How To Become a Master at Compression (in Only 10 Minutes)

[00:00] I first started producing an FL studio in 2016 so around 8 years ago and of course when I first started I would have watched tons and tons of tutorials and every single YouTuber including myself would say use compression and after trying to learn it over and over again

[00:14] it kinda made sense but it kinda didn't it's one of those topics that feels complicated but also looks so simple with that being said I'm about to break it down in such an easy to understand way so that by the end of this video you feel completely confident in using

[00:27] it. Okay so before we start anything you might be like well what does a compressor even do? All it does is just squeeze down the dynamic range of a sound and you might be like well

[00:39] what is dynamic range? Well if I draw something here real quick let's just say that this is a simple drum loop or something like that the dynamic range is just the difference between the quietest parts and the loudest parts of this audio so a sample or a song with a lot of dynamic

[00:55] range would look something like this you have these very very quiet parts and then you have these very loud parts but a sample with very little dynamic range would look something like this where the whole sample or song just kinda has a consistent volume right just

[01:08] so this is clear this part of the song or the sample would be considered very dynamic in other words there's a lot of difference between the quiet parts and the loud parts here and then this other section that we've drawn would just be considered not dynamic correct

[01:21] and now you might be like well why would you want to squeeze the dynamics of the sound? You can do that in order to bring up the character of a sound or maybe you have some vocals with some very loud parts and some very quiet parts and you want to kind of even those out

[01:33] it can also help your sounds sound more glued together it really just depends anyway let's go into the specifics of compression and I'm going to break this down in such a simple way that anybody will be able to understand let's do it once again I'll draw some audio

[01:46] like a kick drum for example I'm running out of ink here now that we have our audio here there are four main settings on a compressor number one is the threshold now what is a threshold well think of it as like the line or the trigger point that you

[02:00] set that turns the compressor on so let's say that we set our threshold to right here whenever sound passes through this threshold right here this trigger point that's when the compression will turn on and of course having a very low threshold will affect a big chunk

[02:16] of the sound now the next thing here is the ratio all the ratio is it's just how much the sound gets compressed or gets squashed after it passes the threshold you could have a ratio of two to one for example we'll cover this in more detail a little bit later it's kind of hard

[02:32] for me to show you with a drawing but this essentially means that for every two decibels above the threshold it'll get compressed down by one decibel and for example this would mean that for every four decibels that goes above the threshold it will of course get compressed by one decibel right

[02:48] like I said the ratio is just how much the sound gets lowered and volume after it passes the threshold that's all you need to think about right now the third thing here is the attack now all the attack is is just how fast the compressor takes to react once the sound passes the threshold so the ratio is how

[03:06] much it gets squashed down and the attack is how long it takes for it to get squashed down does that make sense so for example if you have a fast attack immediately the compressor is going to start clamping down and it's going to immediately catch this peak here but let's say for example you have a slower

[03:22] attack it's going to let this peak this transient come through and then it will start clamping down right anyway the final thing is release let me write that in real quick and all the releases it's just how

[03:34] quickly the compressor stops working after the sound gets quieter so a very fast release might look something like this where the sound gets compressed down and then it kind of just goes immediately back up again and then a slower release would look something like this where it kind of takes a while for it

[03:49] to get back up to its original volume so this is extremely simplified like I said we're going to more detail in just a second but really these are the fundamentals this is all you kind of have to understand for now so to tie it all together I'll give you a little analogy let's say that you're a

[04:03] teenager for example living in your parents house and you're just living your normal teenage life blasting music and so of course your mom is going to come into your room and start yelling at you to turn down the music the threshold is how loud you can turn your music before your mom starts yelling at you

[04:18] the ratio is how much that you agree to turn down your music the attack is how quickly you turn down the volume after she's yelling at you and then the release is how quickly you go right back up to the

[04:30] original volume when she leaves anyway hopefully that kind of helps you understand it and now I think it's actually time that we look at some real examples in the DAW let's do it okay so now that I've given you a very basic explanation of what compression is I have this project here you might remember

[04:44] it from one of my past videos and we'll be specifically focusing on this muted guitar loop right here

[05:00] so you can see it's a pretty dynamic loop it has these loud peaks here and it's very sharp and then all we're going to do is just use compression to kind of smooth that out so in FL studio we have the

[05:15] limiter to kind of squash it down and smooth out these transients all we have to do is of course lower threshold and then increase the ratio and as I adjust the settings here just kind of watch what happens

[05:31] and listen so here's a before and after

[05:52] and like I just explained the attack is how long it takes for the compression to actually start working so of course if we have no attack then the compression is just going to instantly start but if we increase this a little bit you can hear the compression kind of opens up and lets those transient

[06:11] peaks through and once again the release is how fast it goes back up to its original volume after the compression so if we do a really slow release take this all the way down

[06:30] and a really quick note make sure you're not relying on visual cues to mix and compress and stuff like that you want to actually listen and hear if it's making your track sound good and while the visuals might be helpful it's just a lot better to listen and it's going to train your ear anyway

[06:44] let's play this with the whole track okay it's a little bit too much in my opinion so I'm gonna loosen

[06:56] this up

[07:11] yeah that's good okay so now we're in Ableton and I'm doing this because I hopefully want to help out the Ableton users as well this is a drum and bass track I just started working on

[07:26] like I said I just started working on it so it's definitely not finished but I want to give an

[07:40] example with this main synth here I'm not a huge fan of I guess how punchy this synth is so we can go ahead and just apply the default compressor here and we can mess with it this is the threshold

[07:56] and I want to decently fast release a pretty fast attack because I just wanted to catch that initial

[08:12] punchiness and I actually want this to be pretty subtle

[08:24] and so whenever you're compressing because we're squashing down the dynamics of the sound my sound a lot more quiet right so if we wanted to we could just increase the outgain by a little bit here

[08:37] or click on this makeup button this is just going to automatically compensate for the loss of that level hopefully that makes sense one more thing we can cover is actually a glue compressor

[08:53] now I wasn't going to cover this because I wanted to just simplify this video as much as possible so I have this group with all the top drums like the snare and the symbols

[09:06] and I'm going to apply a glue compressor to this group the reason I'm not including the kick is because I don't want to squash the kick with everything else I want to keep it separate so it punches through and especially in EDM it should be the loudest element in the whole track because it's

[09:19] the foundation anyway a glue compressor is exactly what it sounds like it glues your sounds together so a little bit of history on this most glue compressors emulate I believe it's an SSL bus compressor and

[09:31] that specific compressor was loved by a ton of engineers for its ability to of course glue sounds together right and so that's what it's trying to do here let's mess with it

[09:48] I want it to be a little bit faster so I'll turn down the release just a little bit and I want that snare to just snap through so we can increase the attack as well that way the compressor doesn't catch the initial peak of the snare

[10:07] it's a very subtle difference but it kind of just helps everything glue together all right hopefully

[10:20] all of that made sense like I said I tried to just simplify this video as much as possible I just wanted to give you like a crash course that you can refer back to if you need as always if you want to you can check the link in the description below think it'll be really cool we can work one-on-one

[10:34] get your music to sound really professional and also if you want to please subscribe it will help me retire my parents you've probably heard me say this like a thousand times already but anyway make music now and you'll think yourself later peace