VOCAL COMPRESSION SECRETS of the PROs

hey everyone cool caparoon here thank you so much for joining me on what i think is going to be one of the best videos of the entire year today we're going to be going over every facet of vocal compression we're going to talk about how a compressor works and what each individual control and setting does we're gonna talk about choosing the right compressor for your particular song we're gonna go over my favorite compressors the compressors that i use religiously we're gonna go over tips and tricks and things to watch out for to let you know that you're compressing something too hard and we're going to jump into pro tools and you guys are going to watch me dial in a compressor on a vocal and then go over settings and how it affects the vocal itself so you can hear as i change settings what it's actually doing we're going to explain all this when this video is over you are going to have a much better grasp on how to dial in your compressor for your vocals in your mixes let's get into it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so how does a compressor actually work and what does it do a compressor is a plug-in or a piece of hardware that squashes the dynamic range it brings the loudest parts of a signal and the quietest parts of the signal and it makes them closer together now another way to look at this is it's bringing the quietest elements up in the mix while taming the hottest elements vocal compression in particular is one of in my opinion one of the single most important things to making a vocal sit properly in a mix so the different controls on our compressor are an input which just controls as you turn it up it controls how much signal is being put into that compressor whether it's hardware or software now threshold on a compressor is the level at which compression starts when signal crosses over that threshold so if you turn your threshold up that means the signal has to be much louder in order to start compression and if you turn the threshold way down that means compression starts when the volume is much lower we're going to get way deeper into that in a bit the attack on a compressor controls how fast gain reduction starts after that signal crosses the threshold the release on a compressor controls how quickly the gain reduction goes away after that signal drops back below the threshold the ratio on a compressor controls how many db of gain reduction happens when that threshold is crossed how aggressive and hard and how hard does a compressor clamp down once that signal crosses the threshold level now when you hear someone say gain reduction what they're talking about is once that signal crosses over the threshold how many db of gain reduction there is on the compressors the compressor turning those peaks down by 2 db by 5 db by 20 db how many how many db is that compressor hitting so that's gain reduction if you're brand new to this that's okay watch that last section a handful of times until that really burns in your mind before moving on now a lot of compressors have an adjustable threshold most plug-ins that you use that aren't modeled after a piece of hardware they have an adjustable threshold however a lot of hardware units for instance this 1176 many many hardware compressors have what they call a fixed threshold now what this means is you would use the input control to turn up the volume going into that threshold so instead of here's the level of your signal instead of bringing the threshold down so that way it starts compressing you would turn the input of the compressor up so that way it rams that signal louder into the threshold and that's how you control how much gain reduction you're getting or how hard the compressor is hitting so like on an 1176 if you want more compression you turn the input up if you want less compression you turn the input down and then with all compressors you would balance that level on the output of the compressor to make up for how much gain reduction there is now on a lot of compressors they'll actually call this makeup gain and in some compressors they just call this the output before we move on i would like to give a huge shout out to the sponsors of this video sweetwater and universal audio i've been using universal audio stuff for a very very long time i run an apollo here i use all the universal audio plugins have for many many many years and obviously been massive fans of the icons 1176 la2a for a very long time huge fans of them and i really appreciate them coming on board to sponsor this video also huge shout out to sweetwater i buy all my gear from sweetwater and there's links down in the description going over all the gear that i use and all the gear that you see in this video and if you use those links to purchase i get just a tiny commission and really helps the channel out really helps me be able to put more time and effort into these videos and sweetwater has been a massive help in growing this channel so you get down there use those links and i really appreciate it and they really appreciate it since we're going over tracking vocals and vocal compression and that sort of stuff sweetwater was kind enough to shoot me over a refresher pair of my audio technica ath m50xs i've been using these headphones for literally years to track with any sort of tracking acoustic guitar drums vocals if i'm tracking i'm using a pair of m50s audio technica m50s and i've been doing this for the better part of my 19-year career matter of fact here's uh here's here's my old ones my last pair now not only do these sound great one of my favorite things about these headphones is the fact that every single major studio has a pair and so you get a lot of consistency from one room to the next if i go to another studio and i'm tracking vocals at that studio they're gonna have a pair of these and it helps me know exactly what i'm listening to when i'm in different rooms that i'm unfamiliar with big fan of these headphones thank you guys so much for refreshing my pair of audio technica headphones check these out if you've not used a pair before okay back to compression so the song that we're using as an example today is a song called be my crazy by ross copley uh this song is obviously not out yet because it's still in here it's also not mixed yet it's not even really done yet but this is the finished vocal track and he was kind enough to let me use it in this video so i'll put a link to his socials in the description below if you guys dig the song or the sound at all go give him a follow as thanks and appreciation for letting me use a song like this in these videos as you guys know it's incredibly hard to get music of this caliber to use in these videos so thank you so much ross for letting me use your song okay let's jump into pro tools and start looking at some stuff so my starting place for nearly every song is like a medium attack and like pretty fast or fastest release depends on the compressor for sure for the fab filter i'm usually starting out about 25 milliseconds attack and about 100 milliseconds of release but plug-ins seem to react faster and with more aggression than hardware so i tend to use a slower release on plug-ins than i do on hardware um but we're going to go through this 1176 this is my dedicated vocal compressor everything that i do goes through this pretty much everything that i do um and so the first thing that i want to do is just dial in this compressor and let you guys watch me dial it in and just listen to the differences as i dial it in uh and then we're gonna stop and talk about it and explain a whole bunch of things here we go so here's the song for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl [Music] come on come on [Music] [Music] for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day hallelujah sunday kind of save me yeah my tipsy whiskey high come on come on [Music] for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day hallelujah sunday kind of save me yeah my tipsy whiskey high come on come on [Music] for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day saved hallelujah yeah my tipsy whiskey high come on come on [Music] okay so that feels really good to me that is about where i would let it sit um as you can see we're over 10 db of compression of gain reduction nearly the entire time uh and where it felt best to me is just below a medium just slower than a medium attack and fastest release now the first thing that i want to point out in in my opinion one of the most important things of dialing in a compressor is how the release time actually positions the vocal like closer and further from you so the faster the release the closer the vocal is and the slower the release the further away a vocal is and so basically what i'm going to do is we're on the fastest release i'm just going to turn this slower and i want you to listen to how the vocal feels like it's getting further away as i rotate oh i should mention before we do that that on an 1176 anyway the attack and release controls think of it like a gas pedal in a car the more gas you give it the faster it goes so one is the slowest attack and seven is the fastest attack and the release one is the slowest release and seven is the fastest release so the higher the number the faster it goes so i'm just going to rotate this release backwards and make it slower and listen to how the vocal falls away from you in the mix here we go for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl everyday [Music] come on come on [Music] now this happens for a couple reasons one it's because it's holding the compressor compression longer so it's actually turning more of the vocal down the slower the releases but it's also because that low level information is not being let back up so when you're on the fastest release the beginnings and ends and the quietest parts of a vocal are often brought up to be more in line with the same volume as the loudest parts and this gives the impression that the vocal is much closer to you coming out the speakers this is one of my tricks when people ask me how how i get my vocals like so close and and so in your face while still having plenty of reverb and plenty of delay this is one of the reasons and a really fast release on a compressor brings that vocal closer to you okay so let's go over to the verse here uh the verse in this song is much much quieter so here's the verse with the chorus compression settings you could be my neon that keeps me up until the breaking dawn cause you keep it turned on you could be my wrong and right little bit of heaven with a wild side on but what i really want is to see the e girl from you actually this is set pretty good so one of the tricks that i do in making sure that i'm not compressing too much is i pick the very quietest part of the vocal and then we make sure no compression is happening whatever settings we like there can be no compression happening on the very quietest part of the vocal so here's how i would dial this in girlfriend [Music] for you to be my crazy girlfriend [Music] so you can see how the needle doesn't move at all on that last b girlfriend [Music] for you and so what we're doing here is we're setting this up so that way we're using the maximum amount of compression possible without affecting things that don't need affected there's probably other parts in this vocal that are also not getting affected let's listen to this line be my wrong and right little bit of heaven with a wild side on but what i really want is to see e yeah you can see some of those quietest words are getting almost no compression but what [Music] and this feels really nice to me it's bringing up in volume those quietest parts of the vocals so that way they're they're nice and present they're still in your face but we're not we're not really compressing them and we're not slamming them too hard okay so this is about where i would like it dialed in for the verse now let's take a look at the chorus but what i really want is to see e girlfriend [Music] for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day hallelujah sunday kinda saved me yeah my tipsy whiskey high yeah that's really good actually so this is a pretty good setting uh pretty good compromise between chorus and vocal and obviously the chorus vocal was much much louder than the verse vocal if i could have my cake and eat it too i'd probably hit this course just a little bit harder with compression but we're going to talk more about that in a second first i want to go over the different ratios and what they sound like and so we're on a four to one ratio right now if we go up to an eight to one go up to a 12 to one go up to a 20 to one what is going to happen is the compression is going to get much more drastic on the upper parts of that vocal the loudest parts of the vocal now one of the things that's interesting about this compressor and about most compressors is they actually have kind of a different character for each ratio and so you do have to re-dial in your settings in order to get an equal amount of compression so here's that chorus and then we're gonna we're just gonna go all the way to 20 to 1 so that way you can hear the maximum difference and i'll dial it in here is that vocal with four to one for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day okay now i'm gonna change it in the middle and re-dial it in while you're listening for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day hallelujah sunday kinda saved me yeah my tipsy whiskey high come on come on and be mine okay now that what you can hear there if you can hear it hopefully youtube compression isn't absolutely ruining this what you hear there is the compressor gets a lot more grabby and a lot more aggressive it's getting so much more aggressive and grabby and sounds a lot less natural now 20 to 1 is useful on some things higher ratios are useful on some things but it's a good example of the higher the ratio the more grabby and the more aggressive something is going to get so a 20 to 1 on a drum room microphone is awesome two to one four to one is awesome on vocals and i find that anything over four to one starts to get too grabby and too aggressive on a vocal so let's dial this back into four to one for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day hallelujah sunday kind of saved me yeah my tipsy whiskey high come on come on and be mine be my crazy cool that sounds really good now if you were using just a regular compressor a regular plug-in compressor something that's not modeled after a piece of hardware most plug-ins have an input a threshold and an output and so what you would do is you would set your input so that way it's hitting the the front end of the compressor at the appropriate amount and instead of turning the input up and down to get the amount of compression you would drag your threshold up and down to get the amount of compression you wanted and then you would use your output to balance that and so this particular compressor 1176 doesn't have a threshold but you use your input as many hardware units do these vocals were recorded with the manly reference cardioid this microphone is crazy good crazy crazy good it's like a 47 it's got all the bottom end and mid-range push of a 47 with the top-end air or top-end sizzle of like kind of like a c12 kind of a like a more airy uh 251 anyway one of my favorite vocal microphones that was the microphone that i used to track these vocals i think it's absolutely incredible and i'm i'm blown away by how this microphone sounds now the song largely dictates uh what type of compression what compressor we're going to use and how much compression we're gonna use example a really soft acoustic vocal or a soft piano vocal sort of thing is gonna get much less vocal compression than a really dense hard-hitting rock song or a rock rock country tune or like a really modern dense pop mix those songs though that dense aggressive hard-hitting close in your face kind of songs they're going to get much much more compression and more aggressive compression than the softer mortality more natural organic sort of music now in addition to the actual settings and how hard we're hitting the compressor every type of compressor has a different sort of sound so all the famous models of compressors you've seen throughout history they have a character to them and a lot of the plugins even the transparent plugins there's a particular character to them even if that character is that it's transparent and so i think it's important to try out different compressors on every song if you want or find out the compressors like experiment try a whole bunch of compressors out and figure out what one you think you like best and if you're not sure just continue that experimentation song after song after song after song and you will eventually find ones that you end up leaning into more than others and that's awesome that's a good thing now for me personally the vocal compressor is an 1176 and i promise you it's not because universal audio is sponsoring this video it's actually because that's what it is and i'm pumped to have them sponsor this video because it's my favorite vocal compressor a huge percentage of my favorite mix is coming up we're done by chris lord algae and he famously uses a blue stripe of vintage blue stripe 1176 on his vocals he also famously has like 20 1176s and instead of turning the knobs on them he patches a different one in but that's a whole other conversation so some version of an 1176 plug-in or hardware has been on my vocal in every single mix nearly every single mix for the better part of my entire career so we're talking thousands of songs here uh the la-2a is a fantastic choice for more chill ballad style stuff softer stuff it's a much softer more round pillowier compressor la2a is great for that stuff and another one that i really like is the fab filter compressor for a plug-in transparent ultra transparent compressor really like that compressor and i also use the fabfilter multi-band compressor on pretty much every single vocal chain in addition to the 1176 and when we get into pro tools in the minute we're gonna i'm gonna go over all of these details and show you guys how i set it up and let you hear it all so one of the techniques that i use all the time i briefly mentioned it earlier is stacking compressors using more than one compressor on a vocal now i do this in every single mix with this 1176 and the multi-band compressor uh the fabfilter multi-band which we're going to go over in one second but also every compressor has like a limit of how hard you can push it before it starts falling apart every compressor is different some of them you can push very little some you can really slam before it starts falling apart but there is a sweet spot for every compressor so as you become more refined your ear becomes more experienced and more tasteful you'll start to notice this when you push a compressor a little bit too far it starts to fall apart and sometimes i still don't have enough compression on a vocal so what i do in these instances is i will put another compressor immediately after it now this does a couple things this lets me kind of share the load between the two compressors so i can get the overall gain reduction to what i want for the vibe of the song and what's necessary for the vocal so this lets me get there without hitting either compressor nearly as hard also lets me choose two compressors that might have slightly different character if i want to build up one overall compression character that's not possible from a single compressor now like i said i do this almost every mix with the multi-band compressor after the 1176 but if that's not enough i'll usually use the universal audio 176 plug-in that's been one of my go-to vocal compressor plug-ins since they released it like two years ago however long it's been absolutely phenomenal plug-in compressor but i will often put that after the 1176 and just start touching it a little bit more 2 db 3 db 4 db of gain reduction just to nudge that vocal a little bit flatter so that way i can get to the result that i'm after but stacking compressors is something you should be conscious of if you can't get there with one compressor use more than one compressor rather than just slamming a compressor to 30 db of gain reduction you're usually if you need that much compression you're usually better off using more than one compressor okay so now let's jump back into pro tools and let's take a look at the two ways that i stack compressors one of which being what i do all the time on every single song no matter what and the other way being what i do some of the time so the one thing that i do all the time on every single song is i put a multi-band the fab filter multi-band after the hardware chain of eq and compressor whichever way you're doing it after your main vocal compressor i will put this multi-band this fabfilter multi-band and what i want is i want to dial it in where every single band i've specifically selected these bands to handle different frequency ranges but i want it to be dialed in so that way every single frequency only compresses at the loudest parts we don't want this running like the whole time we want it taming the peaks of the different frequency ranges so this is my default setting let's see what it looks like on this vocal this is my own custom preset that i start with uh because i like these frequency points here so let's take a look for you to be my crazy friday [Music] yeah so we're already in a pretty good spot i know i said not to use presets but this preset is my starting point and i will tweak all of the settings from here uh including the frequency points on some singers so for you but this is set up perfectly for him so i will often identify like where the sibilance of a vocal lies and i'll adjust this band right here uh down or up to to cover all of the sibilance and you can see this highest band is only hitting when his sibilance hits for you to be my crazy friday [Music] that's exactly what i want i want it only turning the high end down when his sibling sits same thing with this low band here uh you can see that it's only compressing when he hits his lowest notes for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl everyday and so what this does is this helps maintain a really consistent bottom end in the vocal and the same thing with the two mid bands for you to [Music] and then i will often tweak these to taste uh by pushing them up a little bit for you [Music] something like that but you get the point uh and so my settings on this what i like so the threshold the frequency the crossover points for each band gets adjusted per song the threshold for each band gets adjusted individually per song i have the fastest attack and the fastest release possible and this is mainly because i i want this compressor to not lend any character whatsoever i don't want any attacker release characteristics i want it to just turn down frequencies as they're popping through uh and then to my ratio i leave set to four to one i've got the knee set to hardest so it grabs it the most aggressively especially because we're only turning down a couple db in most of these situations um and i've got the the look ahead turned up a little bit and i've got four times over sampling turned on here uh over sampling is really great and it's one of my favorite things about the fabfilter stuff so i do this on every single vocal now like i talked about earlier if you still don't have enough compression you're hitting your 1176 or whatever compressor as hard as you can you're hitting your fab filter in an appropriate level to balance these frequencies out if you still don't have enough compression then what i will commonly do is i will add this ua176 absolutely love this compressor this is so good and let me just dial this into like the maximum amount of compression that i could stomach for this song so you can kind of get a vibe for it i'm gonna leave it on two to one as i usually do because it's more subtle less grabby so let's see what we got here for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl come on come on [Music] okay now i don't even think this is necessary on this song this is not something that i would do on this song i'm just trying to show you the next option for getting more compression out of a vocal if you think it's necessary if you have an incredibly dynamic singer a singer whose softest parts and loudest parts are are wildly apart from each other i will commonly do this and same thing when i was dialing in my hardware compressor i do the same thing with the plug-ins we're on the la the quietest part of this vocal so you can see what are we hitting three or four db let's take a listen here for you to be my crazy friend yeah so we're hitting three or four db of gain reduction on this chorus vocal now let's go back to that part in the verse that we were setting the compressor on and see if there's any compression [Music] yes so there's a half db of compression still on that quietest b so i mean you can live with that i would probably tend to pull this down so that quietest b is still getting no compression e barely touching it so that's a little bit better um let's listen from there into the chorus and see how hard this hits when the chorus hits girlfriend [Music] for you to be my crazy friday night feeling girl every day that feels pretty good to me now i may work in some automation i will probably draw in automation to make this course louder volume automation in pro tools when i'm mixing so that way there's a bump in volume but that feels overall pretty good i don't find it necessary to add this compressor in this particular instance but i wanted to show it for the sake of this video now i know the sponsor list on this video is a little bit longer than normal so thank you guys for for dealing with this and sticking around with me i very much appreciate it uh if you like this sort of content this is the last sponsor by the way and it's me i'm also a sponsor of this video if you guys are a fan of this sort of content this tutorial style content educational style content i have a patreon page also there'll be a link in the description for the patreon where we go in extreme in-depth tutorials we go into like mixed breakdowns where you guys get to see every faucet of a mix a popular song that i've mixed we do like live q and a's there's awesome merch all kinds of stuff get down there and go hit up the patreon if you're interested in much more in-depth personalized content that's it for the sponsor reads thank you guys for sticking around through that alright so now i want to go over some things to look out for when you're compressing uh these are these are kind of warning signs that you've taken it too far and these are really important things i think to pay attention to so one of the things that happens when you compress a vocal too hard is the sibilance and the breasts start coming out way too much so you never want to compress something so hard that the breaths pop out as loud as the vocal itself that's a pretty good sign that you've went too far sibilance gets a little bit more tricky it's a good thing to watch for because sibilance won't trigger a compressor as hard as the voice actually will and so you can get to a spot pretty easily where the sibilance the s's and the t's and the k's start start hitting as hard start being as loud as the vocal itself this something that you want to pay attention to if you can get by with less compression so that way that doesn't happen awesome if you're still not where you think you need to be with the compression of the vocal then unfortunately the move is you have to go in and you have to cut every piece of sibilance and turn it down and cross-fade it uh melodyne does a pretty good job of this too you can turn sibilance down in melodyne but that's something you really want to pay attention to is how loud the breaths and the sibilance are in relationship to the vocal itself okay the next thing that you want to pay attention to is if you compress a vocal too hard you start taking impact and energy actually out of the vocal for all the energy that you gain uh for the fact that the vocals just reel in your face and starts to get a little crunchy and sounds awesome there is a point when you can take it too far when a big powerful note is no longer bigger and more powerful than the rest of the vocal you've compressed too hard if the difference between a quiet part and a loud part and those different if there isn't any difference at all there you've compressed too hard it's one of the reasons why in this song i don't want to raise the volume of the verses with clip gain to be the same as the chorus because for all the compression that's going on here for as hard as i'm compressing this vocal i still need there to be a difference there has to be an impact when that chorus vocal hits and uh if you compress it too hard you take that impact away and no amount of volume automation drawn back in can fix that the next thing i want to make sure that i point out is that every singer and every song and every compressor has a different optimum amount of compression now and this is aside from the fact that this is a creative effort and and it's all subjective what you think is too much compression i might really like and vice versa but even outside of that creative uh subjective context there is still an appropriate amount for each song so don't get settled into using the exact same settings mostly settings i use the same couple compressors on everything almost always the 1176 but i am always playing with settings uh because no two songs need the exact same settings specifically gain amount of gain reduction and release time those are the two things that that i pay attention to for every song and they are different or slightly different for every single song so don't just set your compressor and then forget it don't just use presets if you're on plugins make sure that you give each song and each singer inside of each song its own individual treatment and and make it personalized dial it in to be optimum for your situation at that moment don't forget to check the links in the description for all of the stuff that we talked about in this video thanks again to sweetwater and to universal audio for sponsoring this video super pumped on my uh my new audio technica headphones thank you for sending a replacement for me very much appreciated and if you guys want more content like this more in-depth tutorial type educational type of content check out the patreon link in the description and become a member and i hope to see you over there and i hope all this stuff helped you thank you guys for sticking around with me all the way to the end if you made it this far if you made it all the way to the end drop a comment and let me know let me let me know that you made it to the end of this extremely long in-depth technical video i really appreciate you guys we'll see in the next one peace

Channel: Colt Capperrune

Views: 18,676

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Id: wWqY5wzDlFk

Length: 34min 31sec (2071 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021