I tried this tutorial and am through video 2:
http://www.boyinaband.com/tutorials/prog-house-tutorial-day- 2-dirty-bass-lead-synth-sub-bass-7-day-song/

but I wanted to translate it over to Abelton + NI Komplete 7, rather than use Reason. I feel I've got a pretty good handle on Reason already. I used NI Massive for the synth.

Here is my translation as a zipped Abelton project with samples and patches:
ftp://ftp.christopherpisz.is-a-geek.com/Temp/ProgHouse_BNBTu torial.zip

My Compression did not turn out like his at all. I tried a variety of setting and have been moving the sliders for hours. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I would also love any advice on anything else. Any mixing/production advise? Would you set this instrument up differently?

Do you understand how a compressor truly works, how every parameters effects the signal, and how it changes your audio? To a point where you should know how changing a parameter would change the sound, before actually moving it. This is something I see time and time again a lot of up and coming producers don't truly know how it works. I'll open up a session and the threshold parameter isn't even lowered to a point where it activates the compressor, and then they have the make-up gain at +4. All they did with the compressor is increase the volume.

I think I do. I read all I could find to read on the matter.

I can see the signal getting compressed with my kick drum. If I lower the threshhold any more, there seems to be a very fine line between squashing it completely out and hearing it at all. I can't seem to get it to just pump with this particular set of sounds. I think it might be because my klck drum has such a long tail.

Did I have this problem? Are you speaking about my project after opening it or just in general?

I'm just speaking in general, I don't have Ableton

Well, I did play with the threshold, just because I thought you were telling me to lower it some more, and I took out a pre-compressor I had added just for warmth. I didn't hear the effect of the warmth anymore after all the other effects came in. I think it sounds better. More pumpy:

http://www.christopherpisz.is-a-geek.com/temp/proghousey.wav

I've read info on paid for tutorials on compression were they don't seem to understand how the parameters work. The misinfomation i read the most is that the attack is triggered when the sound rises above the threshold and the release once the sound dips below the threshold, but this is not the case! Yes the attack is triggered once the sound goes above the threshold but the attack and release are in constant play for the duration of the time that the sound fluctuates above the threshold. You would think that people would know such things before charging money for such info!

It doesn't matter if you can see it, you have to *hear* it!

I can't open the project since I don't have Live but this is a thing I see a lot here. Forget about tutorials at the moment. There are no tutorials which will teach you how to listen to such things.

My recommendation always is to use tutorials only for basic information. What the parameters on a comp do for example. But you'll have to learn how to use it yourself.

The internet is *full* of wrong information. One confused guy picks up some information wrong....tells it the next confused guy......
That's a thing I see a lot here. The amount of information that's instantly available today is definitely *not* an advantage.
A guy who just began to make music reads something about mastering completely out of context for example. He suddenly things that mastering is the thing he needs to get "the pro sound" but he doesn't even know the very basics about songwriting, sound desgin, mixing etc. yet. This happens at least once a week on KVR and other forums.

My general advise:
First question you should always ask yourself is: WHY?
WHY do you want to compress your synth (or whatever)?

"It doesn't sound right and the "pros" always use compressors."
"Since I don't really understand compressors they have to be the secret thing."
"Popular artist XY uses plugin XYZ."

are no reasons.
After a while you'll notice how few effects a good mix really needs! You'll only use effects (even EQs) when you want them to do something. You'll only insert an EQ if a particular freq range is to loud etc. And not just to magically make things "better"

There is of course nothing wrong with experimentation! But you got to have a box before you can think outside of it.

Sorry for the OT!
I probably overgeneralized a lot here but it's just a thing I always think when these topics pop up (and there are *a lot* of them).

Cheers
Dennis

See if this helps some with understanding compression a little better:

http://tarekith.com/assets/pdfs/DynamicsControl.pdf

It's more oriented to Live too.

Thanks for the guide, but one quick question about something lots of people say but I've never fully understood.



Isn't the second method actually doing the opposite of the first and increasing the volume difference between the attack and body portions of your drums? Surely leaving the attacks untouched and turning down the body would result in signal with the same peak volume but a lower RMS. You talk about "using the compressor to boost the audio after the transient" but I don't see how a compressor can do this, despite reading it in loads of guides. Wouldn't this require some sort of inverse (i.e. below the threshold) expansion processor? Am I just thick?
Last edited by cron on Mon Apr 23, 2012 6:20 am; edited 1 time in total

It happens with the the gain make up in both cases. When you let the transient pass, the compressor is doing nothing to it's volume. But what it will do, is boost the body of the sound when you turn up the gain. So the transient stays the same volume, but then you're boosting the body more as well.

But surely if you've got a signal that's peaking at 0dB and have set the compressor's attack to leave the transient untouched, no makeup gain will be possible as the signal is still peaking at 0dB and all you'll have done is reduced RMS. I really can't wrap my head around how this technique can ever allow an overall increase in perceived volume without increase in peak volume.

Well, sure if the signal is peaking at 0dB, but why would you do that anyway?

I only used 0dB as an example. Substitute with (x)dB in the my post above. I still don't grasp how you can use a compressor to do anything other than increase the volume of the transients relative to everything else if you're leaving transients untouched and compressing everything else.

It can't, that's why a limiter is sometimes also used after the compressor to catch the loud parts (usually the attack transients in this case). Some compressors also have limiters built-in.

As for the rest, imagine a typical electronic kick, with a fast-ish decay. Using a compressor that lets the attack through will allow you to keep the beater/tick part, but then "turn down" the louder part of the body in relation to the rest, or in other words make the part you're compressing closer to the volume of the quieter parts. Using make-up gain to increase the volume afterwards will then allow you to make the quieter part of the body relatively louder compared to the original sound. You're trading dynamic range for a louder perceived volume.

The pumping effect is all about the attack parameter. I mean, the rest is important too, but that's the important parameter timing-wise here, and the timing is what makes that sound.

Hope that makes sense. I think you'll get a better feel by playing around than by reading or watching tutorials though, once you have the basic idea down it's just a matter of time. Some compressors are definitely better than others for this too, my favorite for this is Rough Rider (of course, ymmv and all that).

Got it - we're talking about reducing the dynamic range of the body alone rather than the dynamic range of the entire kick (i.e. attack + body). Although we're increasing the dynamic difference between the attack transient and start of the body, we're reducing the dynamic difference between the start of the body and the end of the body. I hadn't really considered using release times short enough to obtain this kind of effect before. Many thanks.

Still, this most definitely isn't a technique for increasing perceived loudness of the sound as a whole as stated in some places.