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warlock
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\m/ < That's the devils sign in case someone didn't knowbizarre said:My last job was a metal band ... I needed LOTS of compressors

Keijo
\m/ < That's the devils sign in case someone didn't knowbizarre said:My last job was a metal band ... I needed LOTS of compressors
Xgrind said:hi guys,
I'm new in this discussion, and I'll like to ask a newbie question...
Well from the postings I understand that compressor is commonly used as a automatic volume fader cum gain booster. Well for settings, how will I determine the attack parameter without killing the transient response of the source? Say, I'm recording a vocal track and I'm gonna do compression on it, how would I judge the transient response of the vocal to determine the attack parameter? I'm the kind of guy who prefers to use as little compression as possible in the mix unless necessary and I've heard terms like transient responses from other good engineers out here and other places. Being a newbie, I'll hope you guys could shed some light on my following questions.
P.S. I've tried fiddling around with compression setting for a while but I feel I can do better compression on the signal if I understand the principle and related terms better. Thanks in advance guys ^_^
vox said:
The best way to comfortable with a compressor is to sit down and play around with it for a couple hours, load up a recorded kick drum, snare drum, bass track and vocal track and mess around with them one at a time. Using very extreme settings will make it easier to hear the effect that different controls have on the sounds. Start off by setting the ratio to it's highest setting, set the attack to it's shortest setting and the release to it's longest, crank the threshold right down and listen to how the sound changes, next slowly increase the attack time, you should start to hear a sharp click - the attack transient . As the attack time gets longer the click will start to sound less sharp, etc. Playing around with their attack times will let you add punch to different sounds.
Be careful about your monitoring volume.
Happy tweaking![]()