vocal compression?

alevy said:
thats funny... just go back and listen to the context of how it was used with in that hook. i simply said leave me alone unless you want me to go that extent (eating that chrome).
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Hey, I just said I liked your stuff. That's a high compliment coming from me. I think I've only ever complimented one other guy on this board. That was about two years ago ... the last time I was actually in a good mood, that I remember. :D :D

For what it's worth, I still don't understand how your stuff isn't about violence, but whatever. I just think it represents one of the ways in which rap music, in general, has gotten stale. Yea, yea, another guy rappin' about how you better not mess with him because he's Billy Badass. Whatever.
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alevy said:
thank you a lot. im about to try it out. if i can my only hardware compressor is on my eurkea presonus pre amp would you consider that a crappy preamp. all the other compressors i have are in waves would combining all of those compressor plugins have the same results?
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I've tried doing what Fletcher has described with software (waves/other vst's), and it works ok. I get better results when i chain together my cheap hardware compressors (dbx 118; symetrix 501, symetrix CL100 etc..). Look out for cheap, but usesuable hardware compressors...you can find them for 50 to 150$...
 
if i use the exact same compressor will it work the same i used my waves compressor a bunch of times...and with make up gain do i add it all in the end on the last compressor? or on each individual?
 
ignore that last post.lol i just went back to read it. okay my new questions is should i be adding 13 db's of make up gain? thats how i need to get it up to where it should be.
 
Hey alevy, I'm not much of a rap/hip hop guy - I'm more of an old rocker that grew up with the music of the 70s and 80s. But after Chessrock's comments I went ahead and listened to Hood on Smash, and i gotta say, i can really hear the talent and potential here. I hope you'll keep asking questions and don't get discouraged, because this music deserves to be perfected and you're on the right track. Hopefully you'll get more nice, honest answers such as the one Fletcher gave above.

Wish I could add some good advice but I'm still in the learning stage with this stuff myself - mainly I'm just here to read the responses from the real pros about things like this. I have had some good success on my vox using the dynamics processor plug-in along with a peak limiter in Sonar, but i'm certainly not qualified to say what will work best for you. For me, reading articles and the various posts on this board give me some semblence of direction, but in the end what seems to work best is to insert plug-ins, turn the knobs, and see what happens. I use my ears, and most of the things I try sound like crap so I use the undo and delete buttons. Once in a while, though, I find something that works and then I know I'm learning :D

Anyway, I guess I really just wanted to say good job.
 
thanks man. thats more appreciated from someone who deosnt necessarily listen to my genre. im actually in here practing right now trying to get it right. i'll keep you guys updated. thank you :D
 
To be totally off topic for a minute... I was driving home with my family a while ago and had my iPod plugged into the car stereo. Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" came on. Here I am with the wife and daughters with a rap song [albeit a very old rap song] coming out of the car stereo.

That song has to be a good 7 minutes long... it paints some extremely vivid "ghetto life" pictures... and didn't have the words "fuck"; "motherfucker" or "******" in it once. I never noticed that before. I was kinda stunned.

Then I was kinda amused because the next song to pop up on the iPod was Hank Williams "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It". Now you find me a radio station that will go from playing Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five to Hank Williams and I'll throw out the iPod and listen to that radio station every day of my life.

...and now back to our regularly scheduled pogrom on how to use shitty compressors in evil ways...

Peace.


[PS: I'm kind of amused now as the words "F-U-C-K" and "M-O-T-H-E-R-F-U-C-K-E-R" showed up just fine... but "N-I-G-G-E-R" got blanked out with stars. What does that say about the world in which we live?... I'm not sure, but somehow things are starting to seem sillier and sillier to me the older I get.]
 
****** is still a sensitive word no matter how much black kids try to change the meaning to lessen the magnitude of it. its still sensitive and thats there way of saying it's still not kool to say that word. but its perfectly okay to curse because everybody does it at some point or another. one is a bad word for kids one is a bad owrd for everybody i guess to simplify it. :rolleyes:
 
n-i-g-g-e-r (wow i never actually spelled it the real way before)is still a sensitive word no matter how much black kids try to change the meaning to lessen the magnitude of it. its still sensitive and thats there way of saying it's still not kool to say that word. but its perfectly okay to curse because everybody does it at some point or another. one is a bad word for kids one is a bad word for everybody i guess to simplify it. :rolleyes:
 
alevy said:
and ratio settings should i be using? a ball park figure then.... yeah i know, i know1
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i'll make myself a bit clearer in this post:



no one can answer this for you!!!!



it's like you asking how much more gas you need to fill up your tank..well it all depends on how empty it is doesn't it? without checking, it's impossible to say how much compression is needed.

how about you post a 30sec clip of your vocals, and i'll compress it the way i would like to hear it. i've got waves as well, so i'll make sure to use one of their comps like that you can do the same. like that i can show you the settings i would use to get a sound i like. you can set up your comp the same way as i did, and tweak it until you get the sound you want. if you're looking for a place to host it check out this website.

but noone will be able to tell you that you need the threshold at -15db, a ration of 3.75:1, with attack time of 24ms and release of 60ms with the make up gain set to 3db. its impossible to do without listening to the source.

i'm about to engineer and "produce" a 8 or 10 track rap album myself, with this guy his last album is available to download off his website, so check it out! bare in mind that i had nothing to do with the album thats currently posted on that website...

peace and good luck man!
 
Fletcher said:
To be totally off topic for a minute... I was driving home with my family a while ago and had my iPod plugged into the car stereo. Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message" came on. Here I am with the wife and daughters with a rap song [albeit a very old rap song] coming out of the car stereo.

That song has to be a good 7 minutes long... it paints some extremely vivid "ghetto life" pictures... and didn't have the words "fuck"; "motherfucker" or "******" in it once. I never noticed that before. I was kinda stunned.
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Heh yeah, there is a station on XM radio that plays old school rap, and it is laughable how harmless it was compared to the more current stuff.
 
its real simple and fundamental compared to rap these days. (in some cases excluding the laffy taffy songs).
 
alevy said:
MessianicDreams....
what happened?
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yeh man sorry it's taken so long for me to get back to you..bin busy.

maybe it's just the mp3 that you gave me, but you're seriously lacking in bass frequencies. how far from the mic are you standing? you might want to get a little closer to get some of that proximity effect. what i heard sounded very bright and brittle to me, with almost no low frequencies as foundations.

as for compression, i used the C1: threshold of -30.3, ratio 5.10:1, attack 80.35, release 50, makeup 3.1.
 
yeah i rolled off at 125. that wasn't a good thing? on recomendations from a few other engineers i was told too roll off at 125 because my voice doesnt start until past that area.
 
o kay i have a very important question? i tried those settings in the renaissance compressor and it sucked horribly the attack came in super slow... like entire words went through before any compression happened. with the c1 compressor it worked out perfectly and it sounded very wonderful honestly. why...? if i used the same settings, why did the compression sound totally diffrent? they are both compressors and both waves compressors in addition to that. i dont understand? :confused:
 
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