Compression Settings

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Bokusound

New Member
Joined
Oct 13, 2012
Location
Australia
Compression.

I have been trying to get my head around it. When I use compression on my drum parts ect I always get scared of 'over compressing' them and sucking the life out of the sound so I tend to find my self using the same compression settings for everything which I know isn't right. I play around then always get drawn back to that subtle compression of very low ratio, slow attack and fast release with threshold of about 12, just because it sounds like its hitting hard there. I know with these settings very little compression is going on at all. But when I 'compress the shit' out of the parts like everyone loves to talk about on here The sound looses that crispness and bite, to me it just sounds like a knocking piece of shit lol. I'm obviously doing it wrong?

I know there are probably loads of threads about this but I just wanted to make this specific to what I'm looking to learn. So any help will be much appreciated.

I know it depends on what sound your trying to get but what general compression settings would you use on these individual parts?

Kick:
Snare & Percs:
Sub & Bass sounds:
Synths:
ALSO WOULD YOU BOTHER TO COMPRESS THE FOLLOWING?
Hats & Cyms:
Pads & Atmos:

And if you find a really meaty sounding kick and your happy with how it punches you would you bother trying to compress it any further?
 
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You might find that a transient shaper is more useful on drum hits to control dynamics. Not sure who says you should 'compress the shit' out of everything. Compression controls dynamics and as not all kick/snare/whatever samples are equally dynamic, then 'general' compression settings are a bit pointless. (Dynamics being the difference between the loudest and quietest part of the sample.) A lot of 'in the box' sounds don't need a lot of compression imo, because you are often creating the dynamic that you want as you go.
 
Indeed, it depends what kind of samples you got & what kind of sound you wanna achieve. For liquid stuff, I tend to do subtle compression (_IF IT WORKS_) and for more hard stuff I usually compress pretty hard to get that "in yo face" punchy sound. I highly recommend trying very different compressors also, looking for vintage compressor emulators is a good idea.
 
Thank you for your posts, Tewky 1 that link helped alot man. Been trying parralell compression and also been using a transient shaper to good effect. Cheers
 
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