Upward compression, downward compression, expansion. It’s easy to get these mixed up. I hope you’ll forgive me if I try and simplify this in, say, 90 seconds.
All three of these are forms of dynamics processing. They’re changing how loud or soft something is over time. Expansion is the easiest.
Think of a noise gate. When the level falls below a threshold, we make it go down even lower, usually to the point where we cut it completely. Downward compression, that’s just regular old compression.
When the level goes above the threshold, we start turning it down. Now, somebody probably once told you that compression makes the loud stuff quieter and the quiet stuff louder. And while that’s sort of true, it’s misleading.
Once we turn the loud stuff down, we can then turn everything up a little, and that’s what makes your quiet stuff louder. But upward compression is literally the opposite. Anything below the threshold, we turn up.
So what’s the difference between upward and downward? And why would you use one versus the other? Well, think about it in terms of what gets left unaltered.
The loud stuff or the quiet stuff. With downward compression, you’re leaving the stuff below the threshold alone, reshaping only the peaks. With upward compression, you’re leaving your peaks the way they were and adjusting things once they get quiet.
So what are the extra few seconds for? To tell you that you can come and talk to us about this in a big kitchen class, and you can put it to use in an incubator. And if someone who belongs in either share this post.
