THE BEST WAY TO LEARN YOUR COMPRESSOR
The fastest way to learn any processor is to jump between extremes and then compare the results. This is how we will be learning compression.
Here’s a step by step guide to learning what your compressor (automatic volume fader) does in action.
- Pull a drum loop into your DAW. Ideally you want a drum loop that has room tone/ambience/reverb already on it.
- Add a compressor to the drum loop track.
- Play the loop so it’s looping automatically.
- As the loop is playing set the ratio to 10:1 and then move the threshold all the way down (this will quiet your loop considerably).
- Now set the attack and release to 1ms or less (as fast as possible).
- Gradually pull the threshold back up until you have 10-15db of gain reduction (volume reduction).
- Play with your attack by opening it completely and closing it back down. Notice how the sound of the drum loop changes as you do this.
- You’ll notice as the attack gets longer that the initial transient of each drum hit is allowed to poke through more and more
- Set the attack back to its original position at 1ms or less.
- Now play with your release in the same way by opening it and closing it. Notice how the drum loop changes as you do this.
- What you’ll notice is that the slower the release, the more the tails of the drum hits and the room tone start to disappear.
- Repeat steps 7 and 9 only now as you play with the attack/release also play with the ratio setting.
- You’ll notice how higher ratios influences the aggressiveness and obviousness of your attack and release parameters.
This exercise will allow you to hear in a dramatic and focused way what the behavior of your automatic volume fader sounds like. In particular it sensitizes you to the rate and speed that your volume fader moves up and down.
What you’ll notice is when the attack was slower, it allowed the drum attack or what we call transients to come through.
When you set the release so its slower and slower, you’ll notice how the tails of the drum hits and the room tone start to diminish. That’s because our automatic volume fader isn’t allowed to return back to 0 volume reduction before the next drum hit triggers the automatic volume fader to quiet the sound again.
This is the fastest and easiest way to learn the behavior and character of any compressor.
