I thought I understood compression until tonight

I was trying to compress a kick drum and expecting the resultant waveform to somewhat resemble a fish.
ie. immediate attack (the head), with a quick dip (neck), then a long arc (the body).

Assuming for the sake of argument the kick is 60 milliseconds I would have expected the following settings:
Threshold: Very low
Ratio: Very high
Attack: ~5 milliseconds
Release: ~50 milliseconds
Gain: High

This I thought would mean nothing happened for 5ms (the head) after which the signal was smashed right down (the neck), and the long release would create the body while the compressor gradually returns to where it started.

However, all I'm getting is the 5ms attack peak with a flat block following it (ie, looks like: |----)





BTW, I didn't set out to create a fish , but to learn compression.

Sound more like limiting than fishing

True.
I was using extremes to see easily what was happening. Didn't work obviously.

I know people tend not to like recipes
But a 4-1 ratio with the threshold around the meat of the beat is often good.
A little bit of attack and release to taste.

Pics??

Really? Of what?
The compressor, the desired result or the actual result?

I wanted to see the waveform that looks like a fish, thats kind of interesting!

Well funnily enough I can't find any now.
Have seen them heaps in the past though.

You get the initial transient for dynamics and a deep body and thump. But it's not boomy because of the dip which I refer to as the neck.

LOL. Did you draw that?
It's pretty much bang on TBH.

Nah, twas bored so thought it be interesting to see images you described

Am now gonna see if I can play around in synthesis and see what animals I can make

The "fish" dip at the beginning of the waveform before it goes into the body has naff all to do with compression.it's heavy handed eq on the low mids or they've layered something (another short kick sample perhaps) in the 100-300hz area that is out of phase to achieve such a dip


TIMT

You've got the threshold too low. Think about it, if you are setting the threshold "very low" then you are going to be compressing all the time.. and if you're compressing all the time at a "very high ratio" it's going to be lowering all the audio by a lot! At this point the release won't make much of a difference because it's always compressing whenever there's audio being sent through the compressor, so the compressors only "letting go" once there's no audio passing through, and you won't be hearing the release doing in "sucking"..

so you need to raise the threshold a lot.. and lower the ratio (as some one said earlier 4:1 is a good starting point. Keep an eye on how many db's your compressing 6 db's, for instance, is more than you think!

good luck!

you have got to set threshold above the bass/tail of the kick. the transient can and should cross the threshold to achieve what you're looking for.

Exactly. That's all a limiter is - a comp with a high ratio.



Even more exactlier.

Those kind of settings on a kick is going to probably make it less aggressive - compress anything too much and it'll sound like a splat rather than a thump. It's a rare instrument that you want a very low threshold on. It's not a bad idea to start with the threshold just at the point the red light/meter starts to flicker and then pull it down according to taste. Can think of very few channel instances where I'd want to be more than 5 or 6 dB below the absolute threshold - usually way less than that. Compressing mixes is entirely different - there is certainly a case for very low thresholds there...