Tutorial Wednesdays are basic recording & mixing lessons (at this point) that I give you guys on concepts like EQ and Compression and whatnot!
A good amount of you guys are beginners and might not understand some of the concepts I talk about on the show. This is why I’m doing these basic recording & mixing lessons.
One of the things I wanted to start with was compression! Some of you don’t get it because the controls are fucking confusing! I mean, here’s the thing. The compressor was designed for broadcast. It was put in place so a signal wouldn’t over modulate a broadcast tower and blow it up! Mostly because those things are freaking expensive!
When recording engineers got their hands on these things (compressors) they realized hey they can be used in a musical fashion! Unfortunately the controls weren’t renamed into something cool. -_- You got “threshold,” “Ratio,” and “Attack” and “release!” Most rock guys will look at that and go “Well, what the hell is that?! I don’t know how that works!”
To put it in the simplest analogy; all a compressor is is a really fast volume fader. That’s it! all it does is turn things down. It turns down the loud parts so you can get a better overall level and bring everything up.
Applications are first and foremost vocals. You can use them on drums. I use them all the time on drums everywhere. I also use them on bass guitar and acoustic guitar. Heavy Metal guitars, maybe not so much. They’re already pretty damn compressed because of the distortion, so you don’t need to really use it. MAYBE once in a blue moon, I’d say a multiband compressor, but we’ll get into that in future episode where I’ll break down the different types of compression.
I also wanted to mention that THIS FRIDAY I have my next premium course coming out called “Producing Prog Metal.” I take you guys through an entire mix, where I put the mics, now only HOW, but the WHY I do certain things on certain tracks. The course is going to be anywhere between 2 – 4 hours. You get the multitracks, my Reaper set up, my presets, everything! You get everything to do with the track!
