Logic Pro #27 - Compressor (Compression Explained)

hey everyone this is music tech help guy and welcome to part 27 of my Ultimate Guide to Logic Pro in this video I'm going to give you an overview of how to use the compressor plugin in logic and I'll also explain what compression is and how to use each of the parameters within a compressor and even if you don't use Logix compressor plug-in many of these topics are still applicable to other compressor plugins now this video is going to be a really long one probably the longest video in the series so as always I've left time stamps and chapters below if you want to jump around and I've also included a link to download this demo project for free if you want to work along with me and practice using compression in a mix so first what is a compressor well a compressor is a Dynamics processing unit that can be used to control or shape the volume of a track over time so with an EQ we use this to shape the frequency spectrum a compressor is used to shape the Dynamics so for example on the lead vocal track here there are some pretty Stark differences between the peak loudest moments in the vocal and the softer points in the vocal the goal of a compressor on a vocal at least is to make sure that the dynamic range between these Peak points and these softer points is lessened so you want the Dynamics to be more smooth and you want to make them a bit more uniform so that every word that is sung can be clearly understood and heard compressors do this by applying gain reduction to the signal in real time based on the settings within the compressor so Logix compressor has the ability to view the gain reduction as a meter or in graph mode let me show you what that looks like real quick I carried you on when you needed me that's just how I want love was meant to be I'll keep on tearing through these tragedy so before I even break down each of the controls within the compressor let's hear an example of what compression can do for a vocal track so what I'm going to do is bypass the compressor for now and I'm just going to play the vocal as is so you can hear the full dynamic range of the vocal and then I'll bring the compressor in and play the vocal again so you can hear the effect of the compressor so first this is bypassed [Music] God when you when you needed me that's just how I want love was meant to be a keep on tearing through these tragedies I took the brunt of your shame and all your misery [Music] okay let's activate the compressor let's hear that again [Music] I'll keep on tearing through these tragedies I took the brunt of your shame and all your misery so the white line is showing you the amount of gain reduction taking place in real time the higher the signal level the more gain reduction is applied resulting in a more dynamically balanced vocal you can also see this in meter view you can see that we're applying up to about 7 DB actually up into the 10 DB of reduction range some of the louder points in the vocal so it's all about controlling the Dynamics but controlling it in a musical way you don't want things completely slammed like a limiter would because in many situations that'll just sound bad now this same concept can apply to other instruments but when it comes to more percussive instruments like drums the goal might be to make the Dynamics more Punchy maybe making the kick or snare drum transients cut through the mix a bit better so compression is not always used in the same way on every instrument and compression is certainly not a requirement for all instruments in a mix but I almost always find myself adding some amount of compression to vocals bass guitar acoustic instruments and drums which are the instruments that I'm going to apply compression to in this video next I want to talk about these circuit types up here but before I get into the circuit types I actually want to add the compressor to a kick drum track so in the previous video we broke up the drums into multiple outputs so here's the kick track so I'm just going to solo that and I'm going to add the compressor after the channel EQ here the reason why I'm using a kick drum to demonstrate this is I find that the fundamentals of compression are most easily taught with a kick drum because the transient in the kick drum is very clearly defined and it's just very easy to understand what the compressor is actually doing as opposed to putting it on a vocal which is a very you know dynamically complex signal okay so these different modes up here are actually different circuit types these are modeled compression circuits that are meant to emulate the sound of various different types of well-known Hardware compressors although they are not exact models the Platinum Digital is just digital compression so it's very surgical very transparent and very exact the rest of these I'm going to kind of explain out of order the next one I want to show you is the Vintage opto this is what I was using on the lead vocal Optical compressors will typically use tubes as well as Optical cells to apply their compression so the result is you get a very smooth compression which is why these are typically the go-to compression type for vocals I also like using them on bass guitar quite a bit but it has a really slow Reaction Time meaning that it takes a little bit of extra time to actually apply the gain reduction the Vintage option circuit is based on the teletronics la2a compressor which has now been reissued by universal audio next up are the fet circuits there's two of these there's a studio fet and a vintage fat stands for Field Effect transistor this is a solid state modeled circuit meaning that it's not modeling the sound of any tubes because fat compression is inherently solid state and uses transistors rather than tubes these are often called limiting amplifiers because they are great at limiting peak transients in a more surgical way than you can achieve with an optical compressor because they have a much faster reaction time than opto circuits do however they tend to color the signal a bit more than an opto circuit would the studio fet is based on the Yuri blackface 1176 and the vintage fit is based on the Yuri blue stripe 1176 these have been reissued and cloned by various different companies over the years as well I actually have Hardware clone versions of both of these in my rack the stem Audio 76d Plus which is like the studio fet and the black lion Bluey which is like the Vintage fet and lastly we have the three VCA circuits VCA stands for voltage controlled amplifier and these are also solid state compressors but instead of transistors they use vcas these will typically be more transparent than fat compressors but they do have a faster reaction time than the Vintage opto circuit as well these are great for bus compression meaning that you would combine the signal of multiple tracks together and compress them all together we'll come back to this in a future video very soon when I show you how to use track stacks so the studio VCA is based on the focusrite red 3 compressor the classic VCA is based on the original dbx 160 compressor and the Vintage VCA is based on the SSL bus compressor now I don't want you to get so wrapped up in the different circuit types that you lose focus on how to actually use a compressor so for now what I'll say is if you're not sure what circuit type to use for a particular instrument just use the Platinum Digital dial in a setting that you like and then cycle through each of the circuit types and just listen for how the compressor shapes the Dynamics and how it shapes the tone of the signal and use the circuit that sounds best to your ear there are no hard and fast rules about what circuit should be used for any given instrument I typically will use vintage opto for bass guitar and vocals I'll typically use fet compression for like individual drum tracks I'll use VCA compression for stereo recordings acoustic recordings maybe an entire drum kit maybe the symbols on the drum kit but again there are no hard and fast rules you can use any of these circuits on anything just use your ear and use the one that sounds best for your specific situation next let's jump into the compressor controls the main two controls in a compressor that control the amount of compression taking place are the threshold and ratio the compression ratio is the amount of compression applied to the signal so if you set this to 1 1 this means that no compression is taking place the input signal is the same level as the output signal so if I play my kick track here you'll see the signal coming through in the graph but you'll see no gain reduction applied to each of the kick hits [Music] and as I roll up the compression ratio you'll see more and more compression applied to the signal the threshold is equally as important as the ratio because it determines where the signal level will be compressed where if the signal passes above the threshold it will be compressed and if the signal does not pass above the threshold it will not be compressed the lower the threshold the more signal will pass above the threshold therefore more of the signal will be able to be compressed based on the setting you set with the compression ratio if I have a threshold of Zero no signal is going to pass above the threshold and therefore no compression will take place regardless of what I have my ratio set to [Music] and if I start pulling down the threshold and more signal passes the threshold allowing those transients that are passing the threshold to be compressed based on the ratio [Music] [Music] so to sum this up in simple terms if you have a low threshold and a high ratio this will result in more compression taking place if you have a high threshold and a low ratio this will result in less compression taking place so this would be like a gentle compression setting and this would be like a heavy compression setting let me demonstrate that real quick [Music] so we have some really gentle compression here at a three to one ratio and a negative 14 threshold let's try pulling down the threshold a bit more and we'll get even more compression yeah so now we're getting almost 20 DB of gain reduction it's probably not a practical setting that we would actually use but I just wanted to show that to you so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about with more compression and less compression next up I want to talk about the makeup gain the input gain and the output gain if you find that your recorded signal is a little bit too soft like you're really having to crank the threshold way down because the signal is kind of low you can increase the input gain here which will just increase the level of the signal as it enters the compressor that's all that does and likewise on the output you can also add gain on the output after the entire compressor circuit however gain at least added gain is typically applied with a makeup gain control as you pull down the threshold and pull up the ratio and apply more compression the volume or at least the peak volume of the signal is going to be much lower than it was on input so if you look at the input and output meter with more compression you'll see that the output is significantly lower than the input about 3 DB lower 2 DB lower than the output so what you can do with the makeup gain is you can turn off the auto gain and add or reduce gain to the signal after the compression is applied this will come in really handy especially when we come back to the vocals because as you compress the vocals they're going to kind of get buried in the mix so you can use the makeup gain to sort of compensate for that and bring the vocals back out to the front Logix compressor has an auto gain function where if you turn this off you're basically not affecting the gain of the signal after the compression in any way except that you can dial it in manually with the makeup gain the auto gain 0 and negative 12 DB options will automatically compensate for the volume loss that you get by compressing the signal although I find that the auto gain is generally too loud so I almost never use it I typically will just turn this off and dial in my own makeup gain because I typically only need a little bit you know or if the signal is too loud you can dial it back a bit or what you can do is you can use this in conjunction with the auto gain you can set this maybe to negative 12 and then pull back the makeup gain rather than adding makeup gain [Music] so you can see with makeup gain off the signals significantly lower so I'm going to have to pull the makeup gain into the positive rather than the negative personally like I said I almost never use the auto gain because I don't really find it that helpful at least in in this plug-in next let's talk about the attack and release parameters the attack and release parameters have to do with time rather than amount so the attack time is how quickly the compressor will react to transients that pass the threshold so if you want to compress more of the transients and you want to tame the transient in this Kick Drum you would set the attack time to a lower setting to a faster setting which means that the signal is going to sort of immediately be compressed whereas if you set this to a slower attack time the re action time of the compressor is going to be slower and therefore it's going to let some of the transient through before the signal is compressed let me show you what I mean here because it's much easier to hear than it is to explain so the kick drum sounds like really sort of boomy and that front end punch is sort of gone because the signal is immediately being compressed if I start rolling this up this is going to let some of the front end transient through foreign so with drums I tend to roll up the attack a bit to let some of the punch of the transient through and then the compressor will be mainly acting on sort of the tail of each drum hit rather than the front end of each drum hit we want the drums to be Punchy and a way to make drums sound more Punchy is to roll back the attack time and let some of that transient through the release time controls the amount of time it takes for the signal to sort of release the signal or let go of the signal or stop compressing the signal once it falls below the threshold so if you set a fast release time the signal is going to be compressed above the threshold but as soon as the signal passes below the threshold it's very quickly going to stop being compressed whereas if you set a longer release time it'll take a bit longer for the signal to stop being compressed so for drums I'll typically use a pretty long release because I want the tail end of each drum hit to be really compressed but I want the front end attack the front end transient to come through and there's also an auto button which is really helpful because it automatically adjusts the release time it sort of makes the release time variable rather than fixed based on the content that is coming through the compressor for now just for demonstration I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to play around with the attack and release time so you can see what this does to the kick drum so if you want to hear more of like the body of the kick drum just like the boominess of the kick you'd use a shorter attack and a shorter release but if I want more of that front end punch and I want to tame the sort of tail end of the drum hits I would pull both of these up a bit now you don't want your release time to be too slow because it'll just take too long for the signal to stop being compressed and this will result in overlapping releases where the release time of one kick hit is affecting the attack time of the next kick hit so you have to sort of find a sweet spot for both the attack and release time and this sweet spot will vary for each instrument [Music] next up let's talk about the knee control the knee controls the amount of compression applied to signals that are close to the threshold not all of the circuits even have a knee option and the knee is kind of like a secondary parameter of the threshold so if you pull this over to the right this is what's called a soft knee so if it's over at one that's a soft knee and if you look at the graph here you'll see that the curve is a soft curve so as you go from linear input and output so no compression to the threshold where the signal is being compressed there's this soft sort of transition between no compression and compression and if I pull this over to the left this is what's known as a hard knee so there's like a hard break in the signal from no compression to threshold where the signal is compressed so with a soft knee signals that are just above the threshold will be compressed a little bit differently a bit a bit softer than signals that are well above the threshold if you use a hard knee signals that are just over the threshold will be compressed the same as signals that are well over the threshold so as a general rule if you're not sure just set it in the middle and you'll be fine but if you're working with instruments or you want things to be very precise like individual drum tracks like kick snare Toms these can often benefit from a hard knee whereas I find almost everything else benefits from a soft knee you just get a bit better Dynamic treatment so things like vocals acoustic instruments these will benefit from a softeny but for a kick drum like this I'm going to opt to go with a more hard knee [Music] it's pretty subtle but with a hard knee you can hear each of the kick hits or sort of being compressed the same whereas on the right with a soft knee the softer kits are kind of being left alone whereas the harder kick hits are being compressed more intentionally so I'm going to leave this over on the hardening side for the kick drum so those are the main compressor parameters let's check out some of these parameters here we have a limiter that's built into the compressor and you can set a threshold for that limiter here a limiter think of it like a compressor where the ratio is like a hundred to one or Infinity to one it's essentially a compressor that doesn't let any signal pass the threshold this can be used if you're trying to control Peaks that are clipping although a better option is just simply to pull down the output gain or don't apply so much makeup gain so I almost never find myself using the limiter in the compressor unless I'm trying to you know create some sort of a special effect but let me just show you it in action so you can see what it does [Music] so I had the threshold set at negative one so none of the Peaks were going Beyond negative 1 DB on output and every time the limiter is being used or it's engaged you'll see the limiter light light up in Red so I'm going to turn that off I'll pull the makeup gain back down and let's talk about the Distortion unit which is very interesting so the Distortion unit can be used to add some like a clipping Distortion either soft hard or fully clipped Distortion to the signal with drums this can help to add a little bit of noise a little bit distortion on the peaks of each of the transients which can give each drum hit a bit more definition and punch and I find the soft Distortion to actually be the most noticeable but I'll just go through all of these and demonstrate all of the distortion modes along with Distortion off [Music] now the mix knob is a mix blend knob this allows you to apply parallel compression to the signal without having to do any complicated you know signal chain arrangement with the the sends and using aux tracks this lets you do all of this directly within the compressor plug-in which I absolutely love so what this does is on the far right this means at 100 this means that you're hearing 100 of the compressed signal all the way to the left zero percent this means you're hearing only the input so you're hearing the signal without any compression applied to it so with parallel compare impression a parallel compression technique this involves blending the dry signal the unaffected signal with the wet signal the affected signal and sort of dialing in a parallel compression setting that sounds best especially with drums sometimes it sounds best to blend your wet and dry signals together for the best result [Music] I also find it helpful because with parallel compression you can really slam the signal with some pretty heavy compression for a like a more dramatic effect and then just dial back the mix blend to reduce that effect like I would never use a compression setting like this on the kick just as is it's just it's too much [Music] but if I blend in some of the dry signal it creates a much more musical effect essentially blending the punch of the compressor with the body and tone of the dry signal okay so now that I've got a compressor setting I like I'm going to cycle through all of the circuit types just so you can see what each one sounds like on Kick Drum and I'm going to pick the circuit that I think sounds best [Music] [Music] [Music] the digital circuit is certainly applying the most noticeable effect whereas the others tend to be a bit more smooth the vcas are like Pretty Natural sounding the optos Pretty Natural sounding with like a harder pop a little harder transient but I think the studio sounds best here I may actually use a little bit more of the compressed signal and a little less of the dry signal [Music] okay so let's move on to the snare for this I want to beef it up and give it a bit more punch so once again I'll start with the Platinum Digital and then after I dial in a compression setting I like I'll go through the different circuit types [Music] so with the compressor in we're getting like a noticeable Punch or smack in the snare drum whereas without the compressor even though it's louder right now you're hearing more of the snares and like the fizzle of the snare drum and let's go ahead and just blend this in I'm going to add some soft Distortion and blend this in with the mix blend [Music] yeah here I think I like the Platinum Digital the most and you'll find that especially with electronic music you'll find that the Platinum Digital is the best option in in a lot of cases it's a very capable compressor okay so let's jump up to the vocals and I'll show you how I would dial in a compressor for vocals sort of like a a general purpose uh you know vocal compression setting I've removed the compressor that I had on there before so I'm going to go ahead and add that back to the channel strip and I'm sure there'll be questions about whether to add EQ first then compression second or compression first EQ second you know I I really don't want to sit and argue you about what's better but I typically use EQ before compression at least on vocals but there are many people who swear by compression first EQ second what I'll say is try both and use whichever sounds best if EQ second sounds best go with it if EQ first sounds best go with it okay so I'm going to go straight to the Vintage opto circuit here and what I'm going to do is just sort of dial this in by ear I'm not looking for a a really heavy compression on the vocals but I do want to tame a lot of these Peak moments in the vocal where the vocals getting pretty loud so I'm going to try to tame down those points when you needed me that's just [Music] so one thing I want to point out here is even with a negative 26 threshold and an eight to one and almost eight to one ratio we're barely getting any compression and that's because the signal on this vocal is probably a little low so what we can do to compensate for that is we can pull up the input gain to make the starting point a little louder we may have to reduce the output gain and maybe not apply so much makeup gain later but at least this will give us a healthier signal so we don't have to crank the threshold all the way down and crank the ratio all the way up in order to get any compression let's try that again when you needed me that's just Tower love was meant to be a keep on tearing through these tragedies I took the brunt of your shame and all your misery now again if you feel like the signal is not being or the vocal is not being compressed long enough you may need to increase the release time and you can get away with some longer release times with non-percussive instruments like this so at a faster release setting it seems like it's compressing but it's like very quickly letting go of the signal so here I'm going to opt to go with a bit longer a little slower release time but I'll start with a short release just you can hear what both of these options sound like and I'll start with the vocal soloed and then I'll bring in the rest of the mix that Carriage when you needed me that's just [Music] meant to be a keep on tearing through these tragedies [Music] Bronto frontal shame shame and all your men are misery I Carriage on when you needed me that's just how our love was meant to be I keep on tearing through these tragedies and if you're looking for a really present vocal you can try adding in the soft Distortion although for my vocal here in this context I don't think it's really working out too well so I just put that back on off now I'm not going to use the mix blend here at all but I do want to show you something I want to show you visually what the compression does to the waveform so what I'm going to do is just select this track hit control B to bounce this in place I'll bounce this to a new track I'll leave the original and I will not bypass any of the effects plugins and what this is going to do is it's going to show the waveform of the signal after it's been compressed so you can see we've achieved our goal of taking some of these more p loud moments and pulling them down and we've also succeeded at taking some of these softer moments and pulling them up so the Dynamics overall are smoother and more uniform however one thing you're going to see here is a lot of these waveforms still have these little Peaks these little hard Peaks on them and that's due to the the nature of an optical compressor it has a slow Reaction Time a slow attack time so a trick I like to do with vocals is I'll have the optical compression first doing the majority of the work and then after the vocal compressor I'll actually add a second compressor and I'll typically use one of the fat circuits or I'll use the Platinum Digital circuit and this compressor is just catching the little peaks in the vocal just rounding off and smoothing out those Peaks needed me that's just how I want so to do this I'm using the studio fet here I'm using a very quick attack and a very quick release just to duck down those peaks in that vocal now to see this visually I'm going to go ahead and just bounce and place this vocal one more time so the one on top is the completely uncompressed signal the one in the middle was is just with Optical compression and the one on the bottom is with two stages of compression Optical to control the overall Dynamics and the fat circuit to control some of these Peaks and you can see how that Peak has been ducked down and you can see that the dynamic of the vocal overall is much more uniform than what we started with now that you're sober don't tell me that it's over don't turn this ship around and tell me that you can't give one more day don't ever tell me why now if the vocal sounds maybe like it's a little over compressed you can try pulling back the mix blend here so we get a bit more of a gentle effect you could even do this within the optos circuit as well just to give the vocals a bit more Dynamics [Music] that you can't give one more day don't ever tell me why don't you ever tell me why cause I don't want I don't want to know [Music] I carried your heart when you needed me that's just how I want love was meant to be not keep on tearing through these tragedies I took the brunt of your shame and all your misery [Music] yeah so the vocals are standing out in the mix I can hear every single word that I'm singing very clearly and on top of all that the compressors are adding sort of like a Mojo Like A vibe to the vocal that they didn't have before base I often find having trouble controlling the Dynamics although this base looks pretty actually pretty uniform often what will happen is when the bass player plays more in the middle of the neck you'll get more bass and more you know just the signal will be louder whereas if they play more open strings the signal won't quite be as loud so it's helpful to add compression to Bass to control these things although the base amp designer itself actually has a compressor built into it although I'm not using it at all in this example so let's let's try compressing the bass a bit and see if we can maybe beef up the bass a bit more I'm going to add the compressor after the EQ once again and I'm going to use the opto circuit foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] the transients but bringing out the ring and the sustain of each of the notes of course I'm giving it a little bit of a volume boost as well with the makeup gain when you need me that's just how I want love was meant to be to be not keep on tearing through these tragedy and I may want to do something similar with the guitars maybe I want to you know give these a bit more body make the Dynamics a bit more uniform let's try out the studio VCA on the acoustic guitar here [Music] so if you want less of the transients you'd pull down the attack time if you want the transients to kind of come through more you can pull up the attack which is what I'm going to do foreign and you don't have to apply a lot of compression to get a good result you can hear their you know it sounds fine without the compression but with the compression it's got more body it's you know the Dynamics are a little more uniform everything in the performance stands out a bit better than it did without the compression so I'm going to go ahead and just copy this over to my other acoustic guitar track just by holding option and dragging it over [Music] okay let's hear this whole thing from the beginning now [Music] day don't ever tell me why don't you ever tell me why cause I don't want I don't want to know I carried your heart when you needed me that's just how I want love was meant to be [Music] I took the brunt of your shame and all your misery yeah so all of the tracks that I applied compression to they all have like a bit more of like a more present vibe in the mix the Dynamics are controlled everything sounds better you can more clearly hear each instrument in the mix and again this is not about making huge adjustments to every single instrument this is about making small changes to certain key instruments to make the mix sound better I know this is not an advanced mixing tutorial or anything but you can really do a lot with just EQ and compression and using some gentle EQ and compression adjustments now there's more to the compressor than just what I've shown in this video there are side chain filter options there's a side chain input so we'll talk about those things in a future video but for now I think that's a good overview of the compressor and hopefully you can use some of these techniques to control the Dynamics and shape the Dynamics in your recordings I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this as always thank you so much for the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 38,852

Keywords: logic, logic pro, logic x, logic studio, Logic Pro x, logic 10.7, logic 10.7.5, logic 10.7.6, compressor, compression, ratio, threshold, attack, release, dynamics, mix, mixing, how to use a compressor, understanding compression, how to use compression, how to compress vocals, how to mix vocals

Id: RRrCerIW1pQ

Length: 44min 0sec (2640 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023