Compression on every track?

S

spottydog10

Member
Hi all nice to be here.

Do you put compression on every track? just the occasional and/or the master bus?
What's the concensus?

Mike
 
Funny, Bass Guitar is the first thing I would put compression on, and I'm a Bass player myself.

Back to the question, I put compression on anything that needs it or would benefit by it, usually on the actual channel. I run a bus compressor on the drum bus but sometimes I don't send every drum mic to it depending on the music genre or the sound we are after. While on drums I would usually have a compressor on the snare and kick channels, but the amount of compression used again depends on the sound required.

Alan.
 
I compress what needs to be compressed. Distorted guitars often don't need much or any. I don't usually compress overheads.
 
I can't imagine not needing compression on the bass guitars I record. Simply shifting up from the low E to the A string alone causes spikes in volume. That's characteristic of bass to begin with: larger variation in peaks corresponding to lower vs. higher frequencies.

Must have one hell of a DI box.
 
Surprised it has not been mentioned here yet, but a lot of it depends on the song and or sound you are going for. There are no "do's and do not's" in most things recordings. Sure their are overall principles, but when it comes to mixing and editing, what you do is often specifically dependent on your desired sound. I can see using compression on bass for many certain styles where you want to have the bass more blended and consistent. However, maybe you want "Seinfeldesc" popping bass sound where you want the punchy hits and and then quick fades. Then maybe you would use little or no compression to keep the full dynamic range. It is all dependent on the song, sound, and track.
 
Compression is used to control and reduce dynamic range--to knock down the odd spike that prevents the rest of the track from being louder in the mix or bring up the quiet bits that can get lost. As such, every track has to be judged on its own needs so there's no simple answer to your question.

Two points...

First, you can sometimes do the same thing as compression manually by using some automation in your mix. This can often sound more natural (and be more sympathetic to the music) than using compression.

Second, the above is just talking about using compression to "fix" things where you'd generally want it to be subtle and not noticeable. However, there are certain genres where extreme compression is used as a special effect.
 
It seems like everything gets compressed at some point in a DAW recording, but its nice if you can avoid it. For example, back up harmonies sound nice and open and airy without any compression, same for acoustic guitar. If you can capture a performance without it and use automation during mixing, I think your recording sounds bigger and better. Less is better.
 
Band (EQ) compression or using side chain to trigger when the compressor sucks down can generate a more natural result this also can be used for compression effects such as the classic side chain kick to synth compressor for pumping.
 
I don't compress electric guitars most of the time since there is pretty much no dynamic range. You can see it by just looking at the wave form.

Vocals and bass pretty much every time, usually don't compress drums, I just create a track that highlights the transients of the kick and snare to really bring out the punch.
 
Ah, the old compression chestnut.

Me personally? I compress what needs to be compressed but I do tend to compress the drum buss, vocals and bass on a regular basis. I don't compress individual drums often but will occasionally if I think it needs it. I don't usually compress distorted electric guitars either because they're already compressed. That's the nature of distortion and clipping. I will, however, compress acoustic guitars quite often.

Like others have said, compression should be applied on an individual track basis and not for the sake of it. Compressing every track is a bit overboard but I'm sure it's been done on many records. You could consider tape saturation a compression effect and this has been used across the board on certain albums. If you're looking to smooth out the dynamic range of all your tracks, consider using a tape emulator as your first plugin.

I've always said that compression (or any effect, for that matter) can be applied one of two ways: 1. correctively, or 2. creatively (as an effect). Correctively would obviously fall into the dynamic range reduction category and here I would wager most guys would go for a transparent compressor that gently smooths out erratic spikes in level without too many artifacts. Creative EQ would be something like choosing a 160VU or an 1176 to crush drums and make them pump to get "that sound". etc. Obviously option two does reduce dynamic range, but generally the first aim is the effect.

My 2c

Cheers :)
 
I do compress a lot. Pretty much every track except electric guitars, but to varying degrees and for different reasons. I like to compress drum shells individually (kick, snare top, toms) for punch, but I actually compress the snare bottom mic really hard to kill the transient and allow the snare wires to ring out and breath. I slam the drum room mic to get it thick and vibing really hard with the song, while I don't usually parallel compress my drum bus. I mix through a bus compressor also that gets 2-3 db of gain reduction. I compress bass for punch also, and then I multiband compress to tighten the lows even further.
 
It's interesting to read about your various compression habits, I share some of the same experiences. I expected that I would slowly turn less leaned towards compression as a way of improving the final product, but over the years in my case it has rather been the opposite, right now I find compression to be really essential, I pretty much compress everything. Multiband compression is something I'm currently looking into a lot. The reason is that I like a lot of compression, but not when it damages the stereo image. I'm sure you know that when you place a limiter on the mix bus and just limit everything a lot, there is a lot of frequency fighting on each speaker and hence the stereo image to some degree collapses. How I counter that is instead of limiting on the mix bus scope I apply multiband compression on non-dominant frequencies on each sound source - in parallel. This essentially does the exact opposite to heavy mix bus limiting - since it reduces the RMS on each speaker it also enables more unique peaks from each sound source on each speaker when you compensate for the RMS loss - the sounds on each speaker fight less and therefore the stereo image is much improved. This is one of the pleasant characters I focus on creating when I mix. By doing this especially on the most prominent sound sources in the mix - the ones that normally consume the most mix signal - you can free up a lot of mix signal too and create air, so this kind of technique can be used both for creating the air characteristics (by not compensating so much for the RMS loss) and also for creating more rich stereo characteristics (by compensating for the RMS loss). This is an example of how you can work with compression in mixing and get multiple different characteristics out of it, depending on what you do with it. Another example would be to create rhythm characteristics from it, by setting a long release time. In this case, to add rhythm you do not increase the volume on this bus, bur rather the opposite. So what you can do here and I do this a lot, is to set the release times rather long going into the first verse and then gradually reducing it on a cumulative curvature to make the song groove. In other words, it is really important to think of a volume fader of an effect as causing a desired effect not only by increasing volume/wetness, but also when decreasing volume/wetness. Essentially every side-effect/bi-product that you notice provides a certain negative characteristiics, can be used to create the opposite characteristics. This you might find inefficient, but in the context of the mix it can help create interesting characteristics. In mixing, by removing you sometimes add and by adding you sometimes remove. Almost everything you do in mixing has multiple impacts, it adds something and removes something else.
 
Ive always just compressed bass and vocals. A friend of mine asked me why I never compressed my guitars. The only answer I could come up with is it looks and sounds like they don't need it. Im no wizard lol...just use my ears.
 
crashdiary27 said:
Ive always just compressed bass and vocals. A friend of mine asked me why I never compressed my guitars. The only answer I could come up with is it looks and sounds like they don't need it. Im no wizard lol...just use my ears.
Click to expand...

There are many reasons for compression on guitars, one being the bite characteristics on rhythm guitar, the other one being the sound of the sustain/decay.

As you know, the attack portion of distortion guitar is to a great degree contributing to that particular rock rhythm guitar signature sound, it is much of what is behind the term "rocks". When you apply compression on guitar, how quickly it kicks in is determined by the attack setting. When you combine this with volume boost, what you get out of it is the "bite factor" which is the product of volume boost * compressor attack time. The same about the decay portion: product of volume boost * compressor release time. So compressors do not only attenuate the signal, they can also amplify both the attack and decay portion of the sound which when applied on various sound sources can bring out fine qualities from them, no matter what those sound sources are. And since you can limit this to individual frequency bands and do it in parallel, when you want a very transparent effect from it even when you heavily exaggerate certain qualities of the sound with them, you have everything you need. What you can do with compressors, is really amazing...
 
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