Hello and welcome to this masterclass on compression and dynamic effects processing in general. I had been wanting to do this in depth course for several years now, but a lot of other projects just kind of simply got in the way of doing it. But we're finally here and I'm absolutely raring to go. Now, if you're wondering, you know, why is this guy so excited, I just kind of get very amped up when I can teach on subject that you can use for lighter. Personally, I'm not really crazy about teaching on subjects, I have a short sharp lap like for example, if I taught on some cool piece of software that's going to be obsolete within a year or two. I just don't think I'll spend that much time and effort in teaching it because it really doesn't bring that much value to you and your lifelong passion of creating, performing and recording music.

This subject however, is when you will use for lm Mark my words I got started in audio engineering way back In the 80s, and I was familiar with using compressors, limiters AND gates, way back then. But here's the cool thing. I could look at any new compressor, either hardware or software, and understand how to tweak them and use them in just a couple of seconds just scanning the controls. I mean, look at all of these different compresses. How about if I promise you that once we get to the end of this training, you'll be able to stay down any of these compressors or any ones in the future and just not break a sweat at all. I'm dead serious.

I've seen a million models of old compressors, and new futuristic ones but I can really just take one look at all the newest coolest compressor models and know how to use it within you know really a couple of minutes if that. Now I'm not hyping myself up here I'm just but I know this stuff cold and by the end of this training, you'll notice stuff called to How cool is that? Okay, so I guess the first question should be, you know what I compress ism gates and why should you care? Well, I'm glad you asked. Let's start off with compressors. In a nutshell, here's what's happening.

Let's say you have a waveform like this. Now the sound has a bunch of big spikes in there, but a lot of the signal is a lot lot the law passed, the audio will probably get lost in the mix. Once you start adding other instruments that here's what a compressor can do, we can take a threshold and bring it down so that anything that lies above that threshold is reduced by say a factor of two to one that means that anything above that threshold will be hard or ratio 41 it will be reduced down to a quarter. Now keep in mind, this stuff above the threshold will be squashed down. Now once those peaks have been tamed, we can then amp up the rest of the signal to get an overall denser or punchy a signal. You can see how the quad a signal can now live with those peaks and that's really compression in a nutshell.

But Because people learn in different ways, I'm going to illustrate this concept in four different ways ready? Now, here's the problem, the most common way people relate to what a compressor does. Imagine I'm an audio engineer that's sitting at a mixing desk like this. Now my job is to listen to or maybe watch the levels of a singer coming down this channel right here. Now imagine that every time she hits a really big note, I pull down this fader. And I might do this, if I hear the night go too loud, or I might be actually looking at the meters right here and decide when she's going to let I can actually split my job into two halves.

Really, the first part is listening or watching the levels for her to go too loud. And the second part is reducing the levels actually doing something about it. This will come up again and again and again. One half is dancing. It's too loud. The other half is actually doing something about it.

In other words, we're Some levels that let's try another analogy. You might actually might have seen this in a free video series that I put together recently. I'm hanging out with my daughter tickets and my oldest son Bran. Say hi tickets. Say hi, Brandon. Brandon.

Hey, doesn't Brandon have a nice smile? I mean, but you can't see Brandon smile. Let me let me pull back here. And now you can see everybody. Okay, no sweat. But let's imagine that I wanted to see just the details in Tigger smile.

In fact, honey, you lost a tooth today. Yeah. Yeah, he was the tea. So how would we be able to get the details in Tigger smile. And Brandon smile. We do this all the time.

Right. We do it in family reunion photos all the time. We have the toll one screws down to the little ones. Okay, now we can get the details of everybody on the same picture. Everybody smile, or make the dead frown. So you see that in order to get all the details of the smaller things like in that example is my daughter's smile.

We got a squash down, told Brandon so that we can capture both of their details. Side by side. Okay, so here's another one. Do you ever see at the Grammys, or the Divas at the Grammys hit that big moat? What do they do with a mic? Right?

They pull a mic away, right? Okay, when they pull it away from the mouth, so those big notes, they won't hit too loud. The moving away of the microphone is the gain or level reduction kind of the same as this one here. Now here's the last one and it's a really weird one I can't imagine is the level of my voice every time I speak and it could pick up here. If I put a sponge right here every time the level is got You know, right up to this threshold here, that would meet some resistance and not peak, the, the sponge acts kind of like a protection zone. I thought it was kind of a weird analogy.

That's really compression in a nutshell, whether you think of it as an engineer sensing or responding to the peaks on here and pulling that down, my son's scooting down again and the pitcher, the diva playing the microwave when she hits the burst big notes, or this stupid kind of sponge thing to act as a as a protection against overload. Whatever way you think about it, compression really is basically doing the same thing. let's actually look at how all this came to be a ton of audio processing that we use in today's modern studios have their Genesis back in old radio days. And there's really no better place to start than in am radio, not just because it was the first commercial way of broadcasting way back in the early 1900s. FM radio didn't even come on the board. That was a big increase in quality.

But the point I want to make in the history of compression is that in that am radio days, compression was an absolute must have in broadcasting precisely because of the way in which the am signal works. radio stations use compressors to protect their transmitters from overload. A typical radio station would place these compressors at the last stage of the signal in the capacity of equipment overload protection. In fact, compression is really still used that way to this day, the little speakers in your say your laptop or TV can have compression built in to avoid those peaks damaging those speakers. But since the early days of just using compression as protection, it has evolved into being used in very creative ways to sculpt yourself. You're hear me from now on speak a lot about the two different ways that you can use compression or kind of any dynamic or audio processor for that matter, and that is either corrective, or creative.

In other words, are you fixing a problem or you being creative and designing kind of designing new sounds? Okay, enough history, let's actually look at the three different types of dynamic processes that we're going to nail down in this course. A compressor, like we've said already is a device that compresses or squashes your signal. If it gets above a certain threshold, any signal above that threshold is reduced by a ratio, it's a two to one ratio would have anything above that threshold. And so four to one would reduce that down to basically a quarter of what it would normally be above that threshold. Now, a limiter is basically a compressor, sorry, a compressor with a very high ratio.

A compressor just places basically a hard ceiling on the signal on and it really doesn't let almost anything get above that. There's no real set definition of when a compressor becomes a limiter. But a lot of people tend to think anything above a 10 to one ratio is kind of approaching a compressor being a limiter. Now, the third type again is an interesting thing is that it's almost like a compress it in reverse. Anything below that threshold is reduced by a ratio. In a strict noise gate, you could have a signal like Alexa, get a noisy guitar amp and set the thresholds are the only the signal above it gets through.

And that lower signal gets cut right out. Let's actually hear an example of this. Do you hear all that noise in between The strumming of the guitar. Now let's see that with a noise gate. Now it's important to know that the noise is actually present in the second look on the right hand side of the slide. It's present within those guitar chords.

But because the guitar chords are so loud, it masks that noise. It's only really when the guitar stops playing in between those chords that then the noise becomes present. So with a noise gate, a properly set noise gate is you can really chop that out when the instrument isn't playing. And that will drastically reduce the noise in your in your recordings. So these are the three different dynamic processes that we'll look at. And in the kind of the broadest description, they are compresses, let's watch that signal down.

Limiters. Let's squash it so hard to the signal never get above that threshold. And then the third one, I gates, let's cut out all the low level stuff down below that threshold. They are kind of in broad strokes, what we're going to learn about in this course, we'll learn what every type of dynamic processor does, what every control does, how to route them in your signal chain. And most importantly, you'll get to see, you know, how I use them in action. You'll literally look over my shoulder as we use these effects, these dynamic effects and a mix in mixing in a bunch of different application.

So let's begin with compressors