Now in this section we'll look back at the classic compressors, and see how they actually did their gain reduction both for kind of like a little history lesson, but also a peek under the hood as to how they worked. Because a lot of the newest software plugins and apps or the new ones, you see have their models built on on these older types of compressive, these classic compressors, and we'll see that these these compression models they just go on and on history basically there are four types of compression and that is optical FET tube and VCA. Now, optical uses a light on the detection side to light up when it goes over the threshold. And then the gain reduction side pulls down that gain in relation to the brightness of that light on the detection side because of the nature of the light. Especially If the light was a filament lamp, the attack and the release time tend not to be kind of rural linear.

The Tel atronics li two way is probably the best example most well known example of optical compressors and the way they attack their attack and release times for net less linear way makes them appeal to a lot of folks who want kind of real musical compression, kind of a smoother, less clinical output economic FET stands for field effect transistor. They kind of emulate the tube sound and are known to be very fast in their detection. In a lot of ways old school folks associate FET with a famous a URI 1176. And even if their particular FET processor doesn't sound the same, they're they're hoping the manufacturers are hoping that you make that that connection with the 1176. Now tube compressors are big draw with a Fairchild 670 being big daddy of the more with from memory I think was like 20 tubes in that bit. But probably the most inexpensive hardware compressed my by DB x matrix, Lisa says 3630 VCA or voltage control amplifiers, they tend to be a little bit more kind of clinical and have less coloration to them.

So you might be thinking yourself, how does this relate to software? Because these guys certainly don't have tubes or optical stations and then I mean, why are some of these court fd T's or Opto or whatever? It's because these actually based on models of those kinds of hardware, compressors I mean, the truth is, it's pretty easy to make an algorithm that just you know crunches the numbers and gives you perfect numeric compression but so much of kind of like what we find pleasing the ear Others nonlinear ways in which those old compressors work. So I mean, take an optical compressor, for example, if their lamp on the detection side was incandescent, then that introduces a little lag or latency because it takes a moment for that light to lighten up I mean when you turn a light bulb on and be read by that lights 10 cents and now you and I know that there's no way there's no there's no light to be found in a software emulation.

But that software, those software engineers, being smart people, they know how to emulate those old models and bring great reproductions to their computers and you know, software being what it is a single purchase of a plugin from softube or Universal Audio can be used time and time again, on a bunch of tracks. It's a really good time to be alive and being a recording musician. Now, another time A class of compressors is the multiband compressor. And up until now we've seen how we can compress the entire signal. But what if you wanted them to be more specialized in terms of compressing your highs more than your lows, for example? Okay, I'm back in Logic Pro and I brought up the example of a 14 dads tractor, like you can bring that up into your own da W. And so across this first track, I want to insert dynamics, multi presser and stereo.

And then you should be looking at something like this and it's tracked that down the bottom part of the screen here. Okay, so what this has done is basically taken four independent compresses. And there's a crossover point between so basically from zero to 100 hertz, there's this one compressor from 100 hertz to 520 hertz. There's this compressor 520 that was that 53 5.3 K, and then 5.3 k on upwards. On this particular one, you can slide that point anywhere you like. I'm just going to leave that at the default settings.

And a very interesting thing you can do with this multiband compresses, you can solo those particular bands and work on them independently. So let's just play this from the top, the typical kind of dads Music Group, I can just solid just the low ends, that's everything from basically zero to 100 hertz. I could do the same thing the top end. So you can see where the power is here you can compress each particular band in whatever way you want to do it. And you can also see a visual representation of the game change on any particular one. So let's just look at The sets the top right here, you can set your threshold and you can see the law I set that you can see the amount of gain change that's happening and then send it out.

If you like, what is my base right now? What's the base dropped? So with a setup like this you can compress or expand each particular band completely independently This is great for, for mixes you can use for drum loops, I mean basically anything that is mixed up already, if I had an individual kick, snare higher things like that, then I would just use a regular compressor but if you say been given a loop or a full drum kit, if you wanted to compress the high hats or the cymbals and this would be a really great way to do that because you don't have access to those to those particular Elements except that now all within a mix. When everything's all within a mix a multiband compressor is a great way to go. So you can see the multiband compressors can be used for single tracks very easily to finally sculpt your sound, but a big use of multiband compressors is on entire mixes, every mastering suite of effects includes at least one multiband compressor, as it's just a really great way to finally polish your entire mix.

We'll see some multiband compressors in action in the last section of this training course. But you'll find this in much greater detail in the course specifically on mastering the master class on mastering. So at the top of the wall is training I said that you could stare down any compressor and understand it immediately. You know what all those controls were? Okay, do you really want to test how How much your you know, your knowledge is improved. Now let's do a lightning round of a bunch of different compresses.

You remember this graphic from right at the beginning of that training? If you're honest with yourself that you're probably a little overwhelmed with all these different controls, and then how could I ever understand why these guys? Well, let's go go through some of these guys, because I would say that you would know most of the controls on them. And if not, we'll just point out some of those controls as we come across them. So this first one here, threshold, we know that is ratio makeup range, that's kind of a new one. Well, in this particular compressor, you can decide how much gain reduction, what's the maximum amount of gain reduction that you can't wait.

So let's imagine you just wanted to max it out at say minus 20, then whatever other settings, this would override that and you would only get a maximum, say minus 20 Db on that. We have a parallel processing. We've seen that before. attack and release. Also the auto which will take care of the attack and release for you the sidechain high pass filter this kind of interesting one. So in the sidechain, you can set this to have a high pass filter, high pass filter means it passes the high frequencies and has a very steep slope on the other side of whatever set is here.

So, therefore, whatever is coming in that high pass filter, anything below 500 hertz will really be just completely taken out this can be very useful if you have some side chain program coming through and you want it to ignore maybe your low frequencies be a good way to do that. Okay, let's look at the next one. Ha look at this one. It looks like a like an old old compressor. It's kind of cute how they how they do the graphics on some of these, these plugins. So we've seen ratio punch I'm not sure what that is.

I would have to have a listen to this to actually hear what's going on there, you know, attack threshold. The output, the also the mix here is where your parallel processing will be either from dry all the way around to wet. The release is kind of interesting because it can be synced to a BPM, either an internal BPM, or you can set up to, to look at a host B BPM be great for dance music because you'd be able to sync the release to being musical measures rather than just within milliseconds. So if you wanted to just really pump on every quarter, notice that you could set this to coordinate and as you can see, you go all the way from one bar through the maximum here is two bars. And what's the next one looks like a multiband compressor to me, right, have three different bands, the bass, middle and treble and you can set your crossover points right here with these knobs and then you have identical controls by All three bands, you have you in your attack, release threshold ratio and output.

We know what all of these guys are. And then you have a graphical representation of what's going on in each of these three bands. This guy, let's have a look, we have threshold ratio, and knee attack release depth, I'm assuming that is the kind of restricting how much gain reduction you have. I'm just not sure that that one here, dry and wet mix in the makeup gain, we see all that stuff, the server side chain you looked at, you can have a drop down menu here and decide what is going to be your sidechain source. As well as you can restrict the frequency range. We've seen that kind of before in terms of the sidechain.

Again, input coming in here, and you can see how much attenuation you notice that some people call it gain reduction. Some people call it a attenuation. Some people might even call it compression But hopefully we should just be kind of getting an idea here. Even though some of these things are named something different now that you have a grasp of compression, you kind of get an idea what some of these controls are, even if they're not ones you're familiar with. And then this one here, this looks pretty common to me. You know, you've got attack, release your ratio, wet and dry makeup gain.

And then was I got a high pass filter over here. And then when would you have an auto release or a manual release? all very familiar. This is one of my favorite ones, the softube fet compressor, even though it looks like a kind of a 70s. Stereo back in the 70s. You know, you had you probably had one like this.

I know I had had a stereo that looked kind of like this. Now one thing I think I said this before, one thing that you weren't bind on this particular compressor, where's the threshold, I didn't see a threshold here at all. there's basically two different ways you can set set the threshold, you can either bring the top part of this compressor, this is how great the graphics are going to be on this particular version. The top of here is the threshold, you can either drag that down, so that whatever your program is, we'll hit that threshold, or you can drive that input up into the threshold. So this is a fixed threshold compressor. As soon as caught up, if you don't see a threshold setting on a compressor, it's a fixed threshold.

And typically there'll be an input sitting there, where you drive your input, hotter and hotter until it hits that threshold, then you'll start to see that gamma reduction we saw that before. You have your ratio attack release, your output your parallel processing right here, you gain reaction All of that kind of stuff in the detection side of the circuit, we can have the amount of the external search. And we haven't kind of seen that before. Normally, it's just kind of like an on or off look. So you can balance that in terms of the side chain. And then on that side chain medtech circuit, you can roll off some of the low cut and high cut.

This is really useful if they're the program that's coming in maybe really bass heavy and you want to ignore that stuff. You could roll that off to maybe 200 hertz, I bet. And so it will ignore that same thing. You can roll off the top and the look ahead. We haven't seen that before. Back in the old days.

There in in the analog times. Somebody had the bright idea about how about if we could look ahead at seeing, you know, just a few milliseconds, what is coming down the pike so that we could anticipate some of these big spikes now obviously can't look into the future. So what that would do is that would delay the signal and look at that signal, and then be able to kind of see what's kind of in the future, if you know what I mean. The downside of that is the output of the compressor was always delayed a few milliseconds. In terms of it, this is looking at a signal that's coming from a DA w like a recording. I mean, it's very easy to look forward to that because you're playing back a bar.

Anyway, that's what it's doing over here. So you can look ahead and look at certain peaks that will be able to kind of give you an idea, give the compressor idea of what's coming down the pipe. So they have it you now know what compression, limiting AND gates are all in a nutshell, what all of the controls are and how to use them even how to route them in this added and also some very non standard ways as well. So now that we have a kind of a head knowledge of all this stuff, I'm going to round out this course by going one by one through all sorts of sound sources and scenarios. And you'll basically look over my shoulder as we use these dynamic effect processes. So I really hope you've learned a lot about compression limiters AND gate so that you can use them in pretty much any scenario, you know, hardware or software on a Mac or a PC, or any other device that comes out in the future.

I really don't know what we're going to be recording on in 10 years from Tom but I guarantee you this you'll be able to operate any dynamic effects that no matter what it looks like, because we really no have those fundamentals down called. So let's finish out this training. By looking at dynamic effect processes in action