How To COMPRESS Vocals - Like a PRO!

today I'm going to show you how to compress vocals that's coming up on home music studio one all right hey Dave Maxo here from home music studio 1.com welcome back to the show this is the place where you can learn to produce professional quality home music studio recordings and you could do that even on a limited budget today I want to show you how to compress vocals been getting quite a bit of questions recently on compression and dealing with lead vocals as well as backing vocals and there's really two ditches of error that you can fall into when you're attempting to use compression on vocals one is the really kind of questions I've got recently - and that's Dave tell me what exact numbers I need to use on my compressor to compress my vocals what attack release what ratio on the compression ratio where should my threshold be give me exact numbers Dave come on what are the numbers what are the numbers the other error of the ditch that you can fall into is the idea of just grabbing a compressor throwing it on a track in doing what I call button mashing and let's just start turning knobs and hoping that if all goes well you may get a usable result and if you're lucky and you get a vocal tract that does sound decent here's the problem with button mashing chances are you have no idea how you got there and you can't reproduce your result when you're working on more projects okay so we really don't want to be in either side of those ditches all right we want to be somewhere up the middle where we know enough about how to use compression and the numbers to where we can duplicate the results but at the end of the day compression is still a transparent in this case dynamic range compression is a transparent technique that we're trying to create and enforce the emotion and the feel of whatever project we're working on okay so let's go ahead and take a look at this project here so I'm going to let you hear a little piece of this tracks we're kind of on the same page yeah high above high above the earth okay nothing special at all I'm going to show you now a very simple technique in the wave I use compression for limiting the dynamic range of my track and this is the most common way compressing vocals not really should be used now what is the dynamic range dynamic range is the difference between the quiet peaks here versus maybe this louder peak okay you want dynamic range in a vocal tract that will allow that tract to sound quiet when it's quiet and the sound louder when it's loud but we want to lessen the dynamic range a little bit so that we have a little more evenness of our vocal tract so it's it's a little bit better in its place within our mix so when it's quiet the track's not buried but when it's loud we're not clipping out and peeking out our meters and it's just not climbing above the rest of the instrumentation in our tract okay so we want to limit the dynamic range in limiting the dynamic range we want this to be a very transparent effect at this stage all right so we want to limit the dynamic range but still to keep the same tone and clarity of our original vocal tract and even enhance this okay and so that's what we're going to use our compressor to do I'm just going to right click over here now to be fair I do have a noise gate I've got a little bit of Auto tuning happening on this track and there is some EQ some other things I've got a DSR happening but I've got those elements muted right now and we're just going to focus specifically on this main compressor and deal with our dynamic range now I'm going to deal first of all let's just go ahead and reset this to factory default I'm going to uncheck classic attack and want to draw your attention to really the main controls that are common to virtually any compressor plug-in I'm using Reaper right here you might be using a different dog different compressor and so this will apply to you as well so we've got a threshold we're going to deal with we've got a ratio setting we've got an attack and a release and then we may have cause to deal with what is called wet here but this is actually really the output gain all right or the makeup gain is another term that in the industry would call this okay so let's start first with our ratio I find that in thinking in terms of how high a ratio the more the ratio the more compression so think in terms of the more energy in your vocal track the more energy in the style of music chances are the higher the ratio you may need i and that just depends on again the style of music you're working on in most cases for a vocal I like to be somewhere between two to four decibel or four on the ratio two to one up to four to one in some cases if it was a really heavy hardrock vocal you know metal death metal something like that I might even require a little bit more so what I'm going to do now just simply put in three two one on the ratio okay now the numbers are far less important as the result we're going to achieve so just follow along with me now I've got a three to one ratio and I'm going to zero in on this loudest peak here okay so if we look at this section we're looking at you can see that this peak right here is the loudest of our track right and I'm going to simply just lower my threshold until I see in the neighborhood of a little less than six DB of gain reduction that's what this meter is right here it's telling me how much gain reduction in my dynamic range I'm achieving by any given compressor settings so when I lower this threshold my audio will climb above the threshold and for every audio that climbs above the threshold this read a1a compression ratio will be processed okay so that's what we're after now I'll go ahead and hit play on this section over here we'll listen to it a few times might get a little annoying but it comes with the territory and let's make those adjustments you are okay it's not bad so we're getting a dynamic range gain reduction just a little under 6 dB I think it peaked out at five point six oh five and a half dB I'm happy with that to start let's go ahead and listen to a little bit more of this track and let's see what just that compression settings alone with three to one ratio now and where are our threshold is lower - lets you see how that affects the rest the track you are high above high above the earth greater than the things that I that I count as worth you okay so we're already getting a lot more balance in our track okay so we're doing good there is however one thing that I'm hearing it's it's not very drastic it is subtle but it is still something that I'm hearing okay remember we want to track to be transparent one of the things I'm noticing when we're applying this compression is we're actually losing a significant amount of volume on the code the louder portions okay so when our compressing compressor does the job we're actually losing a little bit more volume than what I would like to okay I still want to have a nice dynamic range in there right so what I'm going to do is a couple of things one we're going to focus on our attack and this attack setting gives us really two things that it benefits us okay one is the slower my attack the more audio will be allowed to pass above the threshold into the output not without being compressed alright so the faster my attack the more compression will be applied so we can limit the amount of gain reduction just by by adding a more length in the milliseconds to our attack all right we can increase our attack time and compress less the other thing is the longer the attack time the more transients or high detail will be allowed to pass through so if you're wrestling with a vocal track and compressing it and you're just losing the clarity then lengthen your attack time that will really help to allow those transient detail notes to pass through and not be compressed so I'm going to really play with my attack to where it's bright like the original track is and like I want my vocal track to be but in these louder spots we're not getting white is much gain reduction to where we're really getting a drastic decrease in volume okay so let's go ahead and listen and I'll make those tweaks you are high above high above the earth greater than the things that I that I count as worth you are okay it's actually pretty good we've got a nice detail of the original tracks still coming through and at the end of the we've landed on just a little under 30 milliseconds the numbers nowhere near as important as the sound that I'm trying to achieve I think I'm happy with what we've got right there okay now the next control I want to adjust is my release time now here's the simplest way to think about release time when you're trying to figure out how to compress vocals and that is think more about the tempo of your vocal tract itself okay so I like my release I like the compression to release at the same timing roughly as what the vocal decay itself does okay so when my my notes trail out here if compression kicked in I don't want to see that release slowly decay to where it's compressing even more and more and more of the vocal tract because it doesn't decay enough that's what the release value is going to be I want to set this release value so it decays at pretty much the same rate as the vocal does naturally all right this is a really great way not to set a release time so I'm going to go ahead and listen and make those adjustments yeah high above high above the earth greater than the things that I that I count as worth you are you are high above high it's actually pretty good okay again where this is not an exact science but we're going after feel here and you kind of get the idea we're just a little under 300 milliseconds but that's just where we landed you can see when we've got the gain reduction showing us on the meter as the vocal trails out in the line high above the earth you can see the decay pretty much is that the same right all right that gives us the most natural and musical benefit using compression now the last setting that I'll take a quick glance at is really my makeup gain it says wet here in this compressor but this is really the makeup gain so we're losing a little bit of volume by applying compression we can make up for the overall volume in our track just by boosting our makeup gain a little bit I'm going to push this up on my particular track just by one DB it's kind of helped level that out a little bit it will do some a beat here so let's take a listen you are high above high above the earth greater than the things that I that I count as worth you are okay I think this is going to work really well and really we're we're just kind of leveling this whole area out here where we still have a good warm dynamic range here we've got a good dynamic range in the track but weighs less than that a little bit by just simply using compression on our vocals alright so hopefully guys this is a prostitue you can follow and we'll be super helpful to you so if you'd like to learn more about specifically recording vocal tracks I've got a free ebook that I would love to get into your hands it's entitled the five pillars of recording studio quality vocal tracks if you haven't got your copy yet just go ahead and click on this button right here that will take you to a page where you can drop in your email and then I'll get that link to download your free ebook sent directly to your inbox if you're watching this video on mobile you can go ahead and click the link directly in the description below you can also click on the little eye icon in the upper left here and then that will take you to the same place as well as always don't forget to subscribe and click like on this video and make sure you share this video so that someone else can benefit from this information and then lastly I'd love you to leave a comment below this video maybe a comment on what you would like to see in future videos that I can help you better so until next time this is dave with home music studio one

Channel: Home Music Studio 1

Views: 299,396

Rating: 4.8584242 out of 5

Keywords: compress vocals, compress, recording, Home Music Studio 1, David Maxey, digital audio workstation, reaper daw

Id: aL0D5vtW9UM

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015