Compression on beatless music

I was wondering if any of you aplied compression to beatless music (ambient / whatever) and what were the benefits of it ? I've never tried it because it sounds counterintuitive to do so.

I use it on beatless music all the time. It's mostly useful for gluing a set of textures together or for creating certain effects. I quite often sidechain certain elements together to get a sort of living breathing organic feel to things. While I understand tat may sound strange to some it works for me. The trick is to use it sparingly most of the time, of course there are also times to abuse the fuck out of it.

I used a lot of compression on this one.

I would guess Tim Hecker uses compression on his tracks quite frequently.

I always use it.

I think you can hear the benefits here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE9mT4JaW_0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t86iISscqM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43YG2bsEQtM

I pretty much always use compression. Especially if there's a lot of bass.

  On 6/19/2011 at 6:24 PM, Aces said:

It's mostly useful for gluing a set of textures together

This is also why you use compression when mastering.

Yeah I use it with almost every track - If you've got a lot of rather resonating textures running through large oscillating filters you really need it as a safety net to stop the whole thing from dominating the mix.

I think people forget you can automate compression. Get some crazy "dipping" sort of effects if you mess around with the threshold and ratio settings (fun). I also agree with mcbpete, compression is not just for beats in any way

i fear the compressor like i fear calling my grandma on her birthday

  On 7/5/2011 at 5:45 AM, Swerm said:

I think people forget you can automate compression. Get some crazy "dipping" sort of effects if you mess around with the threshold and ratio settings (fun).

Twiddle those knobs just like any others, yo!

  On 7/5/2011 at 7:12 PM, ET said:

i fear the compressor like i fear calling my grandma on her birthday

You feel like you're supposed to do it, but it never goes as smoothly as you'd like?

if your track has too much dynamic that you dont want to fix manually, then compression is your friend!

Compression can bring out the reverb and delay trails on your material. Sometimes this sounds nice.

Compression on ambient works great, just make sure to cut annoying resonant frequencies, keep that spectrum analyzer ready

  On 7/13/2011 at 3:07 PM, acidphakist said:

Compression can bring out the reverb and delay trails on your material. Sometimes this sounds nice.

yeah pretty much. i've been loving compression lately. haven't used it on anything purely ambient yet, but i used it in an ambient section of one of my tracks, with a long 808 kick at the start of each bar that ducks the entire track, i love that sound, reminds me of falling asleep.