Demystifying Compressors - How to hear what they're ACTUALLY doing!

The audio compressor can be a daunting tool for beginners, however it’s an essential tool in any audio engineers arsenal.
Knowing what to look for and how to use them, can make or break any production.

Let's demystify the compressor! Today I discuss a technique to quickly assess what a compressor is doing to your transient response and dynamic range - by squashing it down, tweaking the envelope parameters to hear the effect, then dialing back the amount of "squash"

Here's an acronym to help you remember, A.R.R.T or A.R.T.R, it stands for (well firstly squash) Attack then Release then Ratio then Threshold (or Threshold then Ratio)

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Demystifying Compressors - How to hear what they're ACTUALLY doing!

[briancase]

Very good approach to explaining. I hadn't seen compression explained that way. I wish I had seen this two years ago! ☺️ Thanks.

[Gregorovitch]

I think that tip of crushing the track first and then working on the attack and release so you can more easily hear what the compresor is doing to balance the transients and the body of the sound (and presumably comparing different compressors to see which one is getting closer to what you are looking for) and then dialing back the ratio and threshold to get the right dynamics sounds gold to me, something I've never done am definitely going to try out.

[brm]

thanks again bud, your leading the way

[jimvermeer]

good explained brother and good tutorial . Namaste

[greentwigs]

Thank you! You are very good at this!! Great content!

[cyberg-trance]

Great tips thanks! I always have a s(M)exoscope (free plugin) on my master channel. When I compress a sound / bus channel with everything else muted, I can then see the waveform of the sound / bus . This helps me monitor the dynamic range of the sound / bus while tweaking the ratio and threshold.

[BorisBarroso]

Great tutorial, a follow up showing how compression works on drums or bass would be great

[Byronic]

That black Steinberg compressor is def an emulation of a 1176 not a LA2A is way snappier where a 2a is smoothe.
Lets talk about that synth sound tho...lol what was that i love it

[thenayancat]

ARRT is the golden rule in how to tweak em

[blitz]

Do I need to compress every single thing before I start mastering?