Compressor settings

[Garth]

I have been trying to arrive at a good compressor setting for my acoustic guitar tracks. What I want is to limit the very hard sections and leave the quiet sections sounding as if there is no compression on the track. So I suppose that is a high threshold with a low compression ratio.

I understand compression and how it works but am no pro you see.

What I do is select amplitude | dynamics processing from the effects menu.

I then select the limit hard -3db setting. I figure that an acoustic guitar would have a fast attack and should have a medium release time. The problem is I don't know what numbers this translates into for a natural sound.

When I listen to the track with whatever setting I choose it always sounds overly compressed.

I will continue fiddling around with this but I feel like I'm throwing darts in the dark at a hidden dart board.

Anyone else with experience compressing acoustic guitar with settings that sound good? I think once I have a good range to work with I can arrive at the one that fits my sound. I could really use some help here, thanks.

 

[dobro]

Clone a guitar track a few times and apply different compressions to it, and then compare to see which ones you like best.

Here are six attack times to look at for a start: 0, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 ms. Play around and see which one suits you best. Try release times that are 10 times as great as those attack times and play around with those and see what you like.

Also, it depends what you mean by 'high' and 'low', but a high threshold and a low ratio aren't gonna affect the sound much at all, no matter what your attack/release settings are. A high threshold means only the tops of the loudest peaks will be compressed, and a low ratio means they won't be compressed much. You might have to play around with a lower threshold to hear the effect - exaggerate it a bit to actually hear what's going on. You can ease back later on when you're more familiar with the results you get with various settings.

 

[roman]

limiting is compression with HIGH ratio.

Example

compress
attack: <5 ms
release: 200 ms
treshold: above -3 db
ratio: 999:1
(hard knee)

A quick attack (0 ms for example) is to get all sound limited.
When compressing with high ratios, you will end up having a quick reduction of dbs.
the release depends on the tempo of the song and the lenght of the guitar strokes which are above -3db, just check the max. lengt of a sample.