Yeah absolutely. Whatever works for your ears is good enough for me 🙂 Thanks for the comment.

Thank you Glen,

Wow what a great comment. Yeah, there are certainly similarities to both techniques. and I would say that yours really adds to mine explanation-wise. 

Thanks for your kind words.

Björgvin

The idea here is to first apply EQ to clean up and “fix” the sound of the instrument to get the actual uncompressed instrument sound you would have liked to have recorded without requiring EQ. This would include using EQ sweep with narrow cuts to remove “honky”  resonant frequencies and mic/room “bumps”. This would also include EQing any other low-amplitude mud, noise or other junk that might otherwise be adversely boosted and made more audible by the upcoming compression.

Then apply compression to taste.

Finally, once the compression is in place, you can – if necessary – tweak the results with a little more polishing EQ just to finish off the final sound as desired.

Of course there is no such thing as a definitive, hard rule to the order of operation in either the recording or post-processing chain. Both your fine explanation and my perspective here IMHO should be used as guideline to help us all understand how these things tend to work. That is, the understanding of WHY we make these recommendations and WHY the gear works the way it does when used in that order is far more important IMHO than just selecting the equipment order by rote or on faith.

Once one has that understanding, they can more easily create their own signal processing game plan for a given track, and perhaps even come up with some great creative original ideas for what sound they want to try to acheive. 🙂

Glen Stephan,
Independent Recording Network
http://www.independentrecording.net