How to Use Compression on Vocals | Compressors Explained in Detail

what's good youtube you already know who it is man it's your boy q aka huh the wave man man man and we are back with another wave monopoly dot com tutorial and today we're bringing you everything compressors in this video we're going to be going over everything that you need to know in detail about compressors and by the end of this video you will be able to compress your vocals successfully let's get into it [Music] the first thing that we're going to do is take a listen to this first example i bought you this to get you up my checklist my dogs i'm running wild and people rappers my people want it all in all in this song them things up on my side they come in tandem now that you've heard that let's take a listen to our second example i bet you just to get you up my checklist my dogs i'm running wild when people wrap this my people want it all in all in this song them things up on my side they come in tandems so i know you heard a difference now that difference that you heard was compression the first vocal take was a completely unprocessed natural vocal take the second vocal was the same audio take but instead it was heavily compressed now what's compression compression is the process of reducing the dynamic range or evening out the volume of an audio signal dynamics are basically the span in between the highest loudest part of an audio signal and the softest part of an audio signal just imagine if i was in the room with you right now and i started singing to you i just started saying to you live in person it's going to cost you some but just imagine it you're going to hear me sing loud at times and you're going to hear me singing very low and soft at different times now when you're recording into a daw you're most likely going to be recording with an instrumental so if you have your raw unprocessed vocal in there with your instrumental you're not going to be able to hear those lower parts as much as you're going to be able to hear those super louder peaks so what do we use to tame these dynamics we will use a compressor a compressor basically takes the loudest peaks and brings them lower in volume so we can start getting closer to those softer levels now it doesn't quite work like volume okay we can't just turn it down and turn it up but instead we control it we control it with a function called threshold now what threshold is is basically us telling the compressor listen you are going to start engaging this compressor after we reach a certain volume level now by how much it compresses is something else that we control which is called the ratio which means whenever we go above this threshold how much we want to reduce and compress this audio signal and whatever's under the threshold remains unprocessed now that we know those two basic functions let's get into this example so we can further explain those two and the rest of those basic functions let's get into it so let's go ahead and hear this vocal uncompressed once again i bought you this to get you up my checklist my dogs i'm running wild and people rappers my people want it all in all in this song them things up on my side they come in tandems as you can hear you hear those softer parts and then we hear those louder peaks so what are we going to do guys we're going to get a compressor in our case we're going to be working with the r comp which is a compressor that comes from waves audio which is a third-party plug-in but the reason why we're really using this is because it comes with all those basic functions and not only that but it sounds really good it has a great tone and great character and is used by many of the top engineers today so that's what we're going to be using all right as you can see we have this dialed in right here alright guys so what i'm going to go ahead and show you guys is how these things work together so what we're gonna do is we're gonna bring these back to zero and we're gonna start dialing this in so you can understand how these work together in conjunction so i'm gonna bring you to the mind of myself i know that i'm going to want to compress this vocal moderately alright that's where i want to start and from there we can start playing with levels and seeing where we really want it to end up so we're going to do a four to one ratio which basically says for every four dbs it goes over the threshold we want it to allow one to come through which also means three db was reduced during this compression understood now ratios could be set in a bunch of different variations for instance you've probably heard two to one four to one eight to one now what does this mean one to one is basically unity gain which means there's no attenuation at all two to one is very light compression it's gonna allow more dynamics to come through okay four to one begins to get more moderately compressed eight to one we're starting to get more heavily compressed and 20 to one we're starting to reach those limiting levels all right now we got that set the next thing that we're gonna do is set our threshold if your threshold is at zero it is going to be doing nothing it's not compressing anything it is not working so remember the threshold says when to engage when to start compressing our vocal let's get into it i bought you this to get you off my checklist my dogs are running wild and people rappers my people want it all in all in this song them things up on my side they come in tandems i bought you just to get you off my taxes my dogs are running while doing people reckless as you can hear we're already starting to compress that vocal very very well listen all we did was move the ratio and threshold all right now what i'm gonna do is bring the threshold back up and bring it back down and i want you guys to hear how this starts to engage let's get into it i bought you this to get you off my checklist my dogs i'm running wild when people wrap this my people want it all in all in this song some things up on my side they come in tandems i bought you just to get you off my taxes my dogs they running wild on people reckless my now you're really starting to hear this be compressed now as this is compressing you have to understand that we are overall bringing our volume levels down so that's when we're going to start using our makeup gain to compensate for the loss of volume levels so we're going to start bringing it up so that we're able to start fitting this back into the mix so let's start dialing our makeup gain as we listen to our track as a whole [Music] [Music] sounds amazing we're halfway there next we have to understand attack and release attack is basically saying listen after we hit this threshold how fast do we want this compressor to actually work how fast do we want to engage this compressor to hit those transients now what's transients transients are basically that beginning punch of each of those phrases those are transients okay that's what we're going to want to control that's basically what the attack is our release is saying listen how long do we actually want to hold this compression once engaged all alright now for you to really start to get this concept i'm going to over exaggerate both the attack and the release and listen to the characteristic of the vocal change let's listen to it [Music] [Music] [Music] as you've heard when we make the attack very slow in this case 500 we start to hear a lot of transients which gives us a feeling of aggressiveness our vocal becomes more aggressive punchier more just bold now when we sped up our attack made it the fastest that we could we started to feel more smoothness more just silky smooth no transients coming through it's i don't know when i give you all my shaking i don't think when you're out of people like this and then when it was a slow attack i don't bother with doing my back my dogs on their bottom back it was just much more transients coming through with a slower attack and with a faster attack very smooth okay now that's just showing you how this changes the characteristics let's do the same thing with our release listen to the characteristics [Music] my people want it all and all in this song some things up on my side they call me i bet you [Music] [Music] all right when it's a faster release we get a more aggressive tone because we're releasing that compression as soon as it's basically being engaged now vice versa when it's a very slow release we're holding that compression so it gives us a smooth vocal now the key is to work with these in conjunction so we can find that sweet spot so what we're going to do right now is dial this in and listen for where this feels right we're looking for where it feels right not necessarily where it sounds muted and soloed out you want it to feel right within your overall track because at the end of the day we are not compressing to here in acapella we are compressing so that it can find its space within our overall track so we're gonna dial it in right now let's get into it we're gonna start with attack and then go to our release and find where it feels right let's get into it my dogs are running people my people want it all in all in this song some things up on my side they [Music] [Music] so basically i feel very comfortable where this is at right now okay we have our attack at nine which is a pretty fast attack still and we have our release somewhere in the middle okay the reason why we chose our attack to be here is because i like a little bit of that trend that that transient coming through it gives it a kind of a aggressiveness okay but not too aggressive to where it starts to sound wild and just abrupt it just it just has just enough to where i feel like yo this is what i'm going for this vocal this this the words i'm saying it matches it feels right just a tad of aggression and our release i like that it's being held a little bit longer but not too long to where it's too smooth i like it being smooth because this is a melodic vocal so that's what i'm going for so i want it to be smooth but not too smooth to where it sounds like it's just overly compressed alright now if you still don't understand compression i'm going to break it down for you in a more simpler way okay compression is basically like any authority figure okay whether that's your mom your dad grandparents or who knows anything any authority figure okay and you're listening to music your threshold is basically the volume that the authority figure in our case our mother wants us to keep the value at but you know we we young and we want to bang our music so we can turn it up now the ratio is how much we turn down the music when she starts to shout at us right she starts to yell like okay let's turn on the music back here all right now the attack is how fast we turn it down right so she might be saying the way man turn that music and then i turn it down right so that's like a let's say a medium let's say that's a medium attack now she's like what faster attack okay wait man i told you i told you turn that music down and then i start to turn it down that's gonna be a slow attack okay so the attack in this case is how fast we turn our music down once we start to hear that shout out okay and the release is going to be how fast we turn the music back up after she closes the door and leaves our room all right simply said guys that is compression in a nutshell now before we go i want to give you a couple tips to make sure that you start to play around with as you progress with your compression all right the first tip i want to tell you guys is instead of having one compressor do all the work as we did in this example try spreading the workout between three or four compressors this is something that i do a lot and i'll make a video going deeper into this why i use multiple compressors but like i said allow the first compressor to do a little bit of work second compressor to do a little bit more and a little bit more whatever feels and sounds right okay the second thing i want to say it's very easy to over compress guys nothing is wrong with dynamics so try not to over compress your vocals okay listen you already know who it is man it's your boy q aka the wave man and we are here with the wave monopoly to bring you nothing but heat what look if you want to learn some more just go go down my page man go down the playlist you know where to find your music knowledge at man look you already know who it is your boy q aka the wave man here with the weightmanappy.com and until next time

Channel: TheWavMan

Views: 113,371

Keywords: compression, audio compression, compressor, How to use compression, how to use compression on vocals, how to use a compressor, how to compress vocals, how to compress rap vocals, thewavman, compression tutorial, compressor tutorial, how to use compressor in logic pro x, what is compression, compression for begginers

Id: GfITyYZczYU

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021