About compressor

Nur Madi

New member
Hi everybody, I am glad to be hear, I started record my songs yesterday! but I have been reading and trying for months, I have red a lot about compressor and I know that I need it for my classical guitar rumba like rhythm, I feel the whole track sounds more consistent, I record at peak level of -6 DB, as I have only two tracks guitar and vocal, I record them separately, my question is if I choose the threshold of 12 and ratio of 3/1 does that mean that that the track should reach the nine DB level to be compressed or any amount that exceed the 12 DB threshold will be compressed by one to third?
want to know is it right what I do, my track reaches -6 db once and -9 db for times, is it good setting the choose 12 DB as a threshold?
If I have three or for tracks which if mixed them, they will clip, does reducing their volumes before mixing them work? or should I record everything again with lower levels?
How do I know If I need to compress my vocal and solo guitar, I am going to compress the rhythm as I mentioned and then after mixing compress the whole track by a little amount does that sound reasonable?
Thank you very much, I know a lot of question, but I hope you will help me?
 
In theory, any signal that passes -12 will be compressed. A 3/1 ratio means that for every 3db above the threshold, only a 1dB increase will come out of the compressor.

Here is where things get complicated: the attack and release controls will affect what actually comes out of the compressor. If you have a slow enough attack, the compressor won't do anything. If you have a slow enough release, the compressor won't bring the level back up after the signal has dropped below the threshold.

There are other things that affect how the compressor actually reacts to a signal, but those are the most obvious ones. Trying to predict what the meters will read by applying certain settings is impossible.

What I tend to do is set a target for how much reduction I want to do, then set the threshold so that it does that.

If you are trying to catch peaks, I would go for fast attack and release and set the threshold to get a reduction of about 4db.

If you want to keep the dynamics intact, but ride the volume, use a medium attack and slower release.
 
It depends, the actual times vary by compressor. Medium is in the middle, straight up on a knob. Anything to the left is faster anything to the right is slower.

Don't get hung up on numbers when working with a compressor. It's much more useful to know what happens when you move a knob in one direction instead of another. Since no two signals are the same, no two compressor models react the same, and your goal for compressing will (possibly) be different from time to time, the actual numbers are meaningless.

Compression is like horseshoes and nuclear war...close is fine.
 
If you want to do some reading about Dynamics Processing/Compression, I can suggest the Rane Notes on that topic: Dynamics Processors -- Technology & Applications It's about hardware processors but all the methods and terminology are the same "in the box".

As for one of your specific questions, as long as you're not into clipping on the individual tracks, there's nothing at all wrong with lowering the track levels to avoid clipping on the overall mix. It's a pretty normal thing to do. Even you you record at the recommended -18 average/-10 peak sort of range, once you get to 20 or 30 tracks, the cumulative level is going to be too high.

Regarding how to know how much compression to use, the completely useless (but true) answer is "use your ears". If when you listen at normal levels the quiet stuff is getting lost, you probably have to do some compression.
 
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