Yalcin Efe explains how Compressor can be confusing and sometimes it is easy to make mistakes that makes things worse. Today we are taking a look at 5 biggest compressor or compression mistakes that every producer makes in 4 minutes.
Compressors can be weird and to be honestly they can get quite confusing. So let’s look at
five compression mistakes that every producers make.
Number one: When you are compressing group of elements beware of over dominant elements especially the low and heavy ones a typical example of this would be a group or bus processing to drop elements. Let’s listen to this short loop over here do you see an issue the kick is the sole element that is driving the compressor.
What to do most modern compressors have pre-eq building the heavy low end of the kick is driving the compressor hence we can apply a high pass filter to cut those low end of the kick and make the group of elements a bit more balanced together and driving the compressor together as well.
Number two: The first thing many producers learn about the compressor is the attack time because they want to protect their transients though many forget about the importance of the release time.
Listen to this short loop again. Do you see the issue compressor is never really releasing fully hence destroying the transients of the some parts of the loop. Beware of this and try to avoid medium to high release time on dynamic signals.
Number three: If you don’t know what to do with your sound and hoping for some magical compressor presets can solve the issue you are odd for the trouble you should have a purpose before you use a compressor. Common issues that the compressors are used for increasing and decreasing the dynamic range, adding and removing punch and transients controlling the loudness. Mass processing and gluing coloring creative and experimental use case of compressors do exist, but these type of things happen more often with other type of affixes so you may want to try them out before you jump to the compressor.
Number four: Compressors are not the only tools that can alter the dynamic range
and loudness of a signal.
Clippers limiters maximizers saturation and distortions and the list goes on you just need to shave that clicky transient. Why not use a clipper you need to add a bit of a color saturations and distortions are made for that?
You need to limit your dynamic range, limiters are much easier to use compressors are a little bit like this you can adjust them to use for different things but other tools are like this they have a specific purpose that they are really made for and they are really good for it.
Number five: This may come as a surprise but automation of the cooperation
could be very handy and i know eldopers actually abuse it one of the very cool use cases of this is heavy cooperation of the drums on drops to give excitement to the track.
Let’s hear this shortcut. I want to have a bit of excitement going on from verse to chorus
so to do that we will increase amount of comprehension during the chorus this is just sending our drums to a return channel and on the third channel we have it overdrive, a very heavy compression a little bit clipping slight EQ and of course sidechain of the kick to give a bit groove so to give you an idea drums without really traditional sounds like this.