Compression during recording

I'm trying to decide on a mic preamp and I want to know whether to use compression during recording or after the fact. I've read the following from Yep's guide:

First piece of advice: avoid using your hardware compressor before recording unless you really feel 110% confident in what you're doing. If you record at 24 bit, there is no advantage to compressing before recording, and software compressors will tend to be better than your hardware compressor. Moreover, if you get it wrong at the tracking stage, there is no way to fix it or undo it.

I plan on recording at 24 bit using my M-Audio Audiophile 192 card. I am going to purchase a UAD-1 DSP card as well, so I will have softward compressors available. Do most of you record without compression then use it after the fact?

Thanks for the help,

Scott

I don't have a hardware compressor, and don't feel the need for one. Add after recording, that way if you mess it up, you still have the good version!

ORIGINAL: ohhey

Using compression during recording should be done by those that are very confident about the sound they want, if you are asking the question you are not one of them, at least not yet. So I would say don't unless you are just testing and learning.

+1, and exactly what I meant in the cited post.

There are a whole lot of reasons why you might someday want to compress while recording, but none of them are things that you can't technically accomplish after the fact with plug-ins.

The advantages to using a hardware compressor while recording are all workflow and aethetic preference, which is fine, but there is a lot of room to do considerably more harm than good if you aren't really good with compression. Compression is difficult to hear and sometimes counter-intuitive to dial in. Until you get a good handle on what 2dB of compression sounds like, and how different compressors respond differently to different types of signal and so on, leave the compressor out of the input chain.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: krizrox

I use the compressors on my outboard preamps quite often. ...

I would venture to guess that most professional recording engineers (like Krizrox) do. I think this leads a lot of home-studio musicians think they should do the same, not necessarily for the right reasons.

Some relevant things that set professionals apart from home recordists:

- Professionals typically have a great deal of practice with signal processing and usually can tell right away what settings are most appropriate for a particular sound/style/song.

- Professionals typically have a variety of good outboard compressors and the knowledge to use them properly.

- Professionals are under pressure to work quickly and efficiently. a home recordist may spend a week tweaking one song that they spent months writing, a professional is typically expected to put out a complete album by a band they've never heard before in that time.

If all of the above are true, then using an outboard compressor can save time and make for a more sensible workflow. It's kind of like cutting lumber at the lumberyard instead of bringing it to the jobsite first. The less sure you are of what you're doing the more likely you are to end up with a whole bunch of the wrong-sized wood because you overlooked something. But if you know exactly what you're going to need in advance, you can save time and confusion by making your cuts in advance.

It's a matter of balancing skills and priorities. If you do this long enough, you'll eventually start using the compression and eq on your preamps just because it makes sense and you start to know in advance that you're going to want certain things anyway.

Cheers.

Yep's answer always makes sense. Which is why he is busily writing his book on the subject of all things audio. If nothing else take all your forum messages and publish them.

I think we all kind of fall into a comfort zone eventually that makes sense to us based on the way we work day to day. And the type of equipment we have at our disposal. Having made plenty of mistakes over the years, I guess I've figured out what not to do more than what to do in any given situation. As far as compressors are concerned, what I've kinda come to realize is that you really have to screw up big time to ruin a take with a compressor. I mean, you have to be like on mushrooms or just totally not thinking at all to really mess things up so badly that you can't keep the take. With compressors, there's a lot of room for error before things become so bad that the take is trashed. Usually, your ears will tell you well in advance that something isn't sounding right if the knobs aren't adjusted properly. The best thing anyone can do for themselves when learning how to use a compressor is to grab those knobs and crank them all the way and see what happens. You'll learn what happens when you do that and what do so with those settings. I always default to the lowest settings I can get away with. And also - if I don't need a compressor I don't use one.

I am not a professional or even close....but the guy who helped me get going and taught me alot... hands on..was a pro's pro with the golden ears.

He insisted on having a stand alone tracking rig.....Pre's,EQ, gate,Comp/Limiter. He's all DAW but still uses his tracking rig.

So now I almost always track vocals,and live instruments with compression/limiter.

I actually tend to limit vocals more than compress.........and I try to only touch the transient spikes.

The bass I compress and limit.

I do use an EQ before my compresser, if necessary, to eliminate false triggering from bad frequencies.

I never compress synths, E-Drums or any type of pre-recorded sounds.

Most of them are already processed to their fullest.

Thanks for letting me type.

Zungle.

A lot of good points here. Now all singers know how to work a mic is a good point.
The compessor will even our the swaying (back and forth) of a singer.
Bringing the low levels up and knocking the high levels down.
Another good point is to only use the min.
and last, you con't practice if you don't try.
I picked up a inexpencive digital processor
The; Peavey Dual Deltafex is a 24-bit stereo effects processor

This way I have a reverb and other useless things as well as a compressor.
Its not high quality but its a good tool

cryo,
If you don't mind me asking, what pre did you buy?

ORIGINAL: lhansen

cryo,
If you don't mind me asking, what pre did you buy?

I labored over the decision for a long time and finally got a Joe Meek ThreeQ. But, I bought it without trying it first and just received it, so the jury hasn't even been selected yet. Seems people either love 'em or hate 'em and, based on other reviews, I think (hope) I am going to be in the love 'em camp, although my biggest concern is the lack of a ratio adjustment, which is set at 5:1. But, I figured for the price and resale value, it seems to be a safe bet. I will be testing it out with my singer (female) this evening.

Hey Kenny,

I'll be emailing you by the end of the week about sumpin'. Looking for a little help as usual....

Maybe if I had a really nice outboard compressor, I might compress on the front end. I find EQing to be a bit more useful however. Good point about compression possibly helping the vocalist during tracking. I could easily compress the vocal in their headphone mix only.

ORIGINAL: Joe Bravo

"I could easily compress the vocal in their headphone mix only."

You guys listening to that? That's a really good idea and a nice compromise.

Why would you want to do this? The idea behind compressing the vocals during tracking is to control the dynamic range of the recorded track. If you were to only compress the headphone mix (i.e., not the recorded take), you would likely have the opposite effect, especially with less experienced vocalists who don't know when/how much to back off a mic. In other words, the vocalist may perceive that he/she is not singing loud enough during louder passages when the compressor kicks in and try to belt it out even more to compensate. Now, not only would the dynamic range of the recorded track be all over the map, but the tone/pitch quality of the vocals may suffer as well.

I do just the opposite - my singer gets no compression in her headphone mix and I encourage her to pay attention to her own levels and try to keep it consistent - can't do that if it's being squashed by a compressor. If her ears start to bleed, she'll know it and she'll back off the mic . Either way, I get a (lightly) compressed vocal take.

ORIGINAL: Joe Bravo

"I could easily compress the vocal in their headphone mix only."

You guys listening to that? That's a really good idea and a nice compromise.

I always give the vocalist a lot of compression in their headphone mix. I have described my aproach to headphone mixes in more detail elsewhere.

I record mostly rock/pop type music, not classical or high-level Jazz "artists." I want the singer to hear a LOT of themselves, and the worse the singer, the more in-their-face I want their performance to be. In theory, it makes sense to give the singer the most acccurate, most natural and true-to-life portrait of the sound of their voice, but in practice, my experience is that singers pretty much never hear themselves the way everyone else does.

Singers tend to be willing to overlook awful notes and timing errors if their voice "sounds" cool. If their voice sounds rich and breathy and intimate and powerful and authoritative, then they're cool with it. On the other hand, if their voice sounds nasal or honky or naked and wimpy they tend to overcompensate, to "push" the performance, to tense up and sound forced and pitchy and to basically get worse and worse.

If I give the singer an unaffected portrait of their voice and then bland that in with a bunch of close-miked power instrumennts with synth pads and saturated guitars and thunderous drums, the singer is going to mostly just hear their own voice in their own head. Most of the highs and lows and most of the articulation is going to be masked by the backing tracks. Their voice is going to sound all the ways they don't want it to sound-- small, nasal, "stuffy" naked, and not "professional." The singer is going to tense up, and usually, that means they're going to suck.

On the other hand, if I pipe in some super-exaggerated rock star processing to their headphones and give them a big, bold, breathy, controlled, resonant, rich, reverberant "rockstar" version of their voice, then the singer is going to feel cool and confident, like they ARE the rockstar. Putting the singer at ease and making them comfortable with their own voice is, to me, way more important to the quality of the record than anything else.

I have other techniques and work-arounds for mic technique and stuff like that. For me, priority number one is not giving the singer an accurate representation of how they sound. For me, priority number one is making the singer feel comfortable and confident. Compression is almost always a big part of that. Of course, everyone does things differently, and different people have different approaches.

Cheers.

Yep,

Dude, when am I gonna stop seeing a big "X" where your avatar used to be. We may have to start a campaign to find you a new one. Hmm ... I suddenly feel very sinister inside.

My first couple of years here I didn't post very much. Half of my posts were made during the last year probably. You trying to tell me sumpin'?