Do You Know What All the Buttons on Your Compressor Do?

On Friday I gave you some good advice on creating separation in your mixes using EQ.

Sadly, EQ isn’t the ultimate solution to everything. Used well, you’ll create a space for everything in the frequency spectrum, but it doesn’t do anything to help you control tracks that have too much dynamic range.

That’s where compression comes in. Compression helps you tame dynamic tracks, shape sounds and add punch to instruments.

If you’ve ever wondered about what all the knobs on the compressor do and how you use them, check out the video below.

This is only a small snippet of the full compression video but I think you’ll be able to get a lot out of it to use for your own mixes.

In the rest of the video, I spend a lot of time using different compression techniques on all the instruments in the multi-track.

You’ll learn things like:

• How the ratio can affect the punchiness of your drums
• The importance of tweaking the attack and release to shape your sounds
• Using presets to speed up your mixing (while still tweaking them for the best results)
• Using serial compression when you need two different compressors to tackle different aspects of the vocal
• Using different compressor styles for different sounds and character
• Rebalancing your EQ after compression to keep everything going smoothly. Compression alters the volume and loudness of each track so careful rebalancing is key to keeping your song consistent every time you add a new processor to the mix.

EQ and compression are really incredible tools to make your mixes great. But if you only use those two tools you’ll end up with a fairly two-dimensional mix.

To make things more interesting you need to add some space with reverb and delay.

Check out my flagship course, Mixing With 5 Plug-ins for more tips on compression, as well as the other 4 plug-ins you need to make a quality mix.

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