Compression, what's conasiderred a slow attack

[Doug H]

Anyone know what setting of attack is generally considerred slow enough to preserve some of the leading byte of a vocal or guitar, or even preserve some punch in the final mixdown?

Thanks
Doug

[mixsit]

I would say in the range of 10 to 50 ms, depending alot...
Then again, what the 'dial' says doesn't always sound like what is says.
Wayne

[jmproductions]

I would agree that those figures are in the ballpark. A compressor is something that you really have to listen to in order to tweak it correctly. The type of compression/model you are using will have just as much to do with how it knocks down the incoming transients as much as anything else. So if I say try 10ms, because that works good on my unit doesn't mean you will get the same results with yours.

[Doug H]

I guess as always your ears will tell you what's punchy and what's not.

I've been basically running with the default or tighter attack on this plugin assuming that it's starting point of 7 ms is about average. Lately I've been getting into slowing down the attack to around 11 ms.

Just wanted to do a sanity check since I'm still just groping around in the drak with most of this stuff.

Thanks for the replies.