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Old 07-12-2019, 03:47 AM   #29
frood
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Posts: 81
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the section in the yep thread ("why do your recordings sound like ass?") about compression is really insightful.

this bit was particularly helpful for me:

"He uses the ARRT acronym for this, first you crack attack, then Release,
then Ratio, and then Threshold.
First you set ratio to the maximum value, put release to the lowest/fastest setting, and
lower the threshold so that the entire signal is compressed. Ignore the horrible pumping
you hear, but focus only on the ‚beginning' of the sound i.e. You focus on the attack button
only. With this button you can create e.g. the thickness (or thinness) of a sound. If
the material is e.g. a snaredrum you can almost ‚tune' the size of the stick the drummer
is using. The attack affects the size of the hit.
Once you are happy with that, leave attack alone and adjust release. Release essentially
controls the groove, the volume envelope over time. Try to set it as slow as possible
while still hearing a nice groove.
Then leave attack and release alone and adjust the ratio (which was at its max). You can
think of the ratio as a sort of lens. High ratios the sound will be firm, but small. Lower
ratios the sound will be bigger but softer (also less controlled). Lower the ratio until you
loose your above created groove, then increase it again to get the groove back.
Then adjust the threshold so that some sound still gets uncompressed so that the compressor
comes to rest ‚in special moments' as stav puts it.
I hope this helps some people, and the above is not at all my invention. I just wanted to
post this as i believe it is in the same vein as Yep's other comments in this thread AND it
surely helped me to finally understand how a compressor works."
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