At its core, a compressor is not actually such a complicated device. A compressor listens for any sound that exceeds a certain level and it just turns it down. The compressor cares about two things.
When do I turn it down and how much do I turn it down? All this other stuff is going to distract you from that, so we need to reset or bypass anything that isn’t these two controls. We’ll add this stuff back into the mix later, but for now it is crucial that you turn off auto gain.
You also want to set your make-up gain to zero, make your attack and release times as fast as they can go, and set the knee to zero or hard. Today we only care about two things, threshold and ratio. Threshold is when do we turn it down and ratio is by how much do we turn it down.
Before the level hits the threshold, the compressor does nothing. When the level exceeds the threshold, the compressor turns it down. The higher the ratio, the closer it pins it to the level of the threshold.
A ratio of one to one does nothing, where a ratio of twenty to one gets it pretty close to pinned. Right now the threshold is at zero, so it’s never going to kick in. And the ratio is at one, so even if it did, it wouldn’t do anything.
Let’s max out the ratio and now let’s pull the threshold down somewhere around here, maybe around minus twelve. What you’ll start to see is gain reduction happening and now when I’m talking, it’s pulling down the gain. That’s what a compressor does.
And with these peaks under control, we could actually make the whole thing louder. But that comes later. Like, share, follow, check out my classes.
