If you are sifting your way through opinions presented as information...  it IS often better to simply start getting your own experience by twisting some knobs.

Or, at least retreat to the owners manual for advice.

I wish I had something like this when I was learning:



instead I had that famous dbx VCA crunch>over/hiss and a few blinky lights with some unknown response characteristic to keep me busy.

FWIW,

I've heard the Jazz as serious study theory before... It doesn't play well down here in the South where my neighbors invented Jazz music.

There's a sort of out spoken rivalry between the two schools.of thought. One group plays what they want to play that day...  and the other group plays catch up studying all of those folks licks... all the while earning advanced degrees in recognition of the serious study.

It is not a popular subject to bring up amongst jazz enthusiasts.

best regards,
mike

It's not technically Jazz per se.. but I've been listening to Lucky and the Lion: Luckey Roberts and  Willie the Lion Smith playing Harlem Stride Piano.

I reckon it's an off shoot from a pre jazz style... if one considers Ragtime as a precursor to Jazz music rather than a early form of Jazz music.

I find it sort of fascinating that the early years of Jazz are sort of a mystery hidden in sheet music and news paper reviews rather than music recordings. Music recording arrived a few years after Jazz was breaking out nationally.

This Harlem Stride album I referred to above was recorded in the late 50's when the two layers were essentially living custodians of a old style of bar room piano playing when the recordings were made.


best regards,
mike

Thanks for getting us all to put on our thinking caps Jeff!

Thanks Philip. You can definately apply these principles to multiband compressors too. What is good about them is their ability to be able to handle the different parts of the frequency spectrum differently. The idea is to solo the multiband compressor bands one by one. It is a little harder to get used to just listening to quite narrow parts of the frequency spectrum at one time, especially the lower end areas. But even with the various bands in solo mode, you can still apply the ARRT approach to each band. You can also start with the lower bands and leave them on while you bring in the next band higher up and adjacent to it.

You can start by coming up with some great settings for the full spectrum first. Then transfer those settings as a starting point onto the individual bands one by one and modify them out from there to suit each band of frequencies a little more. The fact you can add or subtract gain for each band turns them into a sort of active equaliser as well making fine tuning of the various band levels a nice way to alter the overall sound too.

Another thing, if working with digital compressors you will start coming up with a similar setting of various individual instrument types as well as types of mixes. Nothing to stop you from storing these as presets and calling them up quickly for a great starting point to springboard off and tweak. Before long you will have some killer prests for either a full range compressor or multiband for a wide range of indivual instruments and mixes etc..They will still need final tuning though as there will always be variations in how a musician plays any given part and altering the qualites of the sound. eg an acoustic guitarist who might just pick a little harder and therefore you might speed up the attack a tad to ease off the hard edge to the attack part of the sound.

Also this is very relevent with the release of Producer X1. They have added even more compressors in so more important to get their settings better. Looks like and excellent thing the Pro Channel. That will be worth the upgrade alone. It is going to give a more professional sound have access to more compressors so easily. And adding some analog warmth by the looks too. Individual channel compressors will all require adjusting well and the same applies for busses etc. But getting these compressors wrong could destroy your sound too and we don't want that. They have given us the exact controls we need to do a fine job.

"Lets set Attack first. "


I use this same approach on first dates? But I set the release "last..." And the rohypnol usually erases the memory of the experience? Better living through chemistry. 

I like to think that most of my ideas in terms of setting up compressors are more generic and apply to most compressors and the compressors that are available in Sonar and many other DAW's as well will offer most or all of the basic controls and parameters. And this goes for both hardware compressors and VST's.

I did not talk about multiband compressors though and they may be worth a mention here. I think the process of setting up ARRT parameters in that order will work in a multi band situation as well. But with the added advantage of course of being able to slight modify ratios and things on a per band basis. The Threshold parameter is going to be important in multiband situations. Because you want to set it such that all the bands are reducing by the same amount and then any EQ that came before the multiband won't be effected too much. A multiband as we know can really effect the EQ of you track or buss very much. Care is required I think to keep the bands in balance.

Switching off the bands you are not interested in temporarily is also a great thing to do. That is where a multiband comes into its own I believe. Being able to only listen to the relevant parts of the spectrum you are adjusting for. But after you have reassembled everything it is also important to compare to the EQ of the track without any multiband on it to make sure the EQ is still in balance.

I think this good thread was slightly crippled right in the beginning because the ones who commented (mostly in an oppposing manner) were experienced users. The first paragrapgh of the OP clearly stated that Jeff was offering an approach for folks who don't understand compressors (=beginners).

Forum members with a post count of several thousands are experienced enough to have developed their own methods and they know what they're hearing and aiming at.

A beginner does benefit from a systematic approach in order to learn the tricks. A beginner doesn't even know how a compressed sound is like, not to mention a transparently compressed. Entering a building you must choose a door, otherwise you end up walking around the block.
 
The forums are full of users who have started learning DAW work by "just turning some knobs", and so, after years of turning knobs they come here asking questions like "how do I convert a soft synth to audio".

I actually think BOTH ways are useful...for me. I like being able to muck around with compressors and other effects but it certainly does not hurt being able to understand what the beep is going on either...

trimph1


I actually think BOTH ways are useful...for me. I like being able to muck around with compressors and other effects but it certainly does not hurt being able to understand what the beep is going on either...

I feel the same as you, trimph. One of the reasons I've sort of stayed out of this thread is due to "compression" being so subjective, there are just too many variables. I completely respect Jeff's hard work as well as everything he has offered here. Starting points and the like are all great ideas.
 
However, and this is where MY personal experience/opinion comes in.....every sound and transient will be different based on the instrument, the player, how it's being recorded as well as the particular compressor that is being used.
 
This is what I believe Dean is getting at...which if it is, I tend to favor that method. It's like a few months ago, we had a pretty killer eq/frequency discussion. You can't tell a person how to eq something without hearing it. We can say "high pass at all times" or "high pass on these particular instruments" but we can't give them a frequency number, can we? It's impossible without hearing the sound. If the sound doesn't have a lot of low end in it, it would be senseless to tell someone "well, I always high pass at 150 Hz."
 
If a guitar tone doesn't have meat in the 600-800 range to start with, we don't just cut it because "it worked on one project I did". The same with compression. I see it as almost impossible to give a starting point with anything other than a rough ratio setting for particular instruments....and even that is flawed thinking until you physically have the sound at your disposal to work with.
 
How can we give an attack setting when we haven't heard the instrument? How much release is enough? Remove -3 dB of gain or -8 dB of gain? We can't make that call. Then you factor in that EVERY compressor is going to behave/react differently, and whatever "starting point plan" you have, becomes completely useless. This is not meant to say what Jeff ( or anyone else ) has given is "useless". I'm just saying there are way too many things to take into account with this compression animal to where trial and error or "by twisting knobs" is most likely going to be what happens in *MOST* cases.
 
In other cases you may decide to use the formula that Bobby Owinski has provided for making drum compression work in time with the music. That's a prime example of when a formula or starting point is going to get you what you are looking for with slight trial and error. Or we know that a longer attack and shorter release with the right ratio and threshold is going to simulate what a transient plug would do on a snare drum to increase crack and resonance. Those types of settings are going to work with very little tweaking every time for just about every snare other than the subjectivity of how much crack and ring do you want on the snare.
 
For example, I can run the PC 4k buss comp on any snare drum using a threshold of -37.7, ratio of 4:1, attack 9.4 ms and release 0.1 and it would simulate what a transient plug would do on a snare drum to where it brings out the crack and the amount of ring. It will work every time for me and to adjust for another instrument, I tweak the threshold, the attack and release for that instrument. But those numbers alre always going to be good starting points for me to make a snare crack a bit more and sustain a bit more.
 
But for leveling, tightening, conditioning etc, there's no way a starting point (in my opinion) is going to help. Especially if the compressor you use vs. the one the person writing or teaching, behaves differently...and unless you are using the same one, trust me...they will behave much differently. I have some comps that I have to really jump on to hear a difference. If I listened to the stuff I read and applied it to comps like that, I'd not get the results I am looking for.
 
It's good to read up on the controls....it's a blessing to have people like Jeff share their knowledge for the price of an internet connection....but at the end of the day, it is in my honest and humble opinion that each compressor as well as the instrument it processes, must be treated case specific because of how many different variables there are.
 
It's like anything else really....each individual is going to experiment and create something that works for them. This comes from trial and error as well as how the comp performs with the instruments that are fed into it. Another example slightly off the beaten path but not entirely...
 
I've been told for years that a truss rod in a guitar should be set a certain way. 1 1/4 turns or something or whatever it is. I have NEVER taken notice to how many turns my truss rod gets. I turn it until the guitar I am using plays the way I want it. If it's 2 1/2 turns...so be it. When you tighten it, the neck straightens...when you loosen it, the neck smiles. How much tension you need depends on the guitar, how you play and how you want it to sound. A little string buzz can be good and add a little more of a percussive attack to a guitar. This is good as long as it's not fretting out and making a "dead" sound. Some guys (like me) like that, others like less heat on their truss so the guitar breathes a little more.
 
A compressor is a lot like that to me. It's something you need to feel as well as know what to listen for on YOUR material you are working with. It's also SUPER important to have examples of what a compressor does both good and bad on various instruments. I do a lesson plan with my students covering this exact thing using several compressors. So everything is really important and like trimph, though I will agree on the "both method" my heart will always belong to knob twisting, trial and error.
 
-Danny

Awesome thread guys. Thanks for posting it, Jeff. I'll be trying it out soon... and then I'll fiddle with the knobs from there if necessary. Cheers.

And the other thing is, when you are first experimenting, don't be subtle initially. Let it do quite a bit of gain reduction, so that you can really hear what it's doing. Once you get your head around what it's doing, then you'll be able to listen to it being done more subtly.

And, though you should always mix with your ears, it may not be immediately apparent to you why what you are hearing is happening. So you may want to bounce down some of those unsubtly compressed tracks and compare the original and compressed wave forms, to see how the shape has changed. Has it knockd the peak all the way off, has it made the peak thinner, has it brought up the trailing part relative to the peak, Has it made a dip on the trailng end of the peak and then held down the trailing part, etc...