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Adjusting compressor settings (part 1)

The typical parameters available on a compressor are the following:

  • Threshold;
  • Ratio;
  • Attack;
  • Release;
  • Make up gain.

To simplify things, we can split this in 2 sections: Gain reduction and time constants. You will usually set the threshold-ratio couple before touching the time constants since the latters are the fine tuning part of a compressor. The make-up is a pretty straight forward setting since its simply the volume compensation you can set to recover from gain reduction.

Threshold and Ratio settings:

Threshold and ratio are working together in order to set your gain reduction. Typically lower your threshold will be, lower will be your compression ratio also. Conversely, higher threshold will allow you to push harder the ratio. How you will set those two parameters will depend on what you’re trying to achieve. Few examples :

  • Vocals : You’re trying to make the vocals compete with a bigband… Good luck! You want the average volume to feel “inflated” but also the peak controlled.
  • Master mix: You’re trying to inflate the mix without squashing the peaks.
  • Drum bus: You’re trying to squash the peaks!!

Every situation will promote different settings, of course, but for those situations, this is what I would be tempted to do:.

  • Vocals : Since we have an important amount of gain reduction to achieve I will go with two compressors with different strategies. One that will serve to increase the overall volume to bring up the details, and one squash partially the louder peaks.
  1. Inflation: Low threshold with low ratio (1.5:1) achieving 3db gain reduction;
  2. Brickwalling: high threshold with high ratio (3 or 4:1) achieving 1-2 db gain reduction;
  • Master mix: You’re trying to inflate the mix without squashing the peaks.
  1. Inflation: ridiculously low threshold with ridiculously low ratio (1.2 or 1.3:1) achieving what you need in terms of gain reduction;
  • Drum bus: You’re trying to squash the peaks!!
  1. Peak squashing: high threshold with high ratio (4 or higher:1) achieving what you need in terms of gain reduction.

See you next week for the following !

 

 

161 thoughts on “Adjusting compressor settings (part 1)”

  6. I have a question for you if you don’t mind. I seem to fail at squashing peaks with high ratio/high threshold because the compressors i’ve tried won’t have fast enough attack times so the peaks partially go through and they end up eating my headroom (unless I use a limiter and that feels like cheating). Am I doing something wrong?

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