RedStone
Member
How's this for a fun little metaphor on how compression works?
Compression: A War Metaphor - Levity Project
The main things are
Compression: A War Metaphor - Levity Project
The main things are
- Attack is how long the compressor takes to get to full gain reduction
- The release is how long the compressor takes to get to no gain reduction
- The knee is ... weird, A soft knee can create a sort of progressive compression scenario while a hard knee is a "hit it hard and now" scenario.
- The threshold sets the point where any audio passing above it gets compressed, and 'detects' both the amplitude of the transient and the frequencies of the transients. The knee affects how the threshold 'works'
- Only what passes above the threshold gets compressed, but the result can be a mix that sounds quieter because louder elements are softened. But when you apply gain to the singal after compression, the quieter elements become louder than they were before compression because you gained headroom by softening the louder parts.