Transcripts
1. Intro: What's up, guys? Welcome to a new video. Today I'm going to talk about one of the most basic things about music producing, compression. And even for me after 10 years of producing, I still find it's pretty hard to use compression without any visual guidelines. If you love the younger producers, just throwing compressors on their mixing buses without actually knowing what it does for our sounds. You notice say stuff like I just throw a compressor on my mixing bus because I see the pros do it or throw compressor. I'm, I'm mixing bowls because it's to sounds louder, have kinda stuff. And I really get that's because with a lot of standard compressors that come with standards, the WWE, unlike FL Studio, they don't really make a lot of sense. There's a couple of parameters like the pretty compressor right here. Yeah, it's just really hard to get a grasp on what compression is if you just have this as your compressor. So basically today I'm going to talk about all the different parameters within a standard compressor. And hopefully after this video, you'll know exactly when to use compression and what compression does to yourself.
2. What does a compressor do?: So let's start with what's compression actually does or what a compressor does. What a compressor does is it reduces the dynamic range of the sounds that you're feeding is. So basically if your sound has a lot of peaks, it reduces those peaks. And it can also make the sounds that are less heritable, more noticeable. That's also what compression can do for you. Basically it's compresses. So two peaks here and the lower volumes here, it compresses it. That's what a compressor does. So this is the definition when you look up compression on the Internet. But let's go into an actual projects to look at some actual sounds and see what compression can do for us. So let's say, for example, that you have recorded a tambourine loop. It's marine. If you hit, it's in front of the microphone, you're going to hit it differently every time, you know, it's not going to be exactly the same every time you hit it. And you can see that in the audio file. So here's the audio file of the tambourine. And you can see that for example, this peak here and this peak here, they are not the same in volume. They have slightly higher or lower peaks. And what compression can do for you is it can shave off those peaks so that your audio file in total gets a more even distribution of volume on each peak. You just don't have as much volume difference in your audio file. So you can see this with a lot of sample back loops as well. For example, with percussion, you can see it with percussion mostly. That's just so many different hits. And yeah, just in general, sounds that are organic are, are harder to control and a compressor helps you controlling those sounds. Even with synthesizers, I just have a instance of serum loaded up here with difference notes. So notes in a synthesizer also hits slightly different. So if we record this, and so we, this is the loop right here. You can see that this node, for example, doesn't have the same volume as this notes. And also with this, compression can help you in achieving just a steadiness across your whole sounds and across your All men of the line, for example. This is a pretty weird melody line, but if you want to, you can make all these notes on exactly the same volume or somewhat the same volume. So it's EDM, of course, electronic dance music. You really wants compression because you don't, yeah, obviously you don't want a lot of volume differences winning or sounds, you will have steady line, which makes it easier to mix, which results in a tighter makes, which makes it more pleasurable to listen to.
3. The parameters on a compressor: So let's now talk about the different parameters a standard compressor has. And for this I'm just using the standard fruity compressor. It's come standards when you buy FL Studio or use of trial. And the first one right here is thresholds. So sounds has a certain amount of loudness. It's comes in dB. Everyone hopefully knows that these thresholds is the limits you can sets to sell the compressor when it needs to start compressing. So you can set it at a certain level. And if the sound hits that level, the compression kicks in. That's the threshold. The ratio is then the amount of compression that needs to be applied. So the higher you go, the more compression is being applied to every sound that comes above that threshold, the attack is how fast that compression needs to be applies. So if you put it as 0 milliseconds, it's going to be instantly. But if you put it a bit higher, it takes 71.3 milliseconds to lead to compression. Kickin the same for release, but the other way around, if you put low compression is going to kick in and then immediately or almost immediately, 170 milliseconds after the initiation of the compression, it goes down again. But if you put it high, it's going to take two points and two twenty five hundred and forty six milliseconds before the effect of the compression is gone again. Then of course you also have the gain up because if you're going to shave off the peaks of a certain sound file, that means that your sound file, that are sound file in general is going to be sounding less loud. So you want to crank that up again. That's what gain can do for you. And here you have the knee. And the knee is a bit harder to explain, I think, but generally you have hearts and a soft knee. And a hard knee is when the sound reaches the threshold, then immediately the compression of the ratio kicks in. But when you use a soft knee, the ratio of the compression kicks in progressively. So it doesn't immediately go to 18 to one, but it's starts at one-to-one than two to one. It builds up progressively, but I go into this a bit further later in the video. My rule of thumb is usually if I wants to compression to be noticed, I use hardening. And when I want the compressor to be more subtle, how for vocals, for example, or some percussion loops, I'll use a softer, neat, but not necessarily a complete softening, but I'll go into that a little bit later in this video.
4. The different compressors: So now with this information, let's try to compress the tambourine loop that we have. So we have red hair, Let's loop it. So let's adjust the threshold. And we can play with this all we want because the ratio isn't said yes, it's not doing any compression. So let's just as what kinda compare a compression do we want to apply maybe 12 to one. And now we play with the threshold until we hear that the sound is being altered. So here, right there, that's the sound is getting less loud. So somewhere around here maybe is where the peaks are of this tambourine loop. So we want that sack to be pretty fast and the release to be pretty fast as well. And we want a hardening. Now if you look at this, I totally get why some people do not understand compression because this is, you don't get any visual feedback. If you are hitting the threshold or analogy, you know, you, you have to listen very carefully and it's so just to, to basic in its design. So this is why I really suggest an advise everyone to go by or downloads a free goods visualization of a compressor. And this is my choice. I really like the fat fillers pro C2. And let's try this now with this compressor and see how much easier and how more clear this compressor makes compression to you. So you can see right here, this is what the TQ is. And even with FAB silver proceeds, you can click on this headphone right here. And you can only hear what is above the threshold, which is a amazing functional I think. So here we can, we can just set the threshold according to the actual sound file and set a radial. And you can see right here in the visualizer watts, the compression is doing so the red line and the ducks right there is the compression. So if we adjust the ratio, make it bigger. You can see that's the compression is being applied more. And if we then adjust the threshold, you can see that we are compressing more and more of the peaks. If we're just a sec, you can see that the compression curves are getting more steep. So this is the reason I think people not having plug-ins like these compression plug-ins like these is a reason why compression and remains so vague for a lot of people. This is just a amazing visualizer. I know it's kinda sounds like a big advertisement for a featherless proceed to, but I'm sure there's other compressors that are working alike. And here you can also see what's the knee is doing. So we have play the loop again. And see right here, this is just the curve of the South. And the thresholds. You see that it moves right there. If we apply a hard knee, you can see that the compression when it goes over that threshold right there, it gets applied immediately when a hard knee, if he uses software knee, you can see that it flows more progressively. So that's the difference between a hard knee and a soft knee. It's one of the more difficult aspects of compression I think to understand.
5. Let's compress: So now we have all these information. Let's actually compress the files that we have. So does the tan, blue, and the sth. And see once it does to the sounds. So let's go to the default setting again. And let's apply some really heavy compression to really see the difference in peaks when we rerecord this sample. So that's fifth ratio all the way up, hardening facets act out again is okay. Maybe even, make it even crazier. Now let's rerecord this. So as you can see immediately, if we go to the original file right here, and then we take this file and let's just drag it in there. You can see that this peak that was here in the original file has been reduced. Like almost every sound right here is at the same level. And that makes this TAM loop much more controllable than it was in the beginning. So if we now remove the compression and compare the two files, so this is the original, this is the compressed one. So that's a really clear example of what compression does. And we can also do the same thing with the synthesiser. So let's go to the, since this is what we recorded, this is the original. And now let's compress this. Same, let's say over heavy settings. Then let's record this. Throw that into the project as well. And now let's see here at the WAV file, you can see that this, for example, as his listened to it, this is the original and we can even throw it on top of each other. And you can then see that the levels are just more even. So, yeah, you can see clearly that although it's less clear in the synthesizer, it still is an important difference because it's, it's, it makes sure that your melody line, if this is your melody line, for example, you just don't want any volume differences in there. You don't want, if you play your trachoma dance for That's one bass note is going to hit really hard and then one water-based node is going to sounds less hard. You know, you want that to have all the impacts, um, and you know, you also want to control, you know, if you if you have a lot of these tracks across your whole project and they all have some slides, volume differences here and there, which are going to be really hard to control. You're makes sense to make it a type mix. And yeah, that's basically the basics of compression. I hope you learned something from this. I hope you now have an understanding of what compression does. So you can use it in your projects in a way that helps you. As you're not just trying compression on your mixing buses because you feel like you need to or that's what the pros do, you know, you know, hopefully know what you're doing in that regards. This is like the basic guides. You also have a lot of different kinds of compression, parallel compression, multi-band compression, side chain compression even. But that's pretty basic as well. But maybe we'll go into deaths in another video. I hope you learn something. One last tip I would want to give, just rerecord your loop, for example, before compression and after compression just do, do Daesh, see the difference of what you're actually doing? Do it with vocals, for example, or with guitars, are widths, organic instruments. Because that's really where compression can shine, I think. And if you rerecord, it's an element like that after applying compression. And if you then start comparing the raw file with the compressed file, you can really see what settings you can use with elements and I think gets the best learning school. So let's say it's again, hope you learned something and I hope to see you again in another video. Bye.
Mr. Belt & Wezol, DJ/producer duo from the Netherlands
