Ronan Macdonald gives some creative compression tips to help you get the best from compression in your tracks.
As a cornerstone of modern music production, compression is a process you no doubt turn to day in, day out – but if you’re only using it for workaday volume levelling, you’re missing a number of creative tricks that can make all the difference to your mixes. Here are half a dozen of them…
1. Over-compress To Impress
Compression is generally employed as a transparent process, reining in wayward peaks, adding punch and lifting tails without making the action of the compressor itself particularly apparent. When you want to get more creative, though, don’t be afraid to push your compressor to the, ahem, limit.
Whether you’re looking to evoke the dynamically constrained vibe of a vintage recording, massively beef up an anaemic or overly spiky drum loop, or crush an electric bassline in order to toughen it up, over-compression is a powerful sound-shaping technique. Almost every parameter on your compressor can get involved – overdrive the input, drop the threshold, raise the ratio, shorten the attack, lengthen the release, harden the knee; ensure constant gain reduction, basically – and the artefacts, distortion and amplitude-based oddities that arise from their abuse can be wonderfully transformative.
2. Unexpected Group Compression
Much of music production and mixing focuses on making disparate instrumental and ‘electronic’ parts sound like they were always meant to be together, and compression plays a major role in that, particularly when applied to groups and the master bus. There are, of course, standard groupings that are traditionally called on for this purpose – the drum kit, the vocals, the brass section, etc – but do you ever get experimental with your compression bussing? If not, you should!
Shove the drums and bass on a bus and compress them together, or the bass and a pad, or the drums and vocals, or vocals and strings… Getting unexpected combinations breathing together can liven up the groove of a track no end.
3. Don’t Overlook Automation
Being essentially an automated volume control in itself, the compressor isn’t a plugin that often gets targeted for actual automation. By shifting certain parameters as the track progresses, though, compression can be made more reactive to the arrangement in a broad sense. Drop the threshold and/or raise the ratio on your vocal compressor in the chorus to up the intensity through over-compression, for example, or lengthen the attack on the snare in the verse for a snappier, drier sound. And the dry/wet mix knob is a prime candidate, enabling different blends of compressed and dry signals to be established for each section of a song.
4. Rooms And Reverb
Predictably dynamic in the way they decay over time, reverb and delay effects are highly amenable to compression. Sticking a compressor after a reverb gives you another point of temporal manipulation alongside decay time and room size, and one that can profoundly alter the spatial outcome, making emulated rooms feel bigger and more epic without increasing their tail length. And the same principle applies to delay, where compression can be used to sustain the volume level of a feedback loop to great textural effect.
5. Character Compression
Some compressors were seemingly built to be driven hard, and those are often the ones to reach for when edgy, creative signal squashing is your intent. We’re talking ‘character’ compression, as epitomised by the venerable 1176, with its endlessly relevant all-buttons-in mode, available in numerous plugin versions; the carefully tuned and architecturally diverse ratios of Empirical Labs’ Arousor (or the Distressor hardware that inspired it); and the fabulous preset curves of Kush Audio’s UBK-1. Putting musicality and colouration above accuracy and linearity on the sonic agenda, these are the kinds of devices that really get the juices flowing when it comes to realising extreme artful treatments.
6. Sidechain Compression
Although we’ll be dedicating a full feature to the subject in the near future, no discussion of creative compression techniques can be considered complete without at least a mention of sidechaining. Getting a compressor processing one sound to react overtly to the dynamic profile of another is a dance music staple, but are you being imaginative enough in your implementation?
Think beyond the predictable pairings of the kick drum sidechaining a pad or bassline. Try swapping that kick for the snare, say; or sidechaining the entire mix; or keying a compressor strapped across a reverb with a ‘dummy’ syncopated percussion loop, or sidechaining the drums with a completely different dummy drum track. You won’t break anything if it doesn’t work, after all.
Let us in on your most guarded compressor-bothering secrets in the comments.