Just wondering what you guys think should be acceptable. Mine never exceeds about 5 or 6. Before the mastering process.

ratio means nothing without relation to attack, release, threshold and gain

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1.618

Use your ears. It's not even a "rule" that you must compress the whole mix. Personally, I just throw on a limiter, expander, and a bit of "pizzaz" tonal EQ.

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quote:

Originally posted by Raphie ratio means nothing without relation to attack, release, threshold and gain

I was just a bit vague in my question, I guess.

Let's consider one channel that has compression, maybe right before the delay. Then it goes to a bus that has compression. The final amount of compression that it has is what I was referring to. So the channel may have had 2:1 and the bus was 2:1 or 3:1. Not even talking about compressing the whole mix. So I'm wondering once it goes through all the compression processing that it -will- go through, before mastering what that signal's compression ratio would look like. Not talking about the master or anything like that. But what Alan says is what generally applies with me, and it works consistently. I was just wondering what other folks were doing.

yup still means nothing.

100 times 0 is still 0

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I have 2:1 x 3:1 or 2:1... what do you mean by zero?

quote:

Originally posted by Evolve140 I have 2:1 x 3:1 or 2:1... what do you mean by zero?

You're talking about a signal being modified when it hits a threshold. What's the threshold set to and what's the RMS of the uncompressed signal? Are you using a knee? What's the attack? What sorts of tracks are being compressed? Are they vocals, bass-lines, drums? When the signals are summed at the bus, for compression there, how much gain is being sent?

There are too many variables to answer this question, seriously. There are no hard and fast rules that would dictate an answer that would be "correct". You might be able to copy every variable into an Excel spreadsheet and use that to find means and averages for every song you do to determine some ideal that suits the sound you're going for but the math seems inherently flawed from the word, go.

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Exactly EZ!

This has probably been said before, but PLAY and EXPERIMENT with settings and PRESETS, see what they refer to, hear what they do with the sound,PLAY and LEARN

If it sounds good it often is good. Thinking about 3 or 4 compression stages being mandatory with certain settings is the wrong way to approach this. NOTHING is mandatory. If you like things a bit more compact or thickening up, you compress, otherwise you leave it alone.

I sometimes nearly think that people have some kind of checklist in their head for mandatory project components, they need to be used, if possible with prescribed settings, otherwise the project is not "complete"

Bass EQ > check
Low cut > check
Sidechain > check
Compression > check
Limiting >check
latest DJRyan samplepack > ehhmm check!

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Okay cool. I only use like 2 stages of compression anyway. Maybe I didn't even know what I was asking. It seems to have gotten me an explanation on the basics of well... everything! Which is my fault for not knowing what I was trying to ask. Thanks for humoring me though. Once again, I'm not asking for instructions or rules on how to compress or anything, I was just asking what other people were using, don't mistake my crappy question for help on producing. Doing just fine here...

quote:

Originally posted by Evolve140 I have 2:1 x 3:1 or 2:1... what do you mean by zero?

Gain reduction. The point is that at certain thresholds, there will be no compression even if your ratio is a million.

Ratio alone means nothing

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quote:

Originally posted by Looney4Clooney Gain reduction.

BAM!

And, for what it's worth, I still envy your mixes, E140. I kind of figured there was more to your question because of that.

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my old stuff, not quite up to snuff - but I still dig it - UPDATED 9/23/2012