Compression/Clipping

[Damie Mckeown]

Okay So, Ive been using super fast attack times on my compressor for a year now and realised how much this sucks, So after reading up about compression on drums I started setting nice attack times that just let the peaks throught of the kick without been too clicky and so on, but the problem is it clips like hell untill I lower the level and then lower the level somemore untill I can barley hear it, which sucks. So I read somewhere that a limiter can help fix this a little, So I used the Ad limiter in logic but it made it all out of sync and the regular limiter in logic. But No matter how many settings i made it seemed to squash it all too much unless I kept it at a low volume which wouldnt improve it much anyway. The best thing I have found now is to place logics 'Expander' over a medium is compression setting only clipping my about 2 decibels but the Expander seems to sound tinny and distorted.

What Am I doing wrong here?

I know compression like the back of my hand, and get great results setting up a right ratio and threshold, And I get a nice release time that i can make either pump after a snare or make it longer for more space, yet as soon as slow down that attack time to work anything lower then 0/Straight away on my drums it clips:(

[chagzuki]

What clips?

[PeterL]

Have you tried this new Compadre Beatpuncher ?
http://otiumfx.com/compadre.php
Also a good idea is Voxengo Transmodder which only shapes the transients and is great to improve drum attacks:
http://www.voxengo.com/tmodder/
In your case I think a limiter destroys your previously shaped attacks of your drum.

[Blue Days]

Logic's Ad-Limiter is extremely bad IMO.

I'd like to hear what you think of my own limiter though, it's currently in it's last beta phases, and I used it for mastering these tracks :

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=75652

[kritikon]

It's one of those lesser-of-two-evils things. To bring up the body of any drum with a compressor properly you need to have an attack, but as you say...that means the transient will clip. You can us a limiter (personally I do that after the compressor) to stop that, and often it will work well - limiters can add a good crunch to drums that works well, but if you want a clean sound you won't be able to use a limiter very strongly.

One way around that is to use drum samples that aren't maximised up to full volume as your start point. If your transient is at or around 0dB, then you'll have problems. Either use a quieter sample, or simply pull down channel input by upto even 10dB. Then you automatically have 10dB headroom to play with.

Then you can compress heavily using upto 10dB gain and the transient still won't clip. To do it that way it's best to edit the sample and make sure you haven't got any noisy tails on it, which might become noticeable after compression.

A downside to this method is that you can't really do it to a loop...you need to compress the snare, kick or whatever individually and then put it into your drumtrack.

It's not really a problem though, as sample editing is so easy nowadays, you can get decent quality samples at lower volumes, or even record your own electronic ones from plugins etc with no noise to start with.

I try to make it a habit if I know I'm going to be using compression on a channel that I don't record it at a very hot level...the more headroom you have with a compressor, the easier it is to work with in alot of situations.


EDIT: another way, of course, is to use a sample editor that allows you to redraw the sample. Simply redraw the transient at a lower peak, and then you can pull up the whole volume later...but it's a pretty tedious way of doing it - not anything I would do on a regular basis.