 I was going to call this video Why Use a Compressor but instead I went for Why Use Compression and there's a subtle difference which we'll discuss later. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. It seems that more often than not when people are discussing compressors they're talking about making things louder or more present but there's actually a few reasons to use a compressor, some of which you may not have thought of. Now before we get into that I'd like to quickly thank the sponsor for this video, DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music. Now before we get into the situations where you may use a compressor I think it's really important that we quickly answer what does a compressor actually do. It may surprise you to hear that most controls on a compressor are concerned with turning things down. I like to think of them as answers to questions so the threshold control for example is answering the question when should we turn things down and it's measured in decibels so once we go over a particular level in decibels the compressor is going to turn the volume down. The ratio control is answering the question how much should we turn it down by so once we've gone above that threshold how much should we turn that volume knob down. The attack control is answering the question how quickly should we turn it down once we go over the threshold. Should we wait a while or should we turn things down instantly and finally the release control is answering the question how quickly should we return things back to normal. So once the level has gone back down below the threshold should we wait or should we turn things back up again right away back to the volume they were previously at. Now a lot of people do ask me hey Mike if a compressor is just adjusting volume why not use volume automation in your door. It's a good question here's what I would say to people a compressor may be adjusting the volume several hundreds of times during the course of a song for example now if you were to do that with volume automation that would take a long time to do would be incredibly tedious and then if you wanted to make adjustments later again it would be very time consuming and tedious. Volume automation is really great for broad strokes for things that are going to last a long time yeah in terms of you know a few seconds or something at least compressors are much better when you've got lots of volume automation and you want it to be done automatically depending on the signal. Now if most of these controls are concerned with turning things down why do people use compressors to make things louder. So let's see the process of making something louder using a compressor in action here in my door Kate walked by band lab I've recorded a female vocal and I've duplicated it so we've got two identical waveforms one in blue one in green the only difference is the second track in green has a compressor applied it's this Arturia FET 76 compressor we'll discuss what that's actually doing in a moment but first of all I want you to notice something about this waveform there's a couple of areas where it's much louder than other parts we've got a section here here which is much louder than other parts and then we've got another section here which is much louder that is what I'm using this compressor for I'm actually using it to make these louder parts quieter okay now you can't actually see the difference it's made yet visually with this waveform at the bottom but we can make that happen here in Kate walk by freezing this track in your door it may be called printing the track or bouncing the track or what have you so we'll go ahead and freeze it so we can visually see what the compressor has done now you can see with these louder parts let's look at the first one here that it's actually made it much much quieter and it's comparable to the level in the other parts of the singing okay so it's done that there and it's done it here further on as well and it's done a little bit here with some of the louder parts later on okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this first waveform the one at the top and I'm going to turn its volume up as loud as it can go so that the peak level of this waveform is all the way up to 0 dB if we go louder than that it'll start to clip okay I'm going to do that automatically by using a normalize function most doors have this feature and it enables us to set a new level for our waveform so I'll open my normalize feature I've got it set to 100% don't need to change any settings and I'll click okay so now that waveform is up as loud as it can go everything is increased and the loudest part of it is now at 0 dB let's go ahead and do exactly the same thing to our compressed waveform at the bottom so open up my normalize feature click on okay and again the peak level is now up to 0 dB as loud as it can go however look at the quieter parts especially look at this middle section here yeah and compare the first one to the second one you can see that the quieter parts of course are now much much louder than they used to be and that's because we created enough headroom enough distance between the loudest part and the quieter part to be able to do that when we used the compressor now in an actual compressor the process of doing that will actually be done with an output control or sometimes you'll see it called makeup gain okay and sometimes it's automated depending on the compressor you're using and hi folks it's future mike here editing the video and I just realized I showed you those two waves but I didn't actually play those different vocals for you so you could hear the difference when the compressor was added let's have a listen to that now and that is how we make the the actual overall performance sound louder because human beings are far more attuned to the average level of something than the peaks so now that the average level or the quieter parts are louder we perceive it as much louder but we don't always want to do that sometimes we want to reduce the volume and leave it there so let's look at an absolutely classic situation where we use a compressor to simply turn something down here in my door I've got this little demo and it's just a bass guitar with some drums and it sounds like this now commonly what will happen is the bass guitar will tend to mask or hide the kick drum a little bit yeah the kick never really gets a chance to shine and punch through and that's because they occupy very similar frequencies down in the down in the lower end okay so we could simply go ahead couldn't we and just turn the volume of the bass guitar down so that we can hear the kick more clearly however what's going to happen then is we're actually going to turn the whole volume of it down even when the kick's not playing and it's just going to sound possibly too quiet we're going to lose that lovely sustain that we've got with some of these notes so what we actually want to do is just turn the bass guitar down while the kick is playing we're going to use a compressor to do that so I've already applied a compressor to this bass guitar it's the same one we looked at earlier this FET 76 from Arturia and if I play the bass guitar at the moment with this compressor in its default sort of setup you'll see the needle moving with the bass guitar as it's playing yeah so it's compressing the bass guitar in response to the sound of the bass guitar but we actually want it to compress the bass guitar in response to what the kick drum is doing yeah so we'll just do that quickly this is called sidechain compression and with each compressor with every door it's done a little differently I'll just show you how it's done here in Katewalk so first of all with the compressor I'm going to go to the advanced view here and we can see down here it we can select the source internal or external so internal is the bass guitar itself external would be something like the kick that we're about to use okay so this is called an external sidechain but here they don't use the term sidechain on your compressor it may now with the actual kick drum I need to send the signal of it to this compressor so here in Katewalk I go to the send section of the kick drum and then I simply select the compressor from the list we can see it here okay so now the signal of the kick is going to the compressor okay now I'm going to play it again and again I want you to watch this needle this time you'll see it's reacting to the signal of the kick but it's actually turning the bass down have a look now that may not be very obvious to you which is a good thing we don't actually want this to be too obvious we want it to be happening but we don't want the listener to be too aware of it but I can make it a little bit more obvious by muting the drums yeah so that we can just hear the bass completely by itself and you'll hear it just slightly moving out the way yeah it's ducking out of the way which is why this is sometimes called ducking have a listen so it's subtle but it does work very very well now in a moment we're going to look at a use of compression which is going to be really familiar to electric guitars and bass players especially but before we do that I just want to look at how our sponsor DistroKid make it really easy for you to share your releases with other people this is the hyperfollow page for one of my EP's 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 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quick attack time so it's going to react to the beginning where we see those peaks in the notes pretty quickly okay and it's going to start to turn them down but once that's done it's going to release fairly quickly as well so the quieter parts are going to be louder now as well as using this compressor to just control those transients those parts at the beginning of the sounds yeah I'm also using a second compressor which is a much more sort of overall sound yeah it's not just focusing on those peaks this is an LA2A style compressor and this is just going to sort of even things out a bit more so I'm going to apply those two compressors by freezing the track again and in particular we're going to focus on these three notes right here okay so let's take a look at the top one here that you can see the beginning of the note it peaks there and then it sort of decays reasonably quickly okay but you can see with the second one here where we've compressed it we get that initial peak but then that decay is held for much much longer and the end of that note is much louder than it is in the first example let's have a listen so that we can hear the difference so the first one those three notes sound like this and now listen to the sustain especially on that third note you can hear that it hangs on to that decay of the note much much longer have one more listen the first one the compressed one and that's how we use a compressor to sustain notes so at the beginning of this video I alluded to the fact that sometimes we may use a compressor without actually doing any compression and that may not make too much sense for you well the primary reason for it is to add character to the sound and when we're talking about character we're more often than not talking about harmonics or overtones okay now these types of sounds were normally added traditionally with hardware compressors okay and still with hardware compressors when we've got tubes or things like transformers in the circuitry they were naturally added as a byproduct of using that hardware and of course when we make plugins we try to emulate that so we can capture that sound for a beginner and even for someone who's experienced they can sometimes be very very difficult to hear but nonetheless they are there and they can add a little x-factor to the sound now whilst we may not be able to hear them always we can definitely see them here in my door I have a sine wave and it sounds like this and I'm sure you don't want to listen to that for the rest of this demonstration so I'll mute it but we can play it and have a look at it now it's a very very simple sound as you can see here on the spectrum analyzer it has no harmonics showing whatsoever now what happens when we turn on this la2a compressor without it actually doing any compression immediately we can see the harmonics appear at various levels here and it's the combination of having the harmonics and having them at various levels which really creates the character let's see what happened we'll switch that off and we'll turn on an 1176 here let's have a look we can see it's different again there's many more harmonics being used here at different levels okay and that's simply what these plugins are doing to add that character now earlier we discussed the main controls that you'll find on a compressor things like threshold ratio attack and release so why would it be that possibly the most popular compressor of all time actually doesn't have most of those controls to find out the answer to that I recommend you watch this video right here