last piece of of transient data that kind of comes above our threshold right here so this is where the compression starts to roll off so this is a pretty uh normal roll off for compression but if i jack the release all the way up you'll see that instead of this kind of sharp decline here it's going to be much much more gradual it's going to take a lot longer for the compression to kind of disengage so let's play this again and you'll see it very very visibly here in the analysis and gain envelope line so see how different that line is than the one we had before that's what the release is actually doing the compressor is still firing all the way through here rather than kind of going back to normal right away that's what the release is doing the attack is uh in a way doing the opposite but i'll let you play around with that kind of turn that back to where we had it so there are other settings in the limiter as well compression is a is a huge topic you know i could i could go on for hours about this but i won't um there's a saturation knob here a knee knob there's a curve setting there's a head knob here part of the envelope there's actually a noise gain limiter too which is nice but i'm not going to get into those right now the gain the threshold the ratio the attack and the release are really what you guys need to get going on compression if you're not doing it right now there's no reason to be scared of compression at all it's it's this simple we've done it right here we can hear it we can see it this is all you really need to know to kind of get moving on this stuff and the only thing i'll explain before i close the video here is what the limiter is so it's called fruity limiter so i know it seems like we should actually talk about what the limiter is so the limiter is just a very intense form of compression if you click between the limiter and the compressor you'll see that they're almost the same thing they are very similar in the settings that they have it's just really the difference of instead of having a threshold on the limiter we have a ceiling and there's no ratio and the reason for that is um a ceiling is just that it's a ceiling it's basically a threshold with an infinity to one ratio it doesn't matter what the ratio is in this case there isn't a knob for it it doesn't matter what it is because the ceiling says any audio that gets above this line is not going to be processed it's it's just going to be totally wiped out this is what's called a brick wall so if i lower the ceiling all the way down here you're going to notice on the right that nothing nothing's ever going to get above the ceiling it's just going to be a brick wall right here at this line [Music] so that's not good we obviously don't want to do something like that because we lose so much of what makes the sound of the sound

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Keywords: FL Studio, FL 12, Compression, Explained, Sidechain, Fruity, Limiter, Fruity Loops, How to compress, tutorial, FL Studio (Software)

Id: -NOKQUEuGgI

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 17 2016