Back in the very early days of audio production, there weren't any compressors around, they weren't invented yet.
Mixing engineers, which back then were called "balancing engineers", had to manually "ride" the volume faders. When a track went too loud they had to quickly turn in down, and when a track was too quiet they had to turn it up.
They did all that by hand.
I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it was.
The compressor was invented shortly after, to control the volume of the tracks automatically.
All it did was turn down a track every time it went too loud.
Basically making the mixing engineers' job much easier.
Think of a compressor as a smart volume fader, that knows when and how much to turn volume down, and when to pull it back up. In the many decades that compressors exist, they were used in many other ways and for many other purposes than originally intended.
People came up with great methods and techniques to use this simple but amazing tool.
Today I want to talk about the most basic way of using a compressor.
Reducing Dynamic Range This is the most basic type of compression, and it is used virtually all the time.
Basically what it does, is turning down the loud parts of a track.
Resulting in a more consistent volume level, with less difference between the quiet and loud parts.
Take a look at this vocals track:
Naturally, the human voice is very dynamic, and you can see it in the recording.
There are quiet parts as well as loud parts.
When mixing, we probably want to even out the vocal track, and try to make it sound more consistent.
That's one reason to use a compressor.
Now take a look at the same vocal recording, before and after compression:
You can clearly see how the compressor turned down the loud parts, while leaving the quiet parts untouched.
Resulting in a much more balanced and even recording.
This compression method of reducing the dynamic range is also useful for making percussive instruments sound more "fat" or "punchy".
Let's try it on a snare track. Take a look at this snare hit:
You can see that the initial attack is much louder than the tail.
This means that we will hear the "snap" very well, but we won't hear much of the body of the snare drum.
Now let's take a look at the same snare hit after compression:
Do you see how the transient (the peak) is much lower (quieter) after the compression?
You can also see that the rest of the audio stayed the same.
Now that the initial attack of the snare is reduced, we can use the "make up gain" on our compressor to turn up the entire track. Take a look at the snare hit after the compression and the make up gain.
Do you see what happened?
The peak level stayed the same, but the tail got louder.
How did that happen?
First we turned down the transient only.
Then we turned up the entire track. So essentially, we turned up the tail of the snare.
The dynamic range of the snare hit got reduced.
The difference in volume between the loudest part and the quietest part got smaller.
These were 2 very popular uses of the most basic and simple compression method.
They serve well as an example, but also as practice.
So if you're new to compression or to audio production, try messing with a compressor, and see if you can get similar results.
Are you confused by compressors?
Did this article help you understand the concept of compression?
Let us know in the comments below!
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