Drum compression

bluedaffy

bluedaffy

New member
Question about drum compression...

Almost everywhere I look for tips on compressing drums to help tame some of the wild peaks it says to use a medium attack time. My question is this, if I have say a snare that I want to apply a compressor to make the strikes sound a bit more uniform (not at all limiting though) and I use a medium attack time... wouldn't that not help the wild strikes because the loudest part of the strike on a snare drum, like on all other drums is right away. I would think you would want to have a super fast attack time to tame those peaks... Could someone explain this to me please...
 
Hey,
Yeah, you're right. If you use anything but a very fast attack time then you're not really going to effect the crack of the snare.

If you do set a fast attack time and set the threshold so that it levels out the volume, it could sound really overly compressed.
On the other hand you might get away with it.

Using a short attack time will make your snare sound fuller though because you're bringing the crack down in volume closer to the level or the ringing.

You could try out some volume automation but it might be time consuming and tricky.
Just try out some compression and trust your ears. ;)
 
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I'm glad that theory makes sense to someone else as well. I wonder why it's such a widespread belief that it will help to even out dynamics when using a medium attack time...
 
bluedaffy said:
I'm glad that theory makes sense to someone else as well. I wonder why it's such a widespread belief that it will help to even out dynamics when using a medium attack time...
Click to expand...

It won't even out dynamics as far as I know. If anything it'll increase dynamic range because the crack sound is untouched, but the body of the snare sound is compressed.

I suppose sometimes that's desirable.

A good tip is to pull the threshold down further than you'd want. This lets you really hear what attack and release adjustments are doing.
Once you get desirable timing you can then raise the threshold to taste.
 
More or less agree with what's been said. And a lot to times the tone and volume is varying with how it's hit. But as you go deeper into compression, 'fast or medium (in terms of an instrument at hand) naturally you're probably getting into altering the relationship of the transient vs the 'ring -and on the average -both a new sound shape' and more even dynamic perhaps?
That's to say I don't think you can really level' out a snare (an inconsistent snare at least) with compression, with out changing it's shape :D
Sometimes I'll go with a hard limiter and see if the tone and/or crunch of taking off the tops' works.
 
The fact that you use the phrase 'help tame some of the wild peaks', tells me you should be manually adjusting the 'wild' ones. I mostly use compression as a sound coloring tool myself. Not really for leveling of dynamics so much.

Steeno's comment 'trust your ears', is the best advice. No direct rule applies in anything, in regards to mixing.
 
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