How To Use Compression - Detailed Tutorial

hello and welcome back to another video or if you're new here i'm michael welcome to the channel today we're going to be learning all about compression so i'm going to go over all the basics you know attack release threshold what all the dials do but far more importantly i'm going to be going beyond the theory and trying to show you how to hear compression so i'm going to be going really into detail about how to hear compression so you actually know how to apply it in a mix i think a lot of us know the general theory behind it but actually getting it to work in a mix without just turning dials randomly and hoping for the best um that's what i'm really going to try and help you with in this video having some focus behind what you're doing with your compression i've got plenty of examples to demonstrate different compression techniques and there are loads of different ways to use compression but a simple way that i think a lot of us know is that you know with audio you've got quiet parts and loud parts the idea is that the compression compresses the loud parts so that they become a bit more quiet and now when you raise the gain overall the quiet and loud part are now both loud both full fat in your face you know those sorts of words now that's a very basic way to use compression other ways include being able to adjust the transient of the sound so making something more punchy or less punchy and smooth and you can also use compression to adjust the sustain of a sound which is very common in electric guitar where you want notes to just ring out for ages and ages so let's just dive right in and we'll take a look at compression i'm going to be demonstrating these compression techniques on a vocal from a song that i did with a friend called calvin all the details are in the description if you're interested um because vocals seem to be really challenging to process and it's what i'm asked about all the time i'm using fl studio 20 but you can use any daw and you can use any compressor they all look a little bit different but they all have the same basic functionality the first core principle when compressing almost anything and i i really hate giving rules in audio because you know there's no real rules but just don't bother doing it in solo it just doesn't help you you can listen to the vocal in solo for the sake of it but when you're adjusting the parameters you really must listen to everything together and i'll quickly justify why i say this unlike other effects like eq or reverb where sometimes it can actually help to solo and really hear something in detail with compression it's all about dynamics levels and transients and because of that you need to hear it with reference to something else you have to hear the whole rest of the band the rest of the instrumental because otherwise you're just blindly setting a level in comparison to nothing and you do not know whether it's going to sound good or not i've wasted countless hours compressing stuff in solo till it sounds good then it didn't sound good in the track so that's the first thing we're going to listen to everything together and just to make a point of this i'm going to start by listening to this vocal in solo this is with no compression and there doesn't really appear to be anything wrong with it when i listen in solo so i'm really listening to the stars of the words how punchy are they the ends of the words can i hear the vibrato do i hear all the low-level information and in solo i absolutely do hear it i'll turn the reverb off as well so we're just hearing the vocal i've been drifting drifting away with you tonight so i'll play a little bit more later but i could hear all of that i could hear all the little ends of the words like tonight i could hear this little t here it was all clear why would i even want to compress it however if i play it in context of the whole track you'll hear that a whole heap of issues spring up on in solo this was a confident vocal performance really well projected i thought it sounded great in the context of the track all of a sudden you can't hear the ends of the words very well especially on speakers the vocal just drifts wildly up and down in volume and it does not sound confident it almost sounds anxious so let's take a listen there's these really aggressive guitars that sort of compete with the vocal a lot so let's take a [Music] been listen drifting away with you tonight oh i just might break my so that was really confusing a lot of the time it just felt too quiet but there was also sections like on this second phrase where it was just far too loud on certain words the same with this final phrase i'm just going to tune in on this one again it was super loud but also quiet at the end [Music] like drifting and away just shoot out of the headphones and then the rest of it tails away and it doesn't sound good so this is why you have to listen in context of the whole track the second principle is that it really helps to have an aim at least 70 percent of the time when compressing i'm trying to actually have a clear aim of what to do the other thirty percent is just wild sound design and hoping for the best okay but what i'm going to show you is the difference between the compressed and uncompressed audio so i've already compressed this and i'll show you the difference so the top one here is the original signal and the bottom is a compressed signal and to an untrained eye they don't actually look that different but if we take a really close look what you'll see is that overall the compressed version just looks fatter there's less difference between the peak and the rest of the sort of low level information if i take the compressed signal and just drag it on top of the original signal you'll see that the peak values don't change that much but overall the waveform just becomes a lot more thick and fat especially in areas like this third phrase here where the vocal starts to trail away in the middle and become really sort of weak and anxious on the compressed version it stays strong through that phrase if i zoom right into the end phrase here the uncompressed one starts small gets really really large and then it ends really really tiny at the end here and what you could hear was that that's okay in solo but with the rest of the guitars at this point we hear too much of it and then the guitars just overlap and there's this frequency masking and we can't hear what we want whereas on the compressed one starts medium ends up medium gets slightly louder and then it ends up with a nice thick bold signal at the end and even though we've altered the dynamics a lot the start of each word still jumps out of the speakers there's still a nice punch on it now the next question is if we're just changing the volume why would we even use compression why wouldn't you just go in with an automation clip on a gain plug-in or a fader and just adjust each little bit of every word up and down like crazy the answer is you probably should do that as well so that kind of gain automation is excellent especially if you're being paid to do a mix for someone spend an hour or two doing it it takes ages it's a skill that takes a long time to develop and for a three minute vocal you could well spend 45 minutes or an hour just doing the gain automation to make sure that you're actually helping it and not harming it it's not something that's simple to do whereas for most of us that aren't being paid a ton to do a commercial mix and we just want our vocals to sound good quickly often if you can set up a compressor or two in a couple of minutes to just make the vocal fit in the mix that's all we're really looking for we're not going for absolute perfection we just don't we just want it to sound confident and not sound weak and i mean absolutely no offense to calvin for saying that he's a fantastic singer it's just the way it works with the microphone and the way the frequencies mask in the mix it can take a confident vocal performance and just sort of turn it on its head so now that i've shown you what the compression looks like i'm going to let you hear it on two of the phrases here and then the other two so i'll start with the compression turned off and just notice how some words just jump out randomly and the ends of the words just trail away under the guitars and don't sound confident and then when i kick the compression in it all sounds a lot more balanced and you can really hear the vibrato and all the wonderful detail in the vocal so let's take a listen away [Music] that's just so much better now we're going to listen to the second phrase and what i want you to really listen for is tonight at the end this t just gets sort of buried under the mix but with the compression it's right forward and you can hear all the detail and emotion in the voice and then at the end here notice how leave again without the compression just trails away but with the compression it's really confident really in your face so let's take a listen [Music] [Music] i really really hope you can hear a big difference between those two examples definitely go back and listen again if you're struggling to hear the differences try to listen on speakers as well because you'll hear the sound sort of in 3d a little bit better but the difference with the compression is just astonishing to how confident it makes his singing sound sounds so much more natural even though technically there's quite a lot of compression there which you'd think would be unnatural so right let's dive right in and i'll go through all the settings we'll talk about the attack release threshold ratio you name it let's get right into it the compressor that i'm choosing to use is the ozone 9 dynamics compressor because i just think it is quite a visual way of representing the settings however just use any compressor they're all going to have their own quirks their own ups and downs sound a little bit different i'm going to add this after my eq it can be good to sort of cut away the low end fix a few frequency problems first and then feed that signal into the compressor it just tends to work better but don't be afraid of you know doing eq before and after i often like to ds vocals before i put them into the compressor but anyway that's enough of that let's dive through all these settings this plug-in happens to be a limiter and compressor in one because they're very closely linked but i'm not going to be using the limiting section at all so i've got my threshold ratio attack release i've got my parallel processing my makeup gain you'll be able to find these settings in virtually any compressor you're using the first thing to do and i'll explain what all these settings do in more detail set the ratio so that it's more than one to one set it to something at least two to one this means that when we adjust other settings there will be compression and i'll explain why in a minute the first thing i'm going to do this is probably the only time that i'm going to set something by looking at the screen and the output every other dial i'm just going to set by listening to it okay so i'm going to adjust the threshold until i can see that i'm getting some sort of compression i'll also hear it and what this will sound like is just a reduction in volume initially it's not actually going to sound any better at all it's just going to sound like my vocal is being randomly reduced in volume so let's take a listen and we'll lower this threshold until the signal is passing over the threshold now the threshold is in db so if my threshold is at minus 20 that means the signal needs to go over -20 before we get any processing so let's play so we're not getting any compression there so i'll just lower it now i can see that we're getting some gain reductions [Music] so right there you can see on the screen here there's some gain reduction it says maybe minus six minus seven dbs and also down here there was a little gain reduction readout how this is shown in every compressor is a bit different but for now i'm just looking to get some compression just so i can get a flavor for it don't try to aim for any specific numbers i know some i know loads of people say three to six db of compression but to be honest sometimes i need 15 dbs for it to sound good and other times i don't need any compression at all so you've just got to do what sounds right so for now i've set the compression threshold as -25 db and this means that whenever the signal passes over minus 25 db so is greater than that the signal processing is going to be applied however i need to give it some makeup gain at the end because right now my signal's been reduced on average by you know four five six db so i need to add at least a few db of makeup gain at the end back so that we're back to the original volume we started at so i'm just going to set this by bypassing the plug-in and seeing if there's like a massive change in volume or anything like that so let's just press play [Music] so at around 3 db there wasn't a big difference when i turned the plugin on and off right now the compression that's being applied is just random it's just based on these settings which the compressor opened up with so let's adjust all the important settings right now the first one is the ratio now this confuses people like crazy and i'm gonna try and make this as simple as i can so looking at the ratio a ratio of two to one would be considered quite a gentle ratio what the two to one means is that if you want to get one db out of this compressor you have to go 2 db over the threshold so if i push past the threshold by say 4 db it's actually going to be cut down by two decibels so it's basically going to be cut in half after the threshold so if i increase the ratio to five to one what that means is that if my signal goes over the threshold by five db it's going to be cut back down by four db and we're only going to be left with one which is a much more harsh form of compression and if i keep pushing this 10 to 1 20 to 1 you have to go 20 db past the threshold to get 1 db out which means you're practically limiting so often a limiter is described as a compressor with an infinite ratio because as soon as the signal touches the threshold it's just kicked back down or chopped off so if we take our ratio back what i'm going to be doing is trying to get quite a bit of uh gentle compression applied on almost every word so i don't want the compression to just take down just only the top bits i kind of want to have this gentle compression to smooth out the whole performance if you have a vocal that's like very very consistent then there's just one word that jumps up like crazy then maybe you want to set quite a strong ratio to just really sort of peg down that one word but in my case it's kind of just all over the place so i'm just going to set a gentle ratio try to get some compression going the whole time so the next two controls are really closely linked attack and release so after the signal has passed the threshold it's loud how quickly do we want to take the gain away from it so naturally a fast attack time of zero milliseconds or one millisecond that's going to remove the transient from the sound so that sharp increase in volume is just going to smooth it out and this makes vocals sound really really heavy almost muffled whereas if you have a really really long attack time all those transients are going to get through they're not going to have any compression and they're going to start sounding a little bit all over the place so lots of people give you specific numbers to aim for 5 10 15 milliseconds whatever i actually much prefer to just pretend this dial has no numbers on it at all and just set it until it sounds right typically for me that's a longer attack so that i retain a lot of punch and transient one of the biggest mistakes i hear with beginners is a super fast attack time the vocals just start sounding like mush i'm just going to loop this first phrase so that you can hear the attack on ive that first word if i make the attack really short the word sort of just mushes away really long i get a really punchy transient so let's start in the middle and i'll adjust those now [Music] i've been drifting so i hope you could hear that when we had the really short attack time the start of that word just turned to mush basically so i like having quite a generous attack time maybe somewhere around 50 milliseconds but please don't copy these settings just set it till it sounds right so what i'm going to do is go over to this section now just a different part of the vocal i want to make sure that i can hear the transients on each of these words if i can't or i feel they're being mushed i'm going to have to increase my attack time a little bit more so that sounds really good especially on words like bags that just jumped through the start sounded really punchy something that you might have seen me do there that i do all the time but not in tutorials is close my eyes so if i'm listening to something close the eyes all of a sudden your brain has no inputs really besides you know what you can feel and what you can hear so your brain becomes a lot more sensitive to sound when you close your eyes it's why at night like everything just sounds so loud i don't know if you've ever woken up at night every little creak and click and everything just sounds super loud so close your eyes let your brain really focus on the audio ignore what the processor is doing in front of you if you can't if you can or you can't hear the transients that's what you're really listening for you're listening for that punch at the start of each word okay i'm aware that i'm going on a bit so the release time this is the opposite of the attack this is okay so once the signal has fallen below the threshold how quickly does the compressor recover so if the compressor recovers immediately what happens is the vocal just chops up and down in volume really suddenly sounds really weird but if it's too slow the vocal just sounds like it's bogged down because the compression is just always being applied which means we're basically just turning our vocal down so i'll show you both let's start with a really fast attack time initially your you'll hear the vocal jump up and down a bit as i push the attack time much longer you'll hear that the vocal just sounds like it's i'm just turning it down basically [Music] so what i like doing is setting the release musically and this can be a bit easier to do on drums but we want to hear the compressor open back up add the gain to the ends of those phrases and just recover in between words so you can see this visibly on the trace here but use your ears as well you see how it completely recovers between words [Music] so the idea behind this is that when the vocals loud the compression's active and then the compressor releases and then everything else that isn't being compressed has this makeup gain applied to it so basically everything gets a boost of three dbs besides those loudest parts and that's why all that low level detail is pulled up by 3 db it's as though we've pushed the fader up by 3 db but also turned the loud bits down this knee control is not on all compressors it's on a lot of digital ones but um this kind of makes that threshold softer so instead of just applying yes or no it's sort of got this maybe zone where it starts applying compression it can make it sound really really soft as you develop your ears for this you'll be able to hear a bigger difference i'm just going to keep this in the middle for now i don't think many people will hear it right away and the next thing i'm going to do is uh this parallel processing here so on most compressors there's a dry wet knob or a slider in this case wet means the completely processed signal dry means original signal you probably already knew that sorry but um what i like to do is i like to back off the compressed signal just a little bit maybe to 70 or 80. and this just lets a little bit more of the natural sound come through you might feel it more than you hear it i don't know it's kind of weird to describe so let's do another before and after i'm going to focus on the second half of the phrase because i know we've listened to that first half a lot uh this middle bit here on the first phrase this kind of dips down is really quiet and then the end gets quiet again so let's take a listen uh before and after [Music] [Music] so overall that's just done a fantastic job of controlling uh the vocal volume even on quite a challenging vocal here so i'm just about to go over and show you some guitar processing but i hope that helps sort of explain what those settings do and really helps you hear the compression and i really would stress this point one more time is that even though listening with everything together makes it you'd think it would make it harder to hear the differences you hear the differences in compression so much more when you listen to everything together i i just i cannot stress it enough how many hours i've wasted um by compressing stuff in solo for sound design it can work but for like vocals and guitars compressing it in solo you're pretty much on your own you've got no reference so definitely listen to everything together don't be afraid to adjust the parameters and really listen out for what they're doing the next thing i want to show you is this really cool little melody calvin played on guitar how we fit it into the mix how we use compression to increase the sustain of the guitar because it was an acoustic guitar which doesn't typically have a whole lot of sustain compared to an electric guitar let's take a listen [Music] so those notes just last forever okay but what we did is we had uh some eq and a reverb but we noticed that it just didn't the reverb just didn't seem to last a long time there wasn't much sustain on the guitar and when we increase the reverb size it just became like a really massive reverb but it didn't it didn't sustain the way we wanted to so what we instead decided to do was use compression to lower the volume of the start of each guitar pluck and just allow a whole load of makeup gain to be applied to the tail so what we're listening for here is that the sustain and reverb just becomes so much bigger when i turn the compressor on so i'll start with it turned off and then i'll turn it on [Music] i'll try to keep this one really brief but this time you don't change the threshold the threshold is just set and you add more uh compression by just increasing the input gain and then adjusting the output gain so that it's the same sort of volume the attack and release are in the middle here and you see that i have sort of like a medium fast release so once the sound is pegged down a bit turned down it very quickly recovers and there's a lot of makeup gain applied and what this does is it means the guitar can be increased in volume a lot without the transients being really really pokey in the mix i still want the transients to sit back a little bit and if you see the gain reduction meter as soon as the gain reduction starts recovering back to nothing you just hear the reverb swell back up which is exactly what we wanted we didn't want to add more length of reverb we just wanted more volume of the reverb to swell back up [Music] and this is like a very common technique that's used in electric guitar processing where you want a lot of sustain it's why guitarists love absolutely adore compression pedals for electric guitar it just adds so much more sustain to the sound smoothes everything out so to prevent this video getting super long i'm gonna call it a day there but i'm gonna come back and do another video on drum processing because that takes a lot of the rules of compression and just turns them on their head again it's really fun but i hope this has helped simplify a lot of the terms ask me any questions in the comment section down below and i hope you have a really nice week see you later guys bye for now you

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 1,771,557

Keywords: compression, how to compress, vocal compression, how to hear compression, vocal compression explained, compression explained, compression tutorial, compression lesson, how to compress vocals, what is compression, best compression settings, compressor attack, attack, release, threshold, compression ratio explained

Id: yi0J9JsRdI4

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 19 2019