2 KEY THINGS: THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING DYNAMICS & DYNAMIC RANGE Getting the results you want from compressors can often be the key to a tight, modern-sound- ing mix. Some producers will tell you that the importance of compression is often overstated, or that it’s not as important as EQ. But the thing about mastering compression is that you’re not really just learning how to operate a piece of equipment: you’re learning to listen to, understand and manipulate the internal dynamics of your tracks. Again, this is tricky: we’re talking about the re- lationships between sounds, and between the components of individual sounds – the envelope characteristics - as much as the discrete characteristics of those indidual sounds. It also means learning to listen in a different way than we’re used to: we’re used to evaluating sounds in terms of their frequency content. It’s easy for most people to say, “That sound is high frequency, that one is low.” But ask most people to evaluate a guitar part in terms of it’s attack or sustain, and those charcteristics help define the role of the instruments part in the context of a full mix, and it’s a different story. Compressors are your main tool for manipulating the dynamics of both individual hits and sounds, and the mix as a whole. Of course there are many factors that contribute to the dy- namics of a sound, or a whole track: what sort of instrument created the sound, how it was played, and most importantly, the skill and sensitivity of the person giving the performance; but compression is our tool used to tame or accentuate the existing dynamics, or in some cases to introduce additional dynamics. One of the reasons people have a hard time understanding compression at first is that the differences in dynamics they introduce can be extremely subtle– compression is as much about the cumulative effect of many individually compressed sounds being brought together, and the relationships between sounds with different dynamics, as it is an obvious process pasted over the whole track. This is why it’s important, once you grasp the basics, to consider an overall strategy for how you’re going to implement compression in a mix (much more on this later). Part of the reason it’s difficult at first is that you’re listening for changes in the transients/dy- namics rather than the frequency content. We can all tell the difference a high frequency sound and a low one, but to the untrained ear it can be a bit more tricky figuring out what’s happen- ing to the dynamics of sounds through a compressor, and more pertinently what settings are going to sound the best in the context of a complete mix. But once you get how the internal dynamics and dynamic range of individual sounds and com- plete mixes can be controlled and shaped, not only will you feel like a sonic wizard, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a Pro Sound master. Remember: experiment, listen, and you’ll get it at some point. It’s easy when you know what to listen for.
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:54:18 +0000