How To HEAR COMPRESSION - Music Production

hello and welcome back to the channel today another ear training video how to hear compression I have made a detailed compression tutorial in the past showing all the dials and parameters and meters but this video here is going to be much more focused on tuning and training your ear to hear all the differences that compression can make to your audio as always in my tutorials there are timestamps and chapter markers at the bottom of the screen I'm starting with a solo voice example to make it very obvious and I'll increase the complexity to a guitar in the context of a mix so if what I'm saying is extremely boring just skip ahead to the more complicated stuff if you can listen on studio monitors preferably or headphones if you have them this is an uncompressed audio recording into a condenser microphone projecting and moving around a little bit as you do in the real world in a recording situation and you can see and hear that some words are much louder than others let's take a listen let's hear how adding compression affects the sound of this audio recording let's and compression sound very confident and forward whereas audio recording at the end is just quiet and it drifts away sounds a little bit timid a little bit shy let's take one more listen let's hear how adding compression effects the sound of this audio recording let's no load up our compressor which in this case is going to be the free TDR kotelnyk of compressor because I know that anyone can download and follow along with this and it's quite a simple and visual compressor one more time my aim is to try and level this out so that the whole performance sounds confident and forward and projected so that none of it sounds shy and timid I'm going to start by increasing the ratio to about 4 to 1 because I want to have quite dramatic compression so you can really hear the differences and I'm going to adjust the threshold until I start to hear a little bit of compression let's press play let's hear how adding compression affects the sound of this audio recording when I can hear and see some gain reduction happening on the meter over here I'm just gonna adjust the release just so that the words are released by the compressor a little bit more quickly and then finally I'm going to add a little bit of makeup gain just to keep everything at the same volume initially with these settings I'm hoping is that the loudest words are going to get a lot of gain reduction so maybe even somewhere between five and ten DB I want this to be very obvious whereas the words at the end are not really getting much gain reduction at all but they are having the make up gain applied so overall everything should feel leveled out but I will show this in a visual example as well let's take another listen to hear if it sounds levelled out let's hear how adding compression affects the sound of this audio recording let's hear how adding compression affects the sound of this audio recording I'm going to increase the attack a little bit to make the effect even more obvious this will pick up on the transience of the sound and really make sure that everything is held in check let's hear how adding compression affects the sound of this audio recording I'll close the plug-in and then I'm going to quickly render this track out to show you the difference visually I've turned off all the effects and I'm just going to quickly change my View mode so that there's nothing behind the clips and it should be very obvious now that while the top audio sample the uncompressed one has large changes in the dynamic range overall this one at the bottom is a lot more even and consistent might not necessarily sound better but it is definitely more consistent a good way to visually represent this is to superimpose the two files so if I drag this bottom file up you'll see that it's underneath the green file now but all the areas with red our areas that gain has been added so all those phrases at the end have a lot more game I've turned off all the effects and let's just take one more listen to before and after and see if you can really hear how all of it sounds like a consistent level performance first without compression let's hear how adding compression effects the sound of this audio recording let's hear how adding compression effects the sound of this audio recording let's hear how adding compression let's hear how adding compression hopefully you could hear quite a large difference between those two examples especially the volume at the end of the clip it really was so much louder in the compressed one however if you can't hear the differences don't worry sometimes these things take time to really tune your ears into before I move on to the next example I'm just gonna quickly talk about the attack and release the attack I will leave alone in this example but the release is very important in making sure that the words still have quite a lot of distinction and clarity I want the compressor to be releasing each word I don't want it to be compressed by a loud word and then stay compressed and take a while to recover so I'm trying to set the release so that it recovers as much as it can in between words if I set the release much longer what you hear is that it gets triggered by a loud part of a word and then everything after that just stays really quiet as the compressors trying to recover because it's still reducing the gain so with a longer release this will just sound really mushy but it will also still have loud and quiet bits it really doesn't sound good let's hear how adding compression effects the sound of this audio let's hear how adding compression effects the sound it actually almost has the opposite effect that we want so I want to just make sure that the release is letting go of those words in quite a musical way but this will make more sense with the next example on guitar this second example is a compression in the context of a mix I was working on this chill lo-fi beat and I've recorded a guitar line on top that I'm going to try to fit in properly using compression so just started with some piano and drums and then I put some guitar in and when I was recording I just played what felt right but I really wasn't paying much attention to the actual recording so you can hear that my velocities were just all over the place cuz I was recording through tons of reverb and delay and I couldn't really hear it at the time and I thought actually this makes a really good example to show you how like a bad recording can still be salvaged using compression what you heard was all the effects on in that example so I had the compression and whatnots but if I turn the compression off you can hear that there's a massive difference in the volume of each of these notes so let's take a listen in solo and then in the context of the mix especially here is just all over the place and what it meant was getting this to sit or fit in the mix was actually quite difficult because once the piano is playing in the drums wherever I set it some of the notes are way too quiet other notes stick out like a sore thumb and it's just kind of uncomfortable it takes away from the whole chill environment I was trying to make let's listen without effects it's not going to sound spacious but you'll be able to hear it [Music] I'm one more time some of the notes just stick out and others are far too quiet so it's really difficult to actually set the right volume here and of course I could simply create an automation clip and manually adjust all of the volumes the issue there is that's okay when you've only got you know eight or sixteen bars to deal with but if you've got like eight guitar tracks the last 64 bars you're going to be doing that automation for hours let's just start by loading up the compressor I'm gonna listen to it in solo because I think it will help you hear the differences so I've got the settings the way I want them right now I suppose but I've set the thresholds so that the loudest notes are getting a lot of compression but that the quietest notes are not getting much compression at all let's take a look and take a listen more importantly [Music] let's start by simply listening to the first four notes in solo with and without compression you really use your ears but you can also use this gain reduction meter to see that some notes are getting a lot of gain reduction and others not so much I'll zoom in so you can see this as well one more time now I'm gonna bypass the plug-in and we'll take a listen without [Music] and you're really listening for how that last note just jumps out now we're gonna listen in the context of the whole mix but the guitar is still not gonna have any reverb or delay yeah I don't want to confuse things I'm gonna start without the compression and I want you to really try and focus on how the guitar seems to just fall underneath the instruments and then jump out again it might help by closing your eyes I do find that when trying to train my ears just forgetting about what the eyes are doing can really help because you lose that vision that sort of stimulus and you really have to focus in on what you're hearing more so try that if you're struggling but this is without compression and then with compression one more time without with we have still preserved a little bit of the dynamics which is good you can still tell that I'm digging into certain notes more or less but overall it actually sounds like I was playing it with a little bit more skill a little bit more thought to the velocities as opposed to just playing whatever felt right I'm just quickly exporting this through the compression so that you can visually see the difference it makes just like last time I have the uncompressed signal in green and the compressed signal in red now ignore these transient spikes at the start I'll address those later with the attack but overall the average amplitude of each note is much more consistent on this bottom one while still retaining a bit of dynamics than this one at the top this one at the top they're jumping from tiny to huge whereas here you've got a lot more consistency and that is the difference that you're hearing this one just sits right where you want it to be in the mix all the time whereas this one here is constantly just jumping above and below the level where you really want it to sit leveling all your tracks completely flat is not the purpose of mixing it's not always the aim in fact it's very rarely always the aim you want to have but there are cases especially with guitar lines like this where you just want things to sound consistent and level and it's why guitarists love recording with like their compression pedals and whatnots because it just gets you sitting in the groove exactly where you want to be at the right volume I've gone a little bit off-topic but you can see if i zoom in i've still got these large transient spikes at the star and that is because of the attack time to help you hone in on what we're listening to this little spike here is quite a good example so if I just select this this little punch at the start that's something that I want to retain if I were to open the compressor and set the attack very very short you're going to lose quite a lot of that punch let's listen in the context of the mix and I'll adjust the attack time as I pull it down each note should feel less defined and feel a little bit more mushy [Music] what I want you to specifically listen for is that on the ones where there's almost no attack it sounds like the note doesn't really start when it's supposed to it sounds like it kind of hits and then just sort of gets up to the right volume that's the way I would describe it so we're gonna take one more listen again first with that pluck at the start then taking it away with the attack really trying to listen closely if you have a very dense mix it can be a good idea to let a little bit of that attack through by having a longer attack time because it lets you follow the melody a bit closer but if you have a very sparse mix and you want the guitar to sit much further back you might want to dial the attack down because you don't want it to poke through the layers however now it's time to add some other effects such as reverb and delay let's just take a listen to those with these effects added I'm gonna blend this guitar into the mix just so that it's really sitting in the background but so that I can still hear every note really clearly let's take a listen so at that level because it's heavily compressed I can actually follow the melody the guitar doesn't really need to be that much louder unless I want it to be you know doing some beautiful lead line to get all the attention however as a final example if I turn the compression off but leave all the other levels the same you'll hear now that the guitar even with all those effects some notes are too loud some notes are too quiet [Music] especially on this phrase here the guitar is just asking for way too much attention in the mix because the volume keeps jumping up and down even with all those effects whereas with the compression just sounds so leveled off and so smooth one last playthrough so [Music] this video was a little bit longer than usual but hopefully it was helpful in sort of training and tuning your ears in to the different effects of compression both in solo and in the context of a mix and let me know what you want to hear next in this ear training series bye for now [Music]

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 160,046

Keywords: Compression, how to, mixing, in the mix, how to hear compression, rules of compression, how to compress vocals, what is compression, audio, compression explained, how to use a compressor, compressor settings, attack, release, ratio, threshold, best settings, how to mix, mixing with compression, music production (genre), in the mix tutorial, mike in the mix, michael, In The Mix lesson, pro audio

Id: ewgVnonLQEw

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020