 Even if you're completely new to vocal compression, I reckon you should be trying out a tool, which is very, very useful. It's commonly used by professionals and is very, very easy to use. I'm talking about an LA2A style compressor. Now I'm using a plug-in version here from Universal Audio, who also happened to make the original hardware version. But there's also plug-in versions available from Waves, IK Multimedia. And here in this free door, Katewalk by BandLab, we have a free plug-in version down here in the Pro channel. The reason I describe this as super easy to use is because there's only really one knob that we use to control the compression. And that's this one, the peak reduction knob. As we turn it up, there will be more compression. As we turn it down, there'll be less compression. It's as simple as that, I'm afraid. Now this knob is similar to something called a threshold control that we will see on other compressors. When we set the threshold for a compressor, we are setting a level in decibels and we're saying, hey, once the signal goes over that level, start to compress it, meaning start to turn it down. We call that gain reduction, okay. Now before the signal reaches that threshold, that level, there actually is no compression happening, okay. So this peak reduction knob is similar to that, if not the same. Now before we go ahead and apply this to some vocals and listen to the difference, I just want to clear up some confusion about this compressor, which I see commonly even with experience mixes, okay. And that has to do with the other main knob on this interface, and that is labeled the gain knob. This should probably more correctly be labeled the output gain knob because that's what it does, okay. This is simply controlling the level or the volume after the compressor and at the end of the chain in terms of this plug-in. It's very similar to just using the fader, okay, on the vocal channel. It's just making things louder or quieter, but it does not affect the compression. A lot of people confuse this for an input gain knob because some other compressors will have one, particularly on the left-hand side of the interface, and that will affect the amount of compression, but in this case, not. So if you've been using this and thinking it's an input gain knob and thinking you're hearing some change in the compression, I'm afraid your eyes have been fooling your ears. So let's go ahead and listen to this vocal. I'm gradually going to push up this peak reduction knob, and you're also going to see this needle start to move, okay. This will indicate that there is some gain reduction or compression happening, okay. So when you see that happening, have a listen carefully and see if you can hear the difference in the vocal. You may need to rewind and listen two or three times, okay. Let's go ahead and listen. When you're hurting, I'm hurting too. When you're laughing, when you're feeling sad, I'm feeling blue. Now if you have listened to this two or three times and you're thinking, Mike, I can't really hear any difference, I'm afraid. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I have to tell you. It is very subtle. Some of you may have heard it, but many of you will barely detect a difference there. That's almost the point of using this compressor like this in my opinion, because it means that the listener is not really aware of any compression. The vocal still sounds natural, but nonetheless, there is some gain reduction happening. Now what has actually happened is when we look at the top or the loudest part of our vocal performance and the quieter part, we've actually reduced the louder part down a bit, okay. So what that means is we've changed something called the dynamic range. The dynamic range is the difference between the quietest part and the loudest part. We've reduced that louder part. That means that if we want to, we can now push the whole thing up so the loudest part is now roughly where it was before, but the quieter parts are now louder compared to the way they were before. That will give the impression of the vocal being louder and a bit more present as well. And that is where this gain knob comes in, that output gain. That's the point where we would use that. Sometimes this is called makeup gain, okay. So we're making up for the fact we've actually reduced the signal somewhat with the compressor. So that's why I think that this particular style of compressor is really useful, especially for beginners. And this is my first tip of five vocal compression tips you should know. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. The other four tips and not so much tips as strategies for compression that you can use in all of your productions, which I think will greatly improve the presence of your vocals especially. Before we dive in, let's quickly thank the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below, you'll get 7% off an already incredible price to distribute your music. Now let's start off with a slightly unexpected tip. So my second vocal compression tip is don't use compression. Well, not always anyway. Although it's a byproduct of compressor plug-ins and hardware, we may color or add character to the sound. The primary purpose of a compressor is to control the volume as we did earlier. Now it's very, very useful to use a compressor where those volume changes are going to be very frequent and will happen many, many times throughout a performance and we're able to automate that process. However, when there's much broader changes in volume, a compressor is not always the most useful tool. Let's take a look at this vocal performance and at the beginning in the verse area here, you can see that we're generally peaking at the same kind of level. OK, but further on when we look at this bridge section here, we're peaking at a much higher level. OK, it's a much louder section of the performance and it's really useful sometimes to be able to even all of that out. OK, now here in Katewalk by BandLab, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it, but the process and the features available are going to be very similar, if not the same in other doors as well. So I'm going to start off by selecting my split tool up here and just drag out the area that I want to affect like so. So that's now a separate clip. Go back to my regular tool, hold control on the keyboard and drag down. And you can see that I'm changing the overall level of that section and I could just even it out to make it much more comparable to other parts of the song. OK, I'll go ahead and I'll do the same thing. For example, to this section here, I'll just change the volume of all of that there. And you can see it's beginning to be a lot more even. Now, obviously, if I was doing this for real, I may go in and do it in a little bit more detail, but that's the general sort of process. Now, definitely go ahead and use a compressor after that, but it's not the most useful tool for broad strokes like this. I think it's important with all compression, not just vocal compression to understand the concepts of attack and release. Now, with the LA2A compressor that we used at the beginning, there is no attack and release control. We don't have control over it. So in this way, it's not always the most useful compressor. OK, when we want to get more fine control over what's happening. So I'll close that and show you this compressor. The reason I'm using this compressor and it's the compressor in Fat Channel XT from PreSonus is because it's completely free to download and you can use it in any door. OK, I'll put a link for that in the description down below. And we've got some nice easy controls on here. It's visually quite easy to understand. Now, first of all, let's go through some other controls apart from attack and release. We have our threshold control, which as we discussed earlier, sets the level at which compression will kick in and we have a ratio control, which essentially is how much we how much gain reduction we're going to do once we go over that threshold. Then we have the attack and release controls here. Before we get into using them, I think it's really important to understand a couple of concepts about the sounds that we're working with. You can see just above it here. I've got a part of the vocal performance we were working with earlier. I'll just play that. And I'm just going to focus for a moment on this word here. This is the word given, OK, because visually it's quite interesting. We can see that this part of the word is has quite a sudden sort of increase in volume here, and it quickly sort of dies off again here. And the rest of the word is mostly at the same sort of level. So that initial part of the sound is what we refer to as the transient. OK, now with some sounds and some words in a vocal performance, it'll be more sudden like that. With other words, it'll be more gradual, a sort of a softer transient, if you like. And we often want to be controlling transients. They tend to be the loudest part and they tend to come and go sort of quite quickly. OK, so this is where the attack parameter comes in attack is essentially saying, hey, once we go over the threshold, how quickly should we then apply compression? OK, very quick, and we're going to get most of that transient and be able to reduce its volume very slow. And, you know, the transient may have already happened by the time the compressor actually kicks in. OK, so that's why this control is very, very important. Let me start off by having it very, very slow to begin with. I'm just going to play that one word, given, yeah. Have a look over on the right hand side at the metering here. This is good shows us how much game reduction we get in this bar here. I'll play again and you'll see there's hardly anything happening. You just see one little blue line there. OK, and that's because this attack is so slow that, you know, this transients come and go on by the time compression happens. OK, so let's go to the other extreme and make it super, super quick. A fast attack. OK, that means a compressor is going to respond really quickly to that transient and have a look at the metering this time. OK, there's quite a big amount of compression happening there. OK, so you can see the difference there and you can see how important it is to get that correct. OK. Now, if it's too quick, if you make it too quick, you may not get the result you want because sometimes you do want the initial impact of a sound, OK, or a word, OK. So don't go through. Oh, yeah, I'll just always make it super fast and it's always going to work. That's not quite the right approach. You want to play with it until it seems right and you're hearing the right thing. Now, another control, which is super important and kind of works in conjunction, you could say is released because once that compression kicks in, yeah, it's only going to switch off once the signal falls below the threshold. However, there's a sort of a delay in that and that is called the release time. If we put the release up really, really sort of long in this case, the problem we will have and I'll just play it because we're definitely grabbing that transient is this. Given kind of the whole word, the whole word given is now become quieter. That's because even though after the initial transient, the level falls down below the threshold, the release is set to such a long time that the compression is staying down as this is staying on during the whole word and it's actually lowering the volume of the whole word. So if we only want to control that initial transient, then we need to get that that release down to a short enough time as well. Perhaps down here, let's have a listen. And, you know, that's probably roughly where I want it. You may want to experiment. So I'm not going to tell you that there is a correct or a good setting for attack and release for a vocal. It sort of depends what you want to achieve with the compressor. Yeah. However, I do tend to find that these kind of settings are quite useful to me to control the initial transience of a vocal. So using these tips to improve your vocal can really add the finishing touches before release. And when you do release your music, you'll want to tell people how to get to it really easily. Now, Distro Kids has a feature called Hyperfollow, which makes it super easy to give links to people for your tracks. This is the Hyperfollow page for one of my EPs. Wonderland. When people visit this web page, they can choose for themselves which one of these great platforms they want to listen to my music on. But I didn't have to create this page. It was generated automatically for me when I uploaded my EP to Distro Kids. If we visit my Distro Kids page here and look at this EP and scroll down, you can see the section just at the bottom here where they supply the link for me to share. Now, I can share that on places like Facebook, where they will automatically be generated my album artwork. And people can just click on this and go straight to that hyperlink page. Now, this is all included with the base price of Distro Kids, which is just $19.99 per year. If you follow the link in the description, you'll get 7% off of that already great price. So at the beginning, when we use the LA2A compressor, we use it as an insert on the vocal channel itself. And we can see that here. I'm going to combine that now with another style of compression called parallel compression. Sometimes this is known as New York compression as well. And for that, we're actually going to use a bus. So you can see with the channel here, I'm doing now a send to a bus, which is called fvox comp. And that bus is over here. You can see it in blue and that has a different compressor inserted there. Let's have a look at that. This is an 1176 style compressor. Again, this one's from Universal Audio, who also make the original hardware. However, there's lots of versions available from different plugging companies for this. And we're using this because we do want more control over the attack and release and ratio, in fact, on this occasion. So it's going through to that bus where we have this compressor. I'm going to put it in solo and we're going to hear it in a moment. But before let's have a look at the settings I have set up here. First of all, the ratio. Remember, this is how much we're going to compress the signal once we go above the threshold. I've put it at 20 to one. That's the highest setting, meaning it's really going to turn the volume of things. It detects down much lower than, you know, say a four to one ratio. OK, so that's the first thing we're going to go for in ratio. The next thing we're going to do is have a really fast attack time. And that's one of the reasons why this particular compressor 1176 is useful because it has really fast attack times. So I'm actually going to put it up nearly full. Now, do note with the attack control on this compressor fast means we have the knob all the way up to full. OK, and slow means it's all the way down. That's in reverse to many other compressor plugins or even hardware that you will see. So it's very fast. The attack times on this compressor go from 20 to 100 microseconds. So it's kind of fast, whatever you do. So I'm choosing that very fast time. So it really immediately grabs any transients. OK, the next setting, which is the release time. I also have set up very fast. And again, fast on with this knob means all the way up full. OK, that's the fastest time. This goes from 50 to 100 milliseconds in terms of timing for release. OK, I'm not going to put it all the way up to the top. I just back off a little bit from the fastest setting. So what's going to be happening here is it's grabbing transients very, very quickly. It's turning the things down by a lot. And then it's releasing pretty quickly as well. So it's only grabbing the transient and everything else is kind of left alone. That means that when we use our makeup gain and turn everything back up again, the quieter parts of the performance will be much louder. OK, and the louder parts will be much quieter, kind of evening the whole thing out quite a lot into a kind of a sausage. If you like. Now, if I play this by itself in solo, it sounds pretty awful. Have a listen. Because I've given all you want, you've taken all you can. I take it on the chin. In fact, those quiet parts are so much louder that we can even hear all the breaths and things. OK, you may not want it quite that extreme. I don't mind it. But yeah, by itself, it doesn't sound good. OK, but the point of parallel compression is the parallel part. It's going to be running in parallel with the original signal. OK, so let's unsolo it so that we can hear both parts. And what I would then do is turn the fader for this parallel compression all the way down to zero. And then I'll just introduce it. So I'm going to be hearing the original vocal and then I'll introduce this. Because I've given all you want, you've taken all you can. I take it on the chin. I'll be your fool. And you will have noticed there that I kind of pushed the fader up and then I almost went too far with it. OK, I got it to the point where I thought, well, it's way too obvious what's happening, OK, and I don't want to hear that. And then I backed off from there. That's just the way that I like to do it. And I may fiddle with it for a bit longer than that before I settle on a level which I like. I also may sometimes automate that fader throughout the course of a song. That's parallel compression, pretty easy to do if you just follow those steps. And then finally, so by combining everything that we've learned so far, we can actually use another type of compression, which is super useful for vocals and that serial compression. This is where we use two compressors, one after the other, each of them for a slightly different task. Let's say we've been using an LA to compressor as we did earlier right at the beginning, and we're getting a nice natural compression with say three, four, five decibels of gain reduction. OK, that's fine for most of the track. But then occasionally there's a super sharp sudden transient in the vocal, which is much louder. And we end up with say 10 or 12 decibels of compression. Yeah, what's going to happen then because of the relatively slow release time of an LA to is we're going to sort of hear it. Suddenly you go much quieter and then gradually the vocal will come up and you can end up with a very unnatural, almost like pumping effect to the vocal. This is where serial compression can come in. I've got that LA to applied here. But just before it, you can see here in the chain, I have an 1176 again. This is going to play the role of reducing those much louder peaks that we will be hearing in the performance. We've got very similar settings to what we had with parallel compression, but slightly different. First of all, we don't have the 20 to one ratio. You can use something much more like this 12 to one ratio that I've got set up here. Still using a fast attack to make sure we grab those transients. We're also using a pretty fast release time so we don't grab anything more than just those outstanding kind of peaks, if you like. Now, what I've done is I've set this up so that this is reducing those transients by around about three or four decibels or so. So not quite the same as we had earlier. We were doing a massive gain reduction with the parallel compression. Now, remember, with an 1176, there isn't a threshold control. Instead, we use the input gain, OK, which is over here on the left. And then we have to counteract that by using the output gain. Yeah, so just remember that there's no threshold control. You'll see that when I play this vocal that we are getting something like three or four decibels of gain reduction. And you'll notice that a lot of the time there is no gain reduction. There's no compression. It's only happening with those transients. And it's sort of fairly quickly on and then off again. Have another look or have a listen. But if you can't hear what's going on, have a look at the needle there. It's almost got a kind of a sporadic look to it. So it's controlling those transients before we go into our 1176 so that things never get too far out of control. And the the sorry, I should say the LA2A before we go into the LA2A and the LA2A is just doing that more gentle, natural compression. Now, many of you will want to be doing some really natural sounding pitch correction on your vocals. And I reckon by far the best tool for that is Melodyne. But when you first get Melodyne, maybe a little bit tricky to figure out. That's why I made this video right here to fast track you to using what I reckon is one of the best tools out there.