A student recently told me that the “aha moment”, the one where they finally understood what a compressor was doing, was when they recorded a compressed signal so they could see and feel the resulting waveform. So I set up this little routing in class. Here I’m compressing the source channel where I’m speaking and I’m routing it to bus one where I’m recording the printed effect.
On the adjacent track I’m recording the uncompressed source so you can see them side by side. Now you can see where my voice is quieter below the threshold of around -28. The two channels look pretty much the same.
However, when I speak more forcefully and the signal crosses the threshold, the compressor buckles down. It’s an impressive 30 to 1 ratio and that’s within the range of limiting. It’s effectively pinning the output at the level set by the threshold.
And we can then add the makeup gain back to the signal to increase the overall level. I hope that helps someone. We’ll be talking about attack and release in the upcoming Beat Kitchen class and well, if someone who belongs in that one, share this post.
