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That said, while there are times where we may want to use compression as
an obvious effect, it’s important to be able to employ it in as transparent a
way as possible. After all, the last thing we want is for it to sound jarring or
distract from the main focus of the song! So with that in mind, let’s take a
look at five tips for more transparent audio compression.
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you follow along with the article? Try a free trial of iZotope’s membership to
access intuitive mixing plug-ins and try these free presets below. Visit this
link for directions on how to upload the presets into iZotope plug-ins.
Next up: attack! Attack times are a little tricky because 30ms on one
compressor can sound very different from 30ms on another compressor,
plus they are incredibly source-dependent. With that in mind, use the
following numbers only as a very general guideline. For transient material, an
“extreme” attack time might be less than 5ms. Then again, sometimes very
fast attack times—even on the order of microseconds—can still sound
transparent if employed carefully. For more sustained material, the crossover
from “extreme” to “normal” attack times might be in the 15–50ms range.
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Now, here’s the punchline: if your aim is transparency, you can usually only
afford to have one of those three parameters in their extreme range. Need a
high ratio? Be careful with your attack and release times. Want a fast release
to enhance low-level signals? Take it easy with your ratio and attack time.
These are by no means gospel truths, and some of the following tips will
demonstrate ways to circumvent them to an extent, but it’s a lot harder to
overdo things when you keep these guidelines in mind.
So, how do you use serial compression in practice? The classic technique is
to start with a relatively fast, high-ratio compressor and set the threshold so
it’s catching the very highest peaks of the signal. You don’t want it to be
working hard all the time, just kicking in quickly on the loudest sections. By
controlling just these peaks, you help prevent them from triggering over-
compression down the line.
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Next, you might use a slower, lower ratio compressor to gently control the
overall dynamics of the signal. Opto or RMS style compressors are great for
this application since they naturally have a slower response than something
like a peak, FET, or VCA style compressor. Check out the “Serial
Compression” Neutron preset included in this article for a great starting
point. Optionally, you could follow this up with some compression on a bus
or aux, or even split the RMS compression into two stages.
However you go about it, by just doing a little compression at each stage,
you can keep things sounding clean and transparent while still achieving a
substantial amount of overall compression and dynamic control.
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transparent. For me, “low-ratio” means definitely under 2:1, and often under
1.5:1! If you’ve never thought to try them, there’s a lot of use that can be
made from the ratios between 1.1–1.3:1, and by keeping the ratio so low you
can often get away with more aggressive thresholds, attack and release
times.
For example, with a 1.2:1 ratio, you might try setting the threshold so that the
signal is always in compression—unless there’s silence. This could be as low
as -48 dBFS! Then adjust your attack and release times to taste, and don’t
be surprised if you can get away with a 15–30ms attack, and 50–100ms
release—although of course you can go faster or slower if you like the sound
of it.
With settings like this you might only see 6–7 dB of gain reduction, which is
probably right about on target for a lot of sources. You could also use this
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Neutron Pro
and
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Ozone Pro
in the free downloadable presets at the top of this article. One caveat to be
aware of is that this style of compression can easily bring up the noise floor,
so may not be well-suited to particularly noisy signals.
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Speaking of parallel compression and gain reduction, did you know that the
gain reduction trace in iZotope plug-ins shows the effective gain reduction
after the mix slider is factored in? This makes it easy to dial in a mix slider
value to achieve only as much total gain reduction as you’d like, even if you
start out with very aggressive compression settings.
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