Easiest Way to Understand Compression

[00:00] Compression is actually a really simple thing. Let's first understand what the look of the way from of the sound means. This is a really straightforward thing. It simply represents the loudness of the sound and compression is nothing other than chopping off the tops of the loudness.

[00:14] To understand it you can do a manual compression using volume automation. You simply automate the gain of the sound and decrease the volume. Now a compressor is only different than that because it is decreasing the volume automatically for you.

[00:28] As you can see the sound goes down in volume and we want to chop up the first part of the sound so it's not as spiky. For this we are going to decrease the volume at the beginning and increase the original volume at the end. And now how quickly we increase it to the original volume earlier or later is controlled by a release knob inside a compressor.

[00:45] How simple is that? Let's just sample and see what the volume automation did to our sound. It chopped off the beginning. So let's say we want to leave a louder beginning of the sound aka transient to make it more punchy.

[01:00] We will learn that what we need to do is at the beginning we need to start from the original volume and then start decreasing it. How quickly we start decreasing it is determined by an attack knob inside a compressor.

[01:12] Let's just sample it and see what the difference it made. Now our sound has a clicky beginning. So visual change is not the only change. You'll start to hear that more squashed aka compressed sounds sound more controlled and more in your face.

[01:25] If you push the compressor really hard you will hear that the quietest parts of the sound have been equalized with the louder ones.

[01:40] You'll notice that the sound has now a flattened feel to it. It's not as spiky as it was. The louder parts are closer to the quiet parts. That means the compressor chopped up loud parts that go past a certain volume level.

[01:57] That level is called a threshold. There's also a ratio knob that determines how much the volume is reduced after passing the threshold. But I wouldn't worry much about it and for the intensity of the compressor used a threshold level. Increase the ratio to infinite to one to turn it into a limiter and you will get exactly what we're talking about.

[02:13] A compressor that chops up peaks of the sound if they cross a threshold line. A great example of a plugin that does this is a built-in compressor or punch. A fun fact punch was supposed to be initially called a visual compressor to make compression easier for you.

[02:26] Both effects have a line that if your sound crosses it it'll get chopped up. Another parameter worth mentioning is a look ahead. It loads a few milliseconds of the audio into its memory to start working even before the sound appears.

[02:38] It'll help you to cut those very beginnings of the sound. Now I'm not an expert when it comes to knees.

[02:51] But from what I've seen what a higher knee does is it makes quiet parts of your sound get affected more with lower threshold. It'll help you for example to compress the high hits in a drum room even if they're not passing the threshold while keeping a relatively low compression levels on louder parts like kick and snare.

[03:07] Peek and RMS are sensitivity options.

[03:19] Peek is more sensitive to short peaks in volume than RMS.

[03:31] Also some compressors are equipped with an expander. Turn it on to mirror the volume reduction and increase it instead of decrease it. Now your sound will get louder instead of quieter.

[03:46] When you're compressing a sound forget about any rules and book values. Do what sounds the best for your track. There's no perfect formula for your sound and music and so about that sounds. If it sounds good, it sounds good and that's it.

[04:00] Anyways thanks for watching, hope that tutorial was useful. There's gonna be much more like these ones in the future. If you're looking for quality sounds you can check out over sample.us and if you're looking for quality plugins you can check out plugins that over sample. Check out our playlist if you want to learn more and have a good day.