Audio Compression 101 Part 2

Room Mics
Use soft compression to just gently squeeze everything together a little bit.

Dance/Hip Hop/Rap Tricks
Compress the bass using the kick as a sidechain input. Don’t compress it so much that it causes bad pumping.

General Compression Tips
It’s a good idea to group up instruments in similar frequency bands such as kick and bass and add a light amount of compression to ‘glue’ them together.

Sidechain Compression Tips
It is generally best to sidechain compress percussive parts of the music as sidechain compressing non-percussive elements can cause noticeable and unpleasant pumping.

Compression or EQ First?
If a frequency is causing a compressor to do something that sounds bad, EQ the problematic frequency out before applying compression.
It is also good to EQ low-end mud out of the mix before applying compression so that low frequency information is not causing the compressor to work unnecessarily on frequencies that are not important to the mix. One trick is to run an initial high pass filter before applying any other effect.

Chorus Compression
A trick that can increase the intensity of a track during the chorus is to create an auxiliary track, apply compression, and then use volume automation to bring it in during the chorus. This is also sometimes used during a bridge. The same technique can also be used to slowly increase the energy over different verse segments. For example, the automation could be set at zero decibels during the first four bars of a verse, and then increased to -8 decibels during the second four bars, and finally increased to -4 decibels during the final four bars of a verse.
Using different compressors on different parts of the mix can also help to accentuate the changes between parts. Some compressors, such as the SSL bus compressor, have a big, wide, pop sound that can accentuate a chorus.

Stereo Bus
Try to get your compression done at the track level and in subgroups. Don’t hit the stereo bus with a compressor too hard. Too much compression on the stereo bus will make the cymbals one dimensional and overly present in the mix. Remove cymbals, shakers, wooden blocks, triangles, and hi-hats before using stereo bus compression.
Group up everything except the hi-hat, shaker, and cymbals and use a very gentle ratio such as 1:1.5 with a deep threshold to pack it together before hitting the final limiter. Try using a higher ratio such as 2:1 in parallel with a low threshold to compress transients a bit. Route the hi-hat, shaker, and cymbals back into the mix before hitting the final limiter.

Transient Designer Tricks
Increasing sustain using transient designer can make drums sound bigger.

Tightening with Transient Designer
A trick that uses transient designer is to put it on the drums, bass, and percussive guitar parts along with a gate. Then trigger each gate with a midi note so that the drums, guitar and bass all sound like they’re hitting together. Transient designer can be adjusted to tighten the sound of the gated parts.

Gating
Try to set the gate so that it is in time with the music, such as on an eighth note, etc.

Meyerson Drum Compression
Compresses mid and high frequency percussive instruments using the kick as a sidechain input so that the kick sticks out. It’s best not to sidechain compress cymbals or anything else that fades out.

300 Hz Up
Try to only compress audio subgroups from 300 Hz and up to prevent unpleasant pumping. Don’t high pass at 300 Hz when compressing an isolated 808, kick, bass, or any kind of low frequency instrument.

CL 1B Pop Vocals
Use the slowest attack and the fastest release. Set it to a 2:1 ratio and adjust the threshold to chop off two or three decibels. Don’t use it to chop off more than four to five decibels.

By Jack Johnston
Jack Johnston has a Master’s of Arts in Applied Linguistics from the New School University, a Master’s in Business Administration from Western Governors University, and a Master’s in Management and Leadership from Western Governors University.