 If you want to get an understanding of the Rocaster Pro 2 Apex processing and how to use it effectively, then this video is for you. The Rocaster Pro 2 is one of the most advanced and powerful consumer audio devices on the market today. Many people are just only scratching the surface of its capabilities, though. What I've found through my coaching clients is that sometimes, even when folks try to unlock more of its power, there is a lack of understanding to know how to achieve the results that they know are possible with this awesome device. There are two main areas where I find that this is the case. The first is advanced audio routing, so connecting multiple devices, incorporating Mix Minus on multiple channels, and being in full control of which audio inputs are being fed to which audio outputs without the slapback feedback echo or whatever other issues you may be encountering. This is something I've talked about at length in previous videos on this channel, and I've certainly spent many an hour talking about this on consultation calls as well. The second area that often causes problems is the advanced Apex processors that we have on the Rocaster Pro 2. Whilst the RCP 2 is a consumer device, Apex offers professional grade hardware and software audio processing solutions, and so there is an inherent complexity that goes along with it. And I'm talking about things like the noise gate, high pass filter, the compressor, and so on. Each has a different effect on our voice, and each has its own set of parameters that we can adjust. But what do the unfamiliar names of these processors mean, and what do all of these parameters do as well, and how do we use them to get the desired effect on our sound? These are questions I get asked all of the time, and these are all dynamic audio processors that we've got on the device, and so that's what I'm going to be talking about in this video. And I'm going to focus in on the compressor as an example. Before I do though, I just want to quickly say hello in the chat. Hey, Richard, great to see you here. Paul and Peter, obviously in the back channel as well. Great to see you in the chat as well. So before we actually dive into things, let's just take a very brief look at the compressor itself. This is the one that, as I say, we're going to be talking about today. So if I come into the advanced audio for this microphone that I'm talking into, and I'm going to tap on here, which is the compressor, and we've got a number of different things here. So we've got these different parameters, threshold, ratio, attack, release, and gain. By the end of this video, you'll know what all of those are. We've also got this mysterious chart here that's bouncing up and down with various different things going on. As I'm speaking, you can see these different meters going up and down. There's this weird little chart thing here. What actually is that, and what does it represent in true sort of audio sense, shall we say? So before we can actually dig into that, we need to look at some first principles. So I did mention that we were going to go a little bit back. First of all, what I want to do is just sort of talk about exactly what is sound. And I did say that we are going to be going right back to the very beginning. And I should say, though, just to sort of preface this all by saying, I'm not an audio engineer by any stretch, but I can lay out all of the information for you that you need to know to get the most out of the RODECaster Pro 2. So what exactly is sound? Well, sound is just waves of energy propagating and oscillating through a particular medium. In this case, it is through air from my mouth to the microphone. But it could be through water. It could be through a wooden desk, for example. That is just ripples of energy passing through that medium. And then at some point, these oscillations and vibrations in the air reach our ear and then our clever little brains interprets that as sound. So perhaps it's easiest, then, if we actually look at what these waves actually look like, because we often picture them as sort of oscillating waves going up and down like this, much like you would see ripples on water or waves in the ocean, for example. But that isn't, in fact, what is going on with sound waves. It's something a little bit different. So in come the slides. I have got a few little demonstration slides to show you today. So hopefully you won't be bored to tears. It's not going to be your average keynote presentation. But what I will say is that here we've got a speaker. And if you've ever seen the cone of a speaker, whilst you are actually playing something through it, you'll notice that it does vibrate in and out like this. And it is actually oscillating back and forth. And what that is doing is that is basically either compressing the air in front of it and causing this wave to propagate through the air. So let's have a little look at a diagram. Imagine we've got the speaker here on the left hand side and imagine these vertical lines are just particular points in the air in front of it. Obviously, air is not in layers like this, but I hope you'll forgive the artistic license. Now, as the speaker cone pushes forward, it's basically compressing the air in front of it. And then as the speaker comes back, it's causing an area of expansion or low pressure. And what that forms is basically these areas of compressed air, which is compression, but not in the, this is not dynamic compression, which we'll be talking about later. This is literal compression of the air, squishing the air in front of it. And then you get areas of rarefaction, which is basically low pressure. So a sound wave is basically just this wave of various different stages of high and low pressure, compression and rarefaction. And so what we can do is we can represent that by a wave. And so the wave form that we have looks something like this, where everything above that center line is a compression and everything below that wave is rarefaction. So that is why we get this sort of wave form to represent sound. Now there are two main components to measure this wave. And that would be, first of all, we've got it sort of passing through time, but then on the vertical axis, we've got what's called amplitude. And that is essentially a measure of volume. So if you've got a higher amplitude, then that is a higher volume. And you can see that on your speaker, if you turn your volume up, then you'll see that the speaker starts pumping even further in and out. Whereas if you turn it all the way down, then you've got a lower amplitude because it's causing a lower pressure and that would be quieter. The other thing then that we can measure in terms of the amplitude and in terms of this wave is the wavelength. So that is how long between these periods of compression and rarefaction. So how quickly it is doing this. So if you were to measure the wavelength and divide the time by the wavelength rather, you would get the frequency, which is how many of these are happening per second. And that is a measure of pitch. And so if you've got something that has got a much higher frequency, then that is gonna have a higher pitch. So a higher number of hertz is a higher sound, higher tone this means, or a lower frequency, which means a longer wavelength is gonna be a lower pitch. So that is the amplitude and the frequency, that is the pitch and the amplitude, which is measured in hertz and the, sorry, the amplitude is measured in decibels, the frequency is measured in hertz and that is volume and pitch. So when it comes to measuring amplitude, the scale that is used as I've just mentioned is decibels, but this can be a little bit confusing because a couple of things. First of all, there are a number of different decibel scales and second of all, the decibel scale is non-linear. And what I mean by that is if you were to sort of go from a certain sound and then you hear a sound which you may think is twice as loud, it's not actually linear in that sense. So the numbers don't directly correlate in a linear fashion, it's a logarithmic scale. And so the other thing is, as I mentioned that there are multiple different decibel scales, the standard decibel scale that you may be familiar with would start from zero and then go up where things that are getting louder would have a higher number. But with audio equipment, there is an inherent limit to what they can actually record or what they can actually detect where they can detect this sort of difference. And so if we look at this chart here where we've got a waveform and that is a given amplitude, a given volume, if we were to make something louder and louder and louder, eventually we'd get to the point where the audio device just cannot register that increase in volume, it's just basically maxed out, it can't record any further. And when that happens, the amplitude's got so big that it's basically just chopping off the tops and bottoms of the waveform and just leaving whatever the maximum it can record is. That is known as clipping. And in fact, that's where the scale that we use on the Rocaster comes from and indeed all audio devices, which is called the DBFS scale or decibel full scale. And it's a bit weird because it goes from minus 60, which is nothing all the way up to zero, which is the maximum that can be recorded. And so in fact, if you have a look on the numbers on the far left-hand side, you can see this where it's zero at the top, which is the maximum we can possibly record on the device or register on the device. And then down to minus 60, which would be actually what you would think of as zero. So this is weird for two reasons. First of all, it starts from a negative number and goes up to zero. So that's a little bit strange for people to understand to begin with. And then there is this thing that zero is actually maximum and minus 60 is minimum in terms of the thing that it is actually registering. Now this scale, the DBFS scale features on the Rocaster Pro 2. And if I come to my top-down shot again, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over to the metering. What you can see here is the metering that we've got on here, the default for it, if I just quickly switch over for one second. Whoops a daisy. Let me just change this over to this one. The default metering that you have on the Rocaster is really sort of plain. It doesn't have any numbers on it. It just has a couple of different marks. It shows you when you are at this unity level. Unity, by the way, at this level, sort of about, I don't know, 70% up from the bottom is basically unity means the input level that is coming from the mic just sort of naturally before you've done anything to it, either increased it or reduced, increased the gain or reduced it. So that is what that level is there. But apart from that, there's nothing really on there in terms of other markings. You can actually add the decibel full scale to these meters though by going into your settings, then go to your display and then metering. The default here is just the one that it will be on by default, obviously. And then if you go to broadcast, as it says here, the level meters will include the DBFS markers. So that's the decibel full scale markers. It will also include the gain reduction. And we'll talk about that when we get onto compression. That's something that happens when you've got compression engaged and it's reducing the volume. But you'll get to understand that as we go through this video. So the broadcast then is the one that has this DBFS scale. Now, if I come back to the meters here then, you'll see that then it's probably a bit small for you to see on my screen now, but you'll see it on your own that now we've got numbers here that are 60, 45, 30, 15 and zero. So those are directly related then to this DBFS scale. What they've done on the roadcaster though is so that to not confuse people with this logarithmic scale, and by that what I mean is I mentioned it's non-linear, you can see then that from zero to minus five is a much bigger gap than it is from minus 55 to minus 60. So that's what I mean by non-linear. There's not a direct sort of linear correlation. It is a logarithmic scale. But what they've done on the roadcaster is they've sort of even that all out to make it more sort of normal in terms of the way it looks. And they've also dropped out some of those figures. So now we just have this 60, 45, 30, 15 and zero. So that is the scale that is on the meters on the roadcaster. They also didn't bother with the minus. So it just does say 60, 45, 30 and 15. There's no minus on there. But that as I say, that is the scale that we've got on there. Now I'm talking about waveforms up until now in terms of them being these nice little waves or in this case, clipped perhaps. But really that's not what's going on in real audio because there's all sorts of different fluctuations in my voice in both the tone and also in the volume as well. And so it isn't just one single wave. That would just indicate a single tone monotonous. Although some people say that I am a little bit sometimes in my videos, but that's another story. But in actual fact, what we've got is rather than something that's a nice, neat wave like this, what we're actually getting is something that looks more akin to this where it's a whole range of different amplitudes as my voice goes up and down in volume. But actually there's more to it than that as well because that would just indicate different amplitudes of the same frequency. But in fact, if we were to take a single sort of point in here and we've got a play head and we were to play all the way through and stop at a point at any given point, there are actually a whole series of different tones going on as well. And they all have their own individual amplitudes. And so this sort of range that we can hear within the sort of audible spectrum, we can actually measure that. And what you do is you measure each individual various different tone, different frequency in the audible spectrum. And you can plot that on something called a spectrum analyzer. This is about as geeky as we're gonna get. So just bear with it. We'll get onto the compressor in a moment. But the spectrum analyzer then, what you have then is you basically have the amplitude. So we're still measuring the loudness, the amplitude on the Y axis there. But on the X axis, what we're doing is we're plotting at that given point in time, we're plotting the frequency. This is again, another thing where it is a nonlinear scale. So it's the frequency is Hertz, this is the pitch. But as you can see the sort of space on that chart there from 50 to 100 Hertz is exactly the same as the space from 500 to 1,000. So it's this nonlinear logarithmic scale. But all you need to know is everything down to the left hand side is gonna be a lower tone and everything to the higher end is gonna be a higher tone. And although this goes down to sort of 30 Hertz at the bottom, you can see right at the top there where it says 10K, that would be 10 kilohertz. So often you'll see on the Rocaster that it's in terms of kilohertz because we're usually more towards the end of the spectrum. So what you then end up getting is you would get something at any given point in time, something like this. And in fact, as you are talking, if you use a sort of live spectrum analyzer, as you are talking, this thing would be going up and down in all areas. And what this is showing you is different areas of the audible spectrum where you have got different amplitudes. So here you can see there's a big spike there just around about these sort of 80, 90 Hertz. That means there's some sort of really low tone that's coming through at that frequency. And that is the sort of dominant thing there. It's louder. So as well as affecting the amplitude, we can just affect the frequency. So if you wanted to use the pitch shift, for example, to make your voice higher, all that's gonna do is that's gonna skew your frequency to be higher to increase the pitch. But what we also can do is we can target specific frequencies. So that's what dynamic processing is involved with. It's looking at how dynamic processes, I should say, are either changing the amplitude, they're changing the frequency, or they're changing the amplitude at specific frequencies. So if you think about an equalizer, for example, where you've got all the different sliders and you can move them up and down to either increase the bass or increase the treble or things like that, what we're doing there is we're essentially just taking on that frequency spectrum graph on the right-hand side. We're basically just saying we wanna take those amplitudes of those lower tones and just boost them up a bit. So that's what dynamic processes are. They're either acting on volume, which is amplitude, which is measured in decibels, or they're acting on the pitch, which is frequency, which is measured in Hertz, or some combination of those. So that's what we're gonna get into. And like I say, a bit geeky, but hopefully this will sort of start coming into its own as we start explaining the compressor. So before we do though, I just wanna mention, we're talking about dynamic processes, and this is specifically what these Apex audio processes are. And you can see the little logo on the Rocaster. But what exactly is Apex audio? Well, Apex audio, as I mentioned in the intro, has been making these audio processes that are actually hardware processes for over 40 years. And these are kind of industry standard things that have been used in recording for, as I say, decades now. And when I say hardware, it's literally these things. So you might see them in a sort of rack mount. So in a studio, you might find these different devices. And these are the same things that we now have on the Rocaster in software form. So if you look at their products, you've got things like here, the exciter. So that's one that we've got on here. You've got this master preamp. So that'll have the compressor on it. And these things are, as I say, the compiler as well. That's one that we use to sort of bring together all of the various different channels. We'll look at that a little bit later as well and give them a sort of overall rounded sound. So that's what Apex audio is. It is basically hardware processes that we now have actually as software on the Rocaster. So I want now to talk then about the compressor in particular, because this is one that's got a number of different sort of complex terms on it that maybe people are not familiar with and not understanding what they do. It's hard to know like, how should you use that to adjust the levels of various different things to get the sound that you want? So dynamic compression, what is that intended to do? It's basically intended to try and even out the sound throughout the production or in the mix basically. So basically leveling out where you've got higher volumes that may cause sort of spikes. You don't want to blow out someone's ears, but then you also might want to raise up the points where someone's talking more quietly. So there is less of a range between those and it's more sort of even and uniform throughout the thing so that you don't find people are constantly either reaching to turn you up so that they can hear what you're saying or reaching to turn you down when there is a loud part in whatever you're doing. And think of this really as the compressor is like doing all of this stuff automatically. So think about you're watching a Netflix movie or something like that. There is a really loud part that comes on and you reach for the remote to turn it down. Well, the compressor is going to kind of do that for you. And similarly, if there's a quiet part that you would normally reach to turn it up then this is going to also potentially do some of that as well in some ways. So we'll have a look at that. So what is dynamic compression doing then in terms of the graph that we've just looked at? If this is your waveform, if you wanted to reduce those spikes there, we've got a couple of big spikes where it's loud so we now know that where the chart is bigger that is a louder point in it. If we wanted to reduce that, we could just say, right, well, let's just turn everything down. That would be basically what the volume does or the fader is you're just basically squashing everything down. And that is affecting not just those sort of louder parts but it's also affecting those quieter parts at the beginning, the middle and the end. So that's not what we want to do with the compressor. What the compressor does is says, okay, I'm going to listen out for anything that is over and above a certain level. And we're going to take only those parts and we want to reduce those. Well, that level that we set there is called the threshold. So that is setting the point at which you say, this is getting too loud and I want to just reduce it to a point. So when we look at the Rocaster, that is, if I just come back into here, that is the first term that we've got there, threshold. And I'll go into how to go through and actually set this up after we've sort of explained all these terms. But that is the threshold. So coming back to our little diagram again, now what we've got is we're saying, right, well, we've got that maximum there. What we want to do is anything that's above that threshold, we actually want to squash that down and make it quieter. So bearing in mind that anything where we're reducing it on this graph here is actually reducing the volume. And reducing the amplitude, reducing the volume. And what you can see then is we've basically got the point where it started above that threshold and we've got the point where it ended after we've applied the compression. And those two things can be expressed as a ratio. And in this case, you can see that the ratio is around about two to one because I've purposely made it like that. And that is basically saying that the amount above the threshold that it was before is now basically twice as much as the amount we've compressed it down to. And you always express the ratio in terms of the one being the sort of end point and the two being what it started at. I've got another little chart that'll illustrate this a little bit better. But that is the ratio and that is the second thing that we've got on here. So you can see the threshold and then the ratio. So in order to actually understand what this is doing in a sort of real sense and understand how this is affecting from the input coming in and then what's the output that you've got going out. Because obviously here you can see although I've taken that starting line as being just the extreme coming down to that lower level, actually there was lots of different amplitudes in between that wasn't there. There wasn't just one single value. So it's useful to look at this then in terms of the input versus the output. And so that we plot on a chart that looks something like this where we've got the bottom, the X axis we've got the input level. And then on the Y axis we have the output level. And you can see that this has the DBFS scale on it. So it goes from minus 60 being no sound that we're recording on the very, the origin there of the chart. And then all the way up to zero which is the maximum that we can record on the device or register on the device on the far end, the extreme end of the scale. So if there was no compression being applied then what we would have is we would have basically a completely straight line like this because what's coming in is what is going out. There is if you've got 30 coming in then 30 would go out, 10 coming in, 10 going out and so on. So that is basically how this would look with zero compression. What we've done though is we've set a threshold and in that previous chart the threshold was at 30 just because it was nice and neat down the middle. So what we've done is we've set this threshold on the input and we've said that, okay anything that goes above that threshold on the input we want to apply compression to it. And so that would look something like this. If we applied that two to one ratio we would say anything that is above the threshold we now want to basically squish it down. And so if we take a few different points on here like point A you can see on the input level on that bottom horizontal axis you can see we're less than the threshold. And so therefore it's unaffected and the output level is just exactly the same. We've got minus 35 dB coming in we've got minus 35 dB going out. So then anything that's above that threshold we're applying that compression. So if we take a point at point B you can see we've got minus 20 coming in but we've got minus 25 going out and bear in mind that this is where the weird scale goes on minus 25 is less than minus 20. So therefore it's a lower volume and you can actually see there that the ratio is in two to one. So whilst we've got minus 20 is 10 more than minus 30 we've just done half of that. So we've actually just got five more than minus 30 on the output. Hope that's making sense. So that's where that ratio works same with anything above that as well the compression is applying that ratio to everything that is over and above the threshold value. So minus 10 coming in with a two to one ratio at a 30 threshold would be minus 20 coming out. Don't worry about all these numbers you don't really need to know the actual numbers I'm just using this to illustrate a little point at the moment but when you actually use it on the Rocaster you won't need to be so worried about the charts and stuff in such detail but what I did want to point out though is where this is leading in terms of the Rocaster and there's one final thing that I just wanna point out on this chart just from technical point of view this point here where it actually starts applying the compression is known as the knee and there are either a hard knee or a soft knee hard knee being like this where it just reaches the threshold and then it just starts the compression immediately and a soft knee is where it sort of eases it in with a slight curve to it and actually that's what we've got on the Rocaster Pro 2 so that it's not just a sort of an abrupt change at that point but what I want to draw your attention to now is now that we've seen this chart and I hope that this is you can understand where this is and will come from feel free to reach out and drop a comment in the chat if not or drop a comment in the video if you're watching on the replay but this chart now is exactly what we've got on the Rocaster so when you see this chart here what we've got is we've got the line showing the input here and we've got the output on that side just forget the meters for a second we've got this line with exactly that layout that we've just seen this is the input on the bottom the y-axis here would be the output and so you can see that we've got this slight curve here that is that soft knee that I was talking about and you can also see that if I change the ratio here then that's going to make that flatter that's increasing that ratio and if I move the threshold back and forth it's moving the point at which that line is on that vertical line that we set with the threshold so this is exactly what is represented by this chart here and it doesn't really tell you on there what it is and so you could be forgiven for being completely clueless looking at this thinking what is that even representing so hopefully that has sort of explained that a little bit now you can apply different ratios and one thing to know about the ratio is bearing in mind this is how much we are sort of squashing the sound by if I was to go to a higher ratio like three to one that would have a more sort of flatter line to it and so that's meaning basically you're applying more compression you're increasing the effect so a more shallow line that's closer to that straight line is going to be less compression and anything where it's getting sort of flatter is going to be an increase in compression now technically you can go all the way to infinity i.e. it's completely flat that is still technically compression but in actual fact that is known as a limiter in audio processing and the the ROCASTER doesn't have a limiter and it can't actually get to that point in any case the ROCASTER's compressor goes from 1.5 all the way to 4.5 and that's the sort of the sort of range that you've got to work with but I just did want to sort of mention that thing about when you're looking at this and you're looking at the chart then just know that as you increase the ratio you'll see that this line flattens off if I go all the way to 4.5 the line is much flatter if I go back all the way to 1.5 the line is not so flat there it's more like this straight line so that's just to understand that then the flatter the line the more compression you are adding the threshold is to do with where it's going to kick in and I'll come to that in a little while when we start looking at how to actually set this up then for your particular voice and the effect that you want to get one thing though that you may find is if you've added compression and you've flattened this thing out what let me just have a look where's it go what you may find is that you want to actually boost everything up because you may have just sort of knocked down all of the higher volumes and now everything may be just generally too quiet well you can boost everything up and this is what's known as gain you will find gain in a number of different places in the rocaster so for example when you first set up your microphone it's going to ask you to set the gain that is the sort of gain that's going to happen before any other processes have happened but in this sense we're looking at just what you're going to boost absolutely everything up by after you've applied the compression and once again just relating this back to the rocaster you've then got this gain down here so if I turn this one up you'll notice how this whole chart here is actually increasing and you'll hear it actually just increasing the sound of my voice as well but if I turn it all the way down then you may find that's a little bit low after you've added the compression so you may want to boost it up and this is where I'll saying that what the compressor is doing is as well as reducing those higher volumes it is also sort of boosting up the lower ones so with this you could have you know a compression that is going to increase the volume if you're talking quietly but also reduce it at those higher levels and make everything more sort of equal throughout so that is the that is the gain so if I come back to the little slide deck so that is the gain what we've also got then is we've got attack and release on the rocaster so what exactly are those well if we take a look at our compression and what's actually happening we've got our threshold on our little chart and we're saying that we're going to apply this compression to it with the compression ratio of two to one and we also then want to see what's actually happening with the compressor so down at the bottom I've now also added a little chart to show what's happening with the compressor and it can either be on or it can be off off basically or or just sort of activating or deactivating so what we're going to do is take a sort of imaginary play head along through this waveform and at the moment it's off you can see that we've got that red line at the very bottom going from off all the way to that white line at point A because we are below the threshold so the compressor has not been activated because we are less than the threshold now what's happened though is at point A it's the first time where that little wave has bounced through the threshold or passed through the threshold so now we want to switch that compressor on but if you go back to the analogy of you watching a movie on netflix and you're sitting there with your hand on the remote we want to think about like how quickly are we going to actually activate that and are we going to jump to do it immediately so what we have then is we have this attack time that is the time it's going to take to actually engage that that compressor and then we are now in this period where we are above the threshold so from B to C we've effectively got the compressor is on now you'll notice that there are a few little periods in that area where we have dropped below the threshold I'll come to that in a moment but in general we are staying above that threshold level up until point C so the compressor is on from B to C but now we've dropped below the threshold we're going to disengage the compressor from C to D and there is a time that it takes to actually do that to switch it off and that is known as the release time and then after D we are within that threshold the volume is low enough that we are going to not have the compressor on and so what we've got then is that effectively we've got the compressor is on between in this particular area now I'm using artistic license throughout this to illustrate some points but I also did that earlier when I mentioned that we're only affecting the area above the threshold in actual fact what it's doing is it is reducing the volume across the whole of that space so even those points where we were slightly below the threshold it's effectively squishing the whole lot and so for this reason you want to be conscious of the attack time and the release time because there's a few things that can happen and a few adverse effects you can get so part of the reason that I'm talking about all of this is so that you can understand what's going on when you're using these processors sometimes like with noise gates for example this is one that people can get wrong where they have it coming in too quickly or releasing too quickly and they get weird sort of artifacts or weird sound effects I should say coming through well that's the same with the compressor here you want the attack to be quick because you don't want to be sort of too slow off the mark to turn the volume down if we come back to that analogy of sitting there with a remote for the movie that your ears get blown out but at the same time we also don't want it to be too quick because then you might find that you're constantly trying to activate it and then it's unnecessary and you're deactivating it again so having this attack time is something to be aware of and the effect it's going to have and I'll show you that as we look back at the ROCaster in a minute the release time then is how long it's going to take to actually release this and this is another one where people can go to one extreme or the other and it have a negative effect so if you have the release time too quick then basically what's going to happen is at these little points between point B and C where it dropped below the threshold what you'll find is that if you had the release time too quick then you'd find that it would start to disengage the compressor and then it would kick back in again and it disengage and it kick back in and you can get this almost like pumping sound as the volume is sort of not really knowing what to do because the release is too quick but conversely if you have the release time too long and you've got an area where you're maybe you're talking really loudly or shouting into the microphone or something like that and you have a really long release time then when you go into a you know lower your voice it can actually take a while for the signal to be returned to its normal level and so what you might find is it suddenly goes really quiet and then slowly fades back up to normal level that it should be for that level of audio if that makes sense it's probably easiest if I actually show you this on the roadcaster so I'll come back here so we've covered the threshold, the ratio, the gain and these two that I'm talking about here are the attack and the release now these aren't represented on the chart as such this is just these two numbers I should also say that we're talking about fractions of a second and in fact the attack which is generally a lot lower than the release that is measured in point at the moment I've got it as 0.95 of a millisecond so 0.95 of a thousandth of a second so we're literally talking about infinitesimally small fractions of a second but nevertheless if you have that too low then the compressor is going to be trying to kick in and if your voice is sort of fluctuating around about the threshold then it's constantly going to be switching on and off this one is probably you're not going to hear too much of a difference with this one right now with what I've got going on but if I demonstrate the release time though and I was to make that really long and I was to start speaking really loudly and then suddenly goes quiet what you would have noticed is over a over the period of that release that quiet part would have been extra quiet because it was being compressed and then it was taking a while to come back up so I'd say for the attack and the release the thing that you want to do is just be a little bit careful with those and keep them if in doubt keep them more towards the center than having them too far on one extreme or the other the compression threshold and the ratio though are more to do with you know how that you want it to sound I'll also just point out then that on this chart we've got on the left hand side this meter that's bouncing up and down that's actually the input level that's coming in and the one that's on the right hand side is showing you what's actually going out and as you can see at the top we've also whoopsie daisy we've also got a little red line that's sort of coming down from the top that is the amount of compression that is being applied and so in effect if you were to take the input plus sorry to take the output plus the compression that would equal the input so this is showing you visually how much compression is going on and if I was to turn this all the way down here and turn the ratio you can see that now I'm applying a load of compression so we've got a much bigger line showing there so the way to set this up then is to basically let's just take the ratio down a little bit you want to find out first of all it is going to depend on the sound that you want to get I'm going to take the gain off completely but at the moment you can see that there's this little sort of dot that is moving up and down on this on this chart here that is showing you where your voice is on the chart or where the the input in this case my voice is coming in on that chart so you can see that because I'm over to the left hand side of that knee because I've turned it all the way over to here there is no compression going on but if I slowly move the threshold down a bit you'll start to see where the threshold the compression is kicking in because you'll see first of all that this little dot representing the current input volume is going to move over onto that sort of sloping side of it but also you'll see the compression coming down from the top there as well and so it's just a case of moving this over to the point that you want it to kick in and you'll actually see on here how much is being applied and where it is starting to have that effect but once it comes to the actual setting of the point this is going to be as a dependent on your voice and personal preference I've got mine at around about 24-25 but then the ratio is how much it is being compressed by when people talk about radio sound or broadcast sound the couple of things that are associated with that is first of all it tends to be heavily compressed because they want to have this sort of equal less of a range I should say in the audio so that's why on radio they would tend to have this compressed so that people can speak loudly and quietly and it's going to be more or less a narrow range of amplitudes volumes for the listener the other thing that you would find in that sort of radio sound if you like would be a couple of the other built-in things that we've got on the roadcaster so that would be the big bottom and the Aural Exciter the big bottom being the funniest name of them all of course but that adds some sort of extra depth and richness to the lower end and then typically also the equalize it would be used to maybe boost up those lower tones and perhaps the higher tones as well to bring out some of the definition in the voice as well so when people think about this broadcast quality sound or radio sound typically they will have a lot of compression it can sound a little bit too much so something in the range of two to three or two to two and a half something like that is what I would generally have that set at as I mentioned before though once you've taken down that top end you might need to sort of increase the gain a little bit just so that you're boosting everything back up to a reasonable level and also then that helps to sort of boost those lower lower levels the lower volumes in that mix so that is what's going on with the compressor and if I just come back to this for a second so we've basically got then the dynamic compression there that's the attack and the release and we've got the threshold and the ratio and that gain was just how much we're going to boost it up by so those are the five terms we need to know threshold this is the level that it's going to kick on at we've got the ratio which is how much compression we're going to actually apply to it the greater number there being more obviously the gain is how much we're going to boost the whole signal up by and then we've got the attack which is how quickly it's going to come on and the release which is how quickly it's going to disengage once we've dropped back below that threshold so this is just part of what's going on in what we call the signal chain so you may hear people talking about a signal chain and that is essentially the order that these things are happening and there is actually a specific order that we need to consider these things and so this is one mistake that people might make with the rocaster is actually sort of hopping around and making changes to one thing not realizing that when they go back to something else and make a change there that they're actually having an effect on the other thing so there is a specific order that we need to think about these processes as we go through so the first thing then we're going to have is we've obviously got our microphone input and from here we're taking it down a cable into the rocaster and the very first thing that's happening is we are setting our microphone gain so not our gain in the compressor but our microphone gain and this is basically how much we are sort of boosting our signal by so you'll find that as part of the setup process in the rocaster in fact if I just come back to that let me come to my top down shot so if you've just selected one of your microphones you can see this level here and we can either boost this up or we can drop it down so this is the initial amount that we're adding to the process coming in or to the signal coming in so that is the first step is the microphone gain the next steps then are the low pass filter that's used to block out sort of background noise so you may want it so that it's knocking out some of the low tones that you don't have naturally occurring in your voice but you want it to knock out for example the hum of an aircon or the rumble of traffic noise outside we've then got the de-esser that is intended to remove these sort of the sibilance the s sound in your voice and there's a way that we do that that is basically this one and in fact the low pass filter is targeting specific frequencies so if you think about that chart where I had the sort of whole spectrum analyzer chart up there which showed all the range of frequencies with these two they are targeting specific areas because the sibilance the s sound that you get happens at a specific frequency and we're just going to try and reduce that down a little bit the next one then would be the noise gate and this is basically when when you stop talking you want the microphone to stop picking anything up so I've got an aircon going on in here which you might be able to just hear underneath my voice but when I stop talking the noise gate shuts and basically stops any of that coming through and this is another one that can cause issues for people when it's basically kicking in at the wrong time or the way they have it set up it's not quite right but this the noise gate the ds and the low pass filter are all subtractive processes they're all taking something away so the low pass filter is sort of reducing these low end tones the ds are reducing those ones at the specific frequency for the s sound in your voice and then the noise gate is actually just you know opening and closing so we want to do those ones first those should be the first things that we actually do because you don't want to go and make loads of changes to your equalizer getting all the levels right across all of the tones and then after the fact you go and just remove a whole bunch of those tones so it is important the order that we do these things in and that's why these ones come because they are subtractive processes these ones come at the beginning of the signal chain the next one then would be the compressor now that is subtractive because as we've just seen it is reducing those higher level volumes but it is also increasing the lower ones so it's actually starting to be subtractive and also additive as well the next one would be the equalizer that one as I've mentioned previously would be basically operating on all of the different ranges of the spectrum and either increasing some of the low tones maybe or decreasing the mid tones or whatever it happens to be so again it's both subtractive and additive the final ones though are all additive so the aural exciter and the big bottom are two things that are used to basically just enhance the quality of your audio either at the low end with the big bottom or the aural exciter at the high end and these are just a little bit of secret source that add to the overall sound of your voice and as I say these are all sort of additive processes they're adding something onto it so this is why the signal chain is important it does actually lay these all out in pretty much this order in any case so if I come to the ROCASTER you can see how here we've got these in this order where we've got the the low pass filter the de-esser the noise gate the compressor the equalizer and so on and in fact if you go into any one of these then you can just press the arrow to sort of go through them and you'll find that they are in that order that I've just described so when it comes to setting this up actually the best thing to do would be to go and switch off all of them so just switch them all off here but then go through one by one starting from the first one and then just go and add those in and make the adjustments that you need to make to those as you go through so then after you've gone through all of these different processes there is one final one there on the at the line level I suppose which is the panning that is just deciding whether you want it to go more to the left or the right hand side in the stereo mix and then after the built-in processes the very last step in the chain for that particular channel would be the fader because obviously we can then reduce the volume reduce the amplitude or we can increase it using the fader now that is all just the signal chain for one individual specific channel so in this case I've been talking about the mic one and that is our signal chain but of course we do have multiple different inputs and you can actually apply all of these things for mic one two three and four but you can also apply these same effects to the USB main USB chat USB secondary and also the bluetooth and that's good to know because that means that if you are bringing someone in on a call over bluetooth for example or maybe they're coming in on a zoom call on one of your other channels the USB channels you can actually clean up the audio and improve the audio of people that are coming in through that means as well and you have all of the same tools there the final thing then that you've got is the smart pads which can play sound right at the bottom you can't apply any other sort of effects as such to the smart pads themselves although the smart pads can apply effects to any of those other channels above and I haven't talked about that but the pitch shift is basically just going to be adjusting the frequency so it's going to be adjusting the pitch you could use the robot which is going to be doing a whole combination of things I haven't talked about those in there but those would obviously then be added into these signal chains but essentially once we've got all of these channels we're then taking all of those into what's known as the master compeler and the master compeler is essentially just a compressor but for the entire mix now one mistake that people might make with this is that they're there on their own setting everything up and they go into play with the master compeler and just to show you where that is if you click on your settings we just come back out here click on the settings click on outputs or tap on outputs there's no clicking and then click on tap on processing here you've got two things one is the output delay that's just to introduce a delay of a set number of milliseconds or seconds but here is the master compeler you'll notice that it looks very similar to the compressor that we've just looked at because the master compeler is a compressor the only thing that it doesn't have is it doesn't have the ratio so it has just got a fixed ratio that it's applying but it's still got the threshold attack the release and the gain so one mistake people might make is that they've got just their own audio coming in they're setting this up they go to play around with the master compeler but they're actually only still applying it to their single input going in what you need to do in order to use this is actually have everything running into the mix that you would ordinarily have so ideally you know if you're going to be playing music or something like that or you've got other people on you really want to be playing with this one and setting this one whilst you've got all of those different things because as I say this is applying to absolutely everything in the mix and so you want it to have that effect on all of those things not just your voice otherwise you are just simply just adding another layer of compression to your voice so if that makes sense it is applying to absolutely everything in here so that is basically what I wanted to cover in terms of the audio processing and how that relates to compression what I will just say then is just to sort of recap the dynamic processes are just a way to describe things that are having an effect either on amplitude which is the volume or the frequency which is the pitch or it is at certain frequencies it's going to adjust the amplitude like boosting the bass or the treble or whatever it happens to be I've covered all of this in my Rokasta Pro 2 Masterclass and I've gone into a lot more depth on all of the different areas of it so you may have noticed my little additional graphics that I've got that aren't my usual graphics today but the Rokasta Pro 2 Masterclass covers absolutely everything about the Rokasta from beginner to advanced level and all of this sort of stuff that we've just talked about here because each of the individual processes has its own unique little terms for it and so I wanted to make sure that those were all covered I mentioned in the intro as well that a lot of people get stuck with some of the audio routing as well so I've covered all of that in the Masterclass as well and I'll just bring this up onto screen here so you can go to Rokasta Pro 2 Masterclass I've literally just launched it today so I'm doing a 25% discount for launch offer that expires at the end of this month so you can use the coupon code RCP launch to get 25% off and you can find the Rokasta Pro 2 Masterclass at rokastamasterclass.com and so what it is is as with all my other courses you do get lifetime access because we know that there is so much power under the hood of the Rokasta and they're sure to be releasing a lot more updates I believe there's one coming imminently in fact so you can get all of those updates as well and if I just come down to the what it looks like on the inside we've got over a hundred lessons that cover everything from the basics all the way through to the advanced stuff like I've been talking about today and if we come down here we've got sections on the getting started section which obviously is just everything you know device orientation how to figure it out you know what all the different ports do what all the different connectors are for the setup process how to update the firmware using the setup wizard so all of the basics but then I've got a whole section here on setting up the mixer connecting devices and guests audio routing using the smart pads and all of the different functions we've got but then we also go into foundations of dynamic audio processing as well and that's kind of the sort of thing that I've covered today as well this foundations of understanding what dynamic audio processing is and then I've got advanced audio processing which is really how to drill down and understand all of the different processes that are built in so today we have looked at you know this introduction to audio processing and understanding threshold and compression ratio and things like that but there are actually three more pages of videos on just advanced processing so we are understanding the equalizer noise gates and so on and then how to go through and set up these things as well so using the dsa using the noise gate and the compressor and using the output delay all of these kind of things are all fully explained and so you do get as I say lifetime access to this and it's 25% off from rocaster masterclass.com it's all there and available right now so that's what I wanted to cover off today if anyone's got any questions about any of that I appreciate I went very geeky very quickly but if there are any questions about that then do feel free to ask or if you've got any questions about anything else rocaster related happy to clear those off right now as well and if anyone's watching on the replay and has got any questions about anything that's come up do feel free to ask about that too and of course you can also join the discord link in the description and I've got a whole rocaster section in there as well but I also do have an area there for anyone who's on the rocaster pro 2 masterclass so there will be a dedicated section and whilst I've covered off a number of different different use cases and you know audio routing and things like that in there I have also left the door open for anyone who's got any special requests in terms of ideas that they've got of things that they've got I mean I was just talking with Peter in the backstage earlier about some specific use case that he's got with the rocaster so you know that's something that I can certainly add in more videos about as well to answer that because I do find that there are every time I speak to somebody with my sort of consultation calls they've all got their own unique use cases for this and how they are using it in there in their business or with their you know whatever it is whether it's doing webinars or zoom calls or whatever it happens to be so always happy to add in new things in that respect in terms of you know adding in new content and so on so if you've got any questions do feel free to let them in or if not then what I'll do is I shall wrap this up and I'll leave it to any questions that you may have in the comments after the fact so I'll just give you a moment I think I've maybe just blown everyone's or bored everyone's tears I should say with the charts and things like that but I'm a total geek so I make no apologies for that so I will just say one final time though that you can get the ROCASTER Masterclass for 25% off from ROCASTER Masterclass.com and that is available till the end of October now for those that are watching on the replay I'm going to leave a link to some videos over on the top I'm going to leave a link to my playlist for all things ROCASTER because I mentioned about that other area which is audio routing and this is something that I've covered at length on the on the channel before with various different videos so for those watching on the replay I'll leave a link to the videos as I say the playlist for all of my ROCASTER stuff over there and thanks for thanks for hanging out and I'll catch you all next time