Cloneboy Studio said:
Screw that.
I cannot imagine a good result coming from that.
Au contraire, my doppelganger friend. There is no easier and better way to start the compression process clean and with no audible artifacting at all than to zoom in on the few of the most-offending (tallest) peaks and knocking just those transients down by 2 or 3 dB. The result of that stage is all but inaudible 99% of the time. Of that 1% of the times where it is audible, 99% of those times the audible difference is actually for the better.
This is really just manually performing what a limiter does. There are four important differences, though. The first is that you can pick and choose just which peaks to affect. The second is that you can knock down the peaks by equavalent volume levels (e.g. knock them all down by, say, 3dB.) instead of hard limiting them to a set peak level. This helps keep a natural relative envelope shape to the wavefrom rather than giving it a crew cut like hard limiting will do. The third is that no coloration is added to the sound of the mix. While sometimes the color added by a limiter is positive, often times you might want the color to come from the compressor only because the combo of colors from both the limiter and the compressor are just overkill. The fourth, is that once proficient at this technique, it is just as fast and easy as finding the optimal choice of limiter (hardware or plugin) and then dialing it in just just the right setting to match the compressor. I'll go up against anybody (except maybe the likes of John "Massive"
) on speed and accuracy when it comes to manual limiting vs. using a limiter.
This is just the first stage; it's "prepping the patient" for compression by getting rid of the blatent or abnormal peaks in a mixdown so you don't have to dial up the compressor too hard and squash the sound to a pancake to get the higher RMS level. Many people use limiters to do this, and that's fine. I'm saying that often times manual surgical strikes to the waveform will actually give cleaner and more pleasing results than a limiter. It's an option.
An option, BTW that I have been using since the days when VST plug-ins were just wistful daydreams in the minds of engineers because they hadn't been invented yet. Engineers actually used waveform editors to digitally edit the waveforms then and got excellent results. And it's a technique that works and sounds good even today, often better than plugins.
Plugins are nothing more than automations of manual digital editing procedures. That's all they are. Some of them are very sophisticated automations, for sure; there is no way one could manually reproduce the sophisticated algorithms that are used for things like amp modeling or modeling of vintage gear like tube compressors. It is for those reasons that plugins were created, to be able to apply sophisticated algorithms to the waveforms that the human hand just cannot do. But for something simple like taming a waveform before compressing it, plugins are not only not necessary and not what they were designed for, but are often overkill. Throwing a big limiting algorithm at a simple transient is sometimes akin to putting out a birthday candle with a garden hose or using the Ferrari to bring a movie back to the Blockbuster just down the street from your house.
What is often forgotten in this day of plug-in mania is that NLE's actually give us the ability to manually control and edit every bit down to the individual sample level. It's just like being able to control every single pixel of an image in Photoshop, except we're doing it with sound instead of pictures. Sometimes you just gotta manually remove the specs of dust form the picture first, and that is often best done manually to individual pixels or a small area of pixels and not by applying an effect to the entire picture. Digital sound editing is not different. It's just bit manipulation, nothing more. Deciding when it's best to juggle a bit manually or to throw an unthinking automation at it is just as important as deciding which mic to use or which way to pan a reverb.
G.
