Autechre the musical possibilities of heavy compression.

I have never really been into this but more and more it is becoming appealing to me and more and more interesting in the types of effects that can be produced.

This is the first thing I wanted to bring up:

Tracks -> master bus-> compressor.

this is the basic setup. The most interesting thing about it is in the way that differences in levels are more and more pronounced and even slight shifts between two audio parts can have profound "musical" effects.

I think of the mixing of the tracks to be hirarchical. The most important part in most cases being the kick drum, but let me back up a bit. Basically when mixing this way you need to decide what needs to always be heard, and then composed around that. For example, perhaps you will have a hissing sound. maybe this ambience has a peak of -60db, but since your compressors threshold is set so low, and the ratio so high, it becomes amplified to -5db. What fascinates me is how artists can create a track just by shaping the sound layer by layer, letting the sounds interact through the response of the compressor. Perhaps you may add a floaty melody that is around -40db, when this plays on top of the ambience, the ambience is almost silent and the melody very loud. On top of that you can have a distorted bassline, ala justice(good example of an artist who makes use of compression in this way). Everything "ducks" out of the way of this fat bassline or lead sound or mix of the two. It now takes stage. But it is important to have an element which drives everything, which is usually the kick drum (and snare sometimes), it will be the loudest out of everything.

What is my point in this post? I think using a compressor as a musical tool rather than a mixing tool has its merits. There are so many articles and opinions on how to mix and use a compressor. One of the most common things I hear is "Don't touch the compressor until you are almost completely finished with the track, make sure everything sounds good on its own, and then use the compressor just to tie everything together, its just icing on the cake, blah blah blah". Okay, thats good advice if you are mixing fucking folk music or something, but otherwise its total bullshit. These days I think it is totally legitimate to mix and even improvise musical parts using the compressor as a musical element. You can't really hear what a sound is going to do to the mix when you will use a compressor with heavy settings on it later. For example say you have a heavy lead melody with bassline, and a four to the floor kick drum. The bpm is around 120 bpm and the compressor's release is set to 200-250 ms, with a fast attack, high ratio, and low threshold. If you are mixing and adding parts to it with the compressor on bypass it is going to sound like shit, unless you REALLY know what you are doing. However, if you have the compressor on while you do this, you will realize that, because of the timing of release, the swell of the lead and the bassline comes up right on the offbeat (250 ms is half the length of a beat at 120 bpm), and because you hear this musical effect, it will directly influence how and where you add more parts to song. Say you think the piece needs some piano stabs, If you just add some stabs in random places, chances are it will effect the "heartbeat" of the compressor and you will loose the emphasis that it has on the offbeat. So yeah, have I explained this enough?

Anyways, I'm kind of out of it right now but I had been thinking about it recently so might as well talk about it with you folks, right? I hope I don't come across as crazy.

Do any of you make music in this way? Clark does, autechre does at times(but often in submixes), richard divine uses very heavy compression as well but that may actually be a case of mastering. Lot of house artists do something like this as well(deadmau5 perhaps?, daft punk..). To be honest I have never made a complete song in this fashion, because most of my fascination of music in the past few years has been purely compositional and structural, however, as of late I feel in order to make my music to be very special I need to experiment more with timbral ideas and mixing ideas.

Excellent discussion. An engineer's use of dynamics is one of the most defining aspects of what determines their style. I suppose this applies to any musical artist. I'm really liking the techniques discussed so far.

I haven't spent a lot of time practicing side-chaining compressors or simply gain. I ought to give it a try. Does anyone know a good article or three where I can read about different techniques?

One of my favorite tricks is grossly over-compressing the master bus compressor for small amounts of time to create moments of exaggerated in-your-face sounds and a big shift back and forth in perspective. Mr. Bungle used this trick a couple of times on their last two albums.

I was going to talk a lot more about specific ideas but I was kind of out of my mind with insomnia when I wrote that post, but yeah, I'll explain more in depth later.

slow attack, just enough release, hard knee, high ratio and very low threshold

shove thru some punchy percussion with a bit of reverb then filter before the compressor

I have tried the method described in the original post several times, but when I do this I find that for me it is almost impossible to get the mix to translate well across a variety of sound systems. Not sure what I am doing wrong probably just need more practice.

Some people do it right, Clark does it wrong. Just turn your ears to the french scene for the masters of compression.

  impakt said:

Some people do it right, Clark does it wrong. Just turn your ears to the french scene for the masters of compression.

i hate these ed banger dudes and their overuse of compression. it's like they can't fucking play an instrument so they play compressor

  Brian Tregaskin said:

  impakt said:

Some people do it right, Clark does it wrong. Just turn your ears to the french scene for the masters of compression.

 

i hate these ed banger dudes and their overuse of compression. it's like they can't fucking play an instrument so they play compressor

Idd. Master of compression meh :/ That's just overcompressed imo.

I was not refering to Ed Banger records.

  impakt said:

I was not refering to Ed Banger records.

good! :p any names then? i'm curious

yeah im curious too, what artists are you thinking of?

  impakt said:

Some people do it right, Clark does it wrong. Just turn your ears to the french scene for the masters of compression.

I wouldn't say Clark does it wrong necessarily, its just a different aesthetic, bordering on straight up harsh noise music, dynamics-wise. I do enjoy it more when compression adds more of a "bounce" than a "wall of noise", but I think both methods are viable as long as you understand the aesthetic that it creates.

compression is bad ass

  Bubba69 said:

Tracks -> master bus-> compressor.

 

this is the basic setup. The most interesting thing about it is in the way that differences in levels are more and more pronounced and even slight shifts between two audio parts can have profound "musical" effects.

 

I think of the mixing of the tracks to be hirarchical. The most important part in most cases being the kick drum, but let me back up a bit. Basically when mixing this way you need to decide what needs to always be heard, and then composed around that. For example, perhaps you will have a hissing sound. maybe this ambience has a peak of -60db, but since your compressors threshold is set so low, and the ratio so high, it becomes amplified to -5db. What fascinates me is how artists can create a track just by shaping the sound layer by layer, letting the sounds interact through the response of the compressor. Perhaps you may add a floaty melody that is around -40db, when this plays on top of the ambience, the ambience is almost silent and the melody very loud. On top of that you can have a distorted bassline, ala justice(good example of an artist who makes use of compression in this way). Everything "ducks" out of the way of this fat bassline or lead sound or mix of the two. It now takes stage. But it is important to have an element which drives everything, which is usually the kick drum (and snare sometimes), it will be the loudest out of everything.

this is how i've been doing things ever since i started using compressors. it's like pushing your fingers out into a membrane, perhaps?

for cubase tracks, i'll usually start off by putting a compressor on the entire mix -- first thing i do. then i just start doing stuff. if something is hard to hear, i'll use EQ/level automation/etc to clear out a space for it.

i've never really messed with more complex uses of compression (extreme envelope settings, multiband compressors, sidechaining, maybe double-compressing or golf-kneeing or tube hardware i dunno) and i'm interested but have been too distracted to dig into it....

The compressor is the most difficult aspect of anything for me. Generally when I get the sound I want, my mixes turn out abit quieter than the rest, which is abit upsetting, because I can't understand how these people get their mixes to sound so perfect when they're still loud.

I generally never compress drums as a whole, keep the bass drum and snare, hihats etc on separate tracks.

I love using sidechaining. That's really where the compression shines.

One trick I've found is routing all audio into separate returns, then using the bass drum or other sounds for sidechaining a particular return. So while the bass drum may duck the bass and rhythmic filler, a snare hit may duck the melodic sounds.

also, i found this very useful equation for calculating the milliseconds for a particular BPM.

  Quote

It's basically: --

 

y = (240,000 * (d / t)) / x

 

where t is the divisions of a bar (e.g. 16)

and d is the delay time (e.g. 3)

and x is the bpm of your song

 

y is the delay time in milliseconds

 

so to calculate 3/16ths of a bar for a 120bpm song, the calculation is

 

(240,000 x (3 / 16)) / 120

= 45,000 / 120

= 375 milliseconds

Or a tool that does it for you if you don't make any sense of the above:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Windows-Widge.../BPM-Calc.shtml

Also, look at justice. Now crazy amounts of compression is referred to as "the justice sound". I enjoy it in small doses.

^handy

for my last track that I posted I put it through a lot of limiters, each had a high threshold so it wasn't heavy limiting but each had slightly different release times, I also connected the audio so it went through only the very last limiter, then only the last two but at a low volume, I guess that would work the same as having a wet/dry on every limiter in the chain

probably it would be an interesting effect if the compression ratio changed a very little bit through the entire track, right? Like if you want to make the track sound confined at first and then open up or I dunno, I'm still getting the hang of it

i think it works best on beats

I really don't fuck with compressor too much. I use it, but very minimally.

Mostly because I'm not very good with it yet.

When I first began making music I never used compression, I just mastered things by automating the volume levels for each track to get the right mix. This technique works really well with ambient music, since sometimes you want one sound to come in really slow, and another to come in and out at certain points.

Side chain compression is nice to put on bass to lower the level when a kick drum comes in, which is handy for certain types of ambient music.

Either way I think it's really important to keep as much of the dynamic range as possible, especially since your ears will get tired if there aren't ever any quieter moments.

Oh and if you seperate the highs and lows and do EQ cutting on them, and then use compression, your tracks will sound louder while still maintaining clarity. This should be taken further by EQing each track individually as well.

i quaff a potion of headache relief

side chain compression is how most of the heavy compression oriented people (flying lotus, ed banger records et al, j mr oizo, j dilla) are getting their sound now adays. It's more than just putting the entire master bus through heavy comression and it involves using at least 2 layers working in tandum.

  Awepittance said:

side chain compression is how most of the heavy compression oriented people (flying lotus, ed banger records et al, j mr oizo, j dilla) are getting their sound now adays. It's more than just putting the entire master bus through heavy comression and it involves using at least 2 layers working in tandum.

isn't sidechain used in a lot of trance music or am I thinking of something else

  Ragnar said:

  Awepittance said:

side chain compression is how most of the heavy compression oriented people (flying lotus, ed banger records et al, j mr oizo, j dilla) are getting their sound now adays. It's more than just putting the entire master bus through heavy comression and it involves using at least 2 layers working in tandum.

 

isn't sidechain used in a lot of trance music or am I thinking of something else

trance is made using casio and dog

  hahathhat said:

trance is made using casio and dog

 

:teeth: