Does any one here know much about compressors and how they change the sounds.Im using fruity if that makes a difference on your responses.
If someone who uses fruity could explain each of the knobs it would be greatly appreciated.
Please try to write in something besides tech talk if at all possible as I am don't have too many tech discussions being the only person who produces in this town.

A compressor is basically an automatic volume control. Imagine yourself with your hand on a fader and your eyes on an input level meter. As long as the meter stays below a certain point (the threshold), you leave the fader all the way up and the gain is unchanged. But the instant sound gets louder, you pull down the fader by a certain amount (the ratio). After the sound gets soft again, you push the fader back up. That's what the compressor is doing, except much faster and more accurately than humanly possible.

In mathematic terms: Say your signal is 4db. And yu set your ratio to 2:1. The compressor will take that 4db and turn it into 2db.

Paradoxically, by cutting the peak levels, a compressor allows you to raise the average level of a sound using the Output control to make it sound louder.

Take a vocal signal for instance.
As a singer sings, her voice fluxuates in db level between words and even in the middle of a multi-syllabic word. A singer will say certain syllables lower or higher in volume. By applying a compressor, the lower db syllables are untouched by the compressor but the higher db syllables are lowered. In the whole picture, the lower db syllables seems louder relative to the higher db syllables after it's run through compressor. To the ear, the voice sounds even and controlled.

Compression is often a lot in vocal, bass, and percussions. A lot of engineers like to apply a lot 4:1 to 10:1 ratio on the bass and percussions because that is the foundation of the track.

Last edited by Scottaculous on May-12-2004 at 18:33

sweet thats exactly what I was lookin for man

Whats a good Hardware Compressor? I was looking at some of the Behringer one's. But noticed there pretty cheap? Am I getting what I pay for, cheap hardware? or decent enuf?

if youre going hardware you wanna go neve or crane song...but that shit is really expensive...but they are the best frmo what I've heard

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Originally posted by davedresden i suggest getting the gabriel & dresden prog-a-minute. in 3 easy steps you too could change the face of dance music. batteries not included. - dave

Holy *uckin *hit batman

http://www.cranesong.com/stc8.html

that bitch is expensive. Is that something we want for a home studio hehe

ok so I played my tune through a program called e-jay and I noticed the pattern in the peaks looks a bit different.Is there a free vst that will tell you how your song is peaking and in which frequency so I can have something visual to hear it with?

quote:

Is there a free vst that will tell you how your song is peaking and in which frequency so I can have something visual to hear it with?

Um...I think what you are looking for then is this:


INSPECTOR free VST for peak analysing!

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please review my latest AMBIENT track HERE.

damm that thing looks nifty...
now if only it worked on my computer
*hits computer*

quote:

Originally posted by Pappa Holy *uckin *hit batman http://www.cranesong.com/stc8.html that bitch is expensive. Is that something we want for a home studio hehe

well neve and cranesong are the best of the best when it comes to compressors...every big studio with some selfrespect owns 2 or 3 of each


okay I really hope you were kidding about E-jay, please tell me you don't have that piece of shit on your computer

well anyway, that freeware analyzer rocks from what I've heard, but if you wanna go for payware then check out the waves-tools

that's what I'm running

also if you want even more expensive and good hardware, check out GML

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quote:

Originally posted by davedresden i suggest getting the gabriel & dresden prog-a-minute. in 3 easy steps you too could change the face of dance music. batteries not included. - dave

quote:

Originally posted by Vizay well anyway, that freeware analyzer rocks from what I've heard, but if you wanna go for payware then check out the waves-tools that's what I'm running GML

Which part of the Wave's Tool are you using for this?

yes I do have e-jay but i wanted to make it clear that.
A) I don't put out demo's on it
B) I use it to see if my songs I make will mix with each other
C) I know how to spin a little on regular tables as well.But I sold mine for a computer so I can make it instead.

Now if already put forth the effort to make the tune then there really shouldn't be a problem right.