How to Use a Compressor like a PRO: Everything You Need to Know

hey guys it's will from edm tips today i'm going to share with you everything you need to know about compression one of the most important and often misunderstood concepts in mixing and it doesn't matter which genre of music you produce or which daw you use learning how to compress properly is an essential skill in this video we are going to go into what exactly compression is which i'm sure already many of you have an idea about but i'm also going to show you exactly how to do it and when to do it when to know you're compressing too much and when to know you're compressing too little and it's going to help you get the absolute best results from your music before we go into what compression is and everything else we're going to cover in this tutorial let's just have a comparison between a vocal that has been compressed and a vocal that hasn't been compressed so first this is the uncompressed vocal [Music] and now let's listen to the compressed version [Music] [Music] you hear the difference everything just sounds clearer and smoother and pops through the mix which leads me nicely into our first point of today's video which is what is compression so compression is simply changing the volume of a signal over time to reduce the dynamic range now what is a dynamic range it's the difference between the loudness point of a signal and the quietest point of a signal so if the quietest point of your signal's here and the loudest is here compression is going to bring those two things closer together so if you envisage a waveform which is a bit like that it's going to make it more of a squashed sausage shape now there are a few variations to this but usually the way it's used is the compressor will make the loudest parts of your signal quieter and then it's going to boost the entire signal afterwards which means you can hear the quieter bits more clearly and this is really useful because it can even a sound out or it can give it more body in the mix now compression can be used on separate sounds it can be used on a bus for instance a drum buss where you've got lots of different drum sounds all going into one compressor and it can be used on the final master channel as well now a good mix engineer would usually use compression at all three of these different stages now most sounds apart from completely prolonged sustained drones consist of a transient and a decay part of that sound it's really easy if you think of a drum because you get that initial hit and then the dying out sound afterwards or a piano where you hit the piano key and then you've got the initial hit which is the transient and then the sound that dies out afterwards now when you're compressing your sound we have to try and get that balance just right between crushing the transient and then boosting up the decay part of it because if you compress it too hard then that sound is gonna sound squashed and horrible and if you don't compress it enough you have to boost the whole signal to hear the quiet parts but then the transients are too loud so in a nutshell that's what compression is and exactly why we want to use it now there's not one setting that's going to work for all compression as much as it would be nice if that was the case because how much you can press a signal will depend on several factors one is the sound entering the compressor all sounds different obviously so that's going to dictate how much you can press the sound the second is the actual effect you're trying to create for instance if you're mixing a country track your compression settings are going to be really different from if you're mixing a dubstep track a dubstep track for instance will have really heavy settings so you can get that really loud sound whereas a country or a classical piece of music will have much softer compression and the third factor it comes down to is of course your personal taste as well i'm also gonna bust some common myths about compression that i see banded around on the internet and some mistakes to avoid that can ruin your mixes but i'm gonna try and break things down and make it as easy as possible so without further ado let's hop into the door and get it done so firstly let's go through all of the controls on a compressor and i'm going to explain them to you as we go so i'm using the fabfilter pro c2 here just because it's a really nice compressor that can show you exactly what's going on visually as well so it's going to help this description but it has pretty much the same controls as any compressor that you're going to find in your daw even if it's just a stock compressor so let's look at their important parts and i'll explain them all so you've got the threshold the ratio the attack and the release they are the main controls that you have in any compressor so let me give you the best analogy i've ever heard to describe these four core controls of a compressor so if you're playing music in your room and you're pumping it up the threshold is the point at which you make it so loud that your mum shouts up at you from downstairs to turn down your music so if you turn it up too loud it gets to a certain point and she's going to tell you to turn it down right the ratio is how much you turn it down by when she shouts up at you the attack is how quickly you respond to her shouting up at you so does she sound really angry if so you want to turn it down really quick and then the release is how quickly after she shouted at you that you turn it back up again so that made me laugh when i first read that analogy on the internet and i think it's a really easy way to remember all of these controls so with that in mind let's just loop a point of this vocal and we're going to use that analogy to help describe it so at this point our threshold by default is set to -18 and that means when our vocal reaches above minus 18 db then the compression is going to start kicking in now as we discussed the ratio is how much you turn it down by so this is where people can get really confused because you've got this these ratios here you know it starts at one to one and it goes all the way up to 100 to one which is basically limiting it means that anything above that level is just being completely cut off and nothing is getting above that but i'll explain the kind of ratios that we would use with compression usually so two to one means that when you go above the threshold and the compression kicks in you are basically halving the volume of everything above that threshold so if your signal was to go above that threshold by 2 db the compressor is then going to make it 1 db now if you turn the threshold to say four to one for example that's a stronger compression you know it's a harder more audible way to compress the sound so if you were to go up and say 16 decibels above the threshold with your signal then a four to one ratio would compress that 16 decibels down to four decibels because that's that's dividing it by four basically and that's what the ratio does and as i said the higher you go the harder the compression and when you get to like a hundred to one that's pretty much you know like well some compressors you can actually have a limiter mode but it basically is compressing it completely above that point so where i'm going to start with this vocal is a relatively gentle compression uh about three to one three and a half to one mind and it's worth noting before i compress a signal especially if it's a longer signal like a vocal i will actually go and try and equalize the the volume more or less beforehand just manually not too much but you can see here i've actually split this track into two this part and this part and that's because this first part was a bit quieter because she was singing more softly so i've actually boosted this up by 10 db um and i've boosted this one up by 6 db so this one's basically 4 db louder than the second one just because she's singing more softly now with vocals you could actually go in and you know tweak separate syllables as well but that's beyond the scope of this video but i just wanted to throw that in uh before we started because i am actually working with a vocal today so let's just loop this first part first and work here wild electric running through my mind so you can see at the moment we're getting about 12 decibels of gain reduction now it would be nice if there was like a particular number that you're aiming for but again it really does depend on those three things the signal going in the kind of music that you're producing and your personal taste as well but for this because it's the dance music track the compression is going to be harder than it would be for an acoustic rock track for example so we want that sound more evened out because everything else in the track is more intense it would be the same for a rock track as well so you want your vocal not to get lost in all the other sounds that are going on wild electric running through my mind so we can hear that mind really nicely with the compression on when we turn it off wild electric running through my mind you can hear this bit really loudly the second part of mind [Music] but then it it just sounds unbalanced compared to the other part and this part here this syllable here you you're losing that kind of last trick signal so if we compress it wild electric wild electric wild electric wild electric wild alleged that's off wild electric so you can hear the trick louder now because we've compressed the signal so i hope hopefully you can hear that difference if you can't hear the difference i recommend just listening through to that part a couple of times until you can hear that difference where that last syllable is a little bit louder and you can use the visual cues of course as well just look when the compressor's off and when the compressor's on and it should coincide with what you're hearing but also listen to it with your eyes closed as well because then you're going to train your ears to pick up on these small nuances of compression now when it comes to setting the initial threshold level it really comes down to again what you're trying to achieve but if you push it so that everything is being compressed that's going to be too much but if you push it so only a couple of the top transients are getting compressed it might not be enough depending on the effect that you're trying to go for so if you set it to a point where say most of the signal is being compressed say 50 to 80 of it's being compressed that's going to give you enough of your signal being compressed that you should be able to hear the effect of the other settings as you go through you can always dial back on the settings a bit later but having enough of the signal being compressed so you can actually hear what you're doing is a really useful tip and i would actually apply that to any plug-in if you push the settings a bit hard first you can actually hear what you're doing and then you can always dial it back to the sweet spot so now we've brought the threshold down a bit let's look at the ratio the ratio again to be set by ear ideally but you know starting off at about three or four as a ratio is a good starting point but then if you close your eyes you can kind of wild electric dial it back and and then just kind of listen as it loops and find a sweet spot that sounds good to you wild electric wild electric and zero one to one is no compression at all wild electric wild electric and you can see on this visual readout there's a wild electric wild electric wild electric wild electric wild electric wild electric wild electric yeah so i can i can hear a couple of those syllables more nicely now um so let's go on to the attack and the release and again attack is how quickly that compression kicks in after the signal goes above that threshold and if you have the attack really really fast it basically cuts off the initial transient completely like straight away and if you have it really really slow it doesn't give the compression a chance to actually kick in so obviously there's a sweet spot somewhere between them now what people will often do well beginners will often put the attack really really quickly so it kicks in immediately but that can actually kind of smush the sound up a bit and just wild electric get it sounding a bit too mushy but you know i've seen several videos on youtube and they'll have a setting between like 25 and 50. but it completely depends on the tempo that the singer is singing at and again it depends on the genre of music that you are producing so it's a good place to start if you start at about 40 or so milliseconds [Music] and it allows the initial transients to come through and it's a nice smooth sound wow so if we bring the attack closer wild electric wild electric wild electric it's a more intense more kind of upfront feel to that vocal now that's what i want in this dance music track so i want this to pop through the piano loop and this is where the makeup gain is important because if you're compressing your signal we need to bring the whole thing up so we're able to compare like for like you know with our ears you can also use auto gain with most compressors as well i kind of prefer to do it manually but you can use auto gain as well now the release as we discussed is how quickly we take the compression off after it's kicked in now the key here is if you have it really really fast the volume goes up and down really quickly because you're compressing fast and then you're releasing it fast and then it's compressing fast and releasing really fast and you know it's it's not smooth whereas if you have it too slow the compressor is never having a chance to completely come off before it kicks in again it's easier to kind of show this visually um so if we look at our signal here that that signal is never getting up to this point again so this red line here is when there's no compression happening so let's look at that again in between the words it never gets up there so we're actually just reducing the volume of the entire signal now the sweet spot is to get it so there's enough room for it to go back to zero in between if it's a vocal for example each word if it's a drum between each drum hit it's kind of easier to set with drums but this compressor is great because it can actually show you and you want to find that sweet spot where it's got enough time to get back to zero without being too fast so the volume sounds uneven so let's try that wow just dial it running through my mind daylight slipping away yeah wild electric running through my mind daylight slipping away yeah so we can see it's getting back to zero at almost every second wild electric running through my mind and again because this is quite a fast vocal you know there's lots of syllables all put together in a relatively short time this release setting is going to be completely different from if this was a ballad for example so that's pretty much it the only other thing to touch upon is the dry and the wet uh on other compressors there might just be a dry wet knob i know you guys already know this so the dryer will be 100 not processed at all the 100 wet would be fully compressed now that's technically known as parallel compression because you're mixing the uncompressed signal with the compressed signal and it can be nice to feed in some of the drive signal which can just add some more of that kind of natural character back into the sound especially if you've heavily compressed it oh there is one control i forgot to mention that's available on almost all compressors as well well all digital compressors at least not all the analog ones and that is the knee and all that means is that instead of the compression coming in immediately when it hits the threshold when the signal hits the threshold the knee kind of smooths that out so if we look at this graph here or the display and we just play our [Music] daylight's vocal away we'll see when the signal hits that threshold the compression immediately comes in to its fullest amount whereas with a softer knee it kind of blends that in so i usually just kind of leave this halfway it's a bit hard to hear the difference unless your ears are really used to listening to compression so leaving it in the middle is you know it's a good place to start [Music] but yeah halfway is usually a pretty good place to start now another thing i do want to touch upon is that you can have more than one compressor in serial so if a sound really does have a lot of variation so you can see here this is a really loud part and then this is a really quiet part you can have one compressor beforehand that just cuts off everything at this point you know at that kind of volume so here you can have it with quite a high ratio to bring that down and then you can have your second compressor to kind of smooth the whole sound out so let's try that let's go to this part and see how we treat this perhaps differently so we're going to turn off the compressor we've used and we're going to put on an initial one just to cut off that really loud transient and then that's going to make our second compressor have to work a little less hard so we get it just so it's hitting that loud one i smile so i smile so just that point so i smile the heart rations i smile so i smile so i smile and then it's very subtle but we're just cutting off that top transient so then it's going to be smoother when it goes into the second one so i smile easily so i smile easily so now let's listen to the difference to this vocal when it's uncompressed and we're going to listen to this with the piano riff going in the background as well so this is uncompressed first take off both compressors a few vocals are coming through we're missing quiet birds [Music] there's a lot of dynamic variation so let's just loot that part and listen when we've got the compression on so just this part [Music] massive difference there [Music] now because again this is a house track i actually want to compress this further still and make it even more of a sausage so what i'm going to use is a different kind of compressor i'm going to use a glue compressor but you could use an analog modeled one as well like this where is it the cla76 is a model of a classic compressor but i'm going to use this one because it's with ableton and it's absolutely fine and for this i like to put quite a fast attack so 0.1 milliseconds a fast release as well and pretty gentle ratio and probably about four to five db of gain reduction [Music] so this is off with this last kind of smoothing glue compressor [Music] this would be a good place to hear the difference actually listen to the so i compared to the easily [Music] we'll just loop that little bit [Music] listen to that so i come in when we turn this last compressor [Music] and again you can use the dry wet knob to just you know tone it back a bit if you if you feel it's a bit hard that compression um so let's have a listen to the whole thing [Music] now let's put on some reverb and delay [Music] all over the place up and down [Music] obviously this is a vocal so i've done you know a few compressors in a row you probably wouldn't do that for drums you might just use one or two compressors because this is a long signal with lots of dynamic variation i've used more compressors in a row but i hope you found that useful guys and i want to give a massive shout out to my accelerator students actually who well i think one of them hit the top of the beatport charts the other day so i'm going to put a link to his music below this video and if you do want more professional coaching from me if you want some one-on-one time and get your music to a truly professional level as quickly as possible you can check out my coaching below this video too thank you so much for watching and oh what else am i going to give you you can download my mixing guide as well for free below this video so as i was saying thanks for watching have a fantastic day and until next time cheers and happy producing you

Channel: EDM Tips

Views: 41,334

Keywords: Compression, Audio compression, compression explained, how to compress, how to use compression, what is compression, compressor, compression tutorial, best compression settings, what is audio compression, what does a compressor do, how to hear compression, how to use a compressor, compressor tutorial, basics of compression, rules of compression, how does compression works, why you need compression, what is a compressor, ableton compression tutorial, EDM Tips, vocal compression

Id: os5DKGu-vvs

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022