Production Stuff: Compression

When I'd started making music again over a decade ago, I avoided using compression except sparingly. Much of why I eschewed (love those words that appear in text but never in conversation) compression was that I had come to hate hearing it on recordings that its application destroyed. I can't stand to listen to music with heavy-handed compression calling attention to itself, creating disorienting ebbs when swells should be occurring, rendering acoustic instruments scratchy-sounding and smearing their overtones into a flattened mess. (Twelve-string guitars, especially, sound like gravel diarrhea with compression on them.) I just tried to listen to a particular alternarock album from 2004, and made it halfway through the second track before the oppressive compression on the mix drove me away from it. This wasn't "brickwalling," wherein everything is LOUD and clipping, but regular ol' compression that scrambled the dynamic relationships among the elements. It would have been a really good album if not for the compression on the mix. I once advised a friend to re-mix his yet-to-be-released album without all the compression on it, because it was ruining the prog-rock glory of the meticulous music. After he did, he thanked me in the manner in which someone is grateful that your secret home remedy had saved his dog from dying.

This weekend (being presently Sunday evening), I did the musical tracks for four songs that I just sat down and made-up. Kind of a stupid thing to do – just tell oneself that one is going to write a song now, however it might come out – but I've done far stupider things in my life. The results were surprisingly good; if I can manage to wield barks and moans on top of the music without deprecating its beauty too much, I'll be releasing the stuff. One thing that I've had to do, in this case, has been to back-off the compression that I'd used on some of the tracks in order to tame the levels or add presence to the instruments. When something sounds like it's "pulsing" or flattened up against a pane of glass, I reduce the compression or remove it entirely.

There are two compressors that I tend to use almost exclusively; both are made by Native Instruments. I use the VC-2A emulation on tracks and on a sidechain buss for drums/bass:

. . . and the Supercharger GT on the master mix buss:

I have no idea whether these are what I "should" be using; they just yield results that sound good to me. Even after my music by me has passed through these, there are still transient spikes in the waveform, with no clipping:

The depiction is of a repetitious song with no dynamics except a build-up in the arrangement. The drums do what drums do – stand out and cut through the rest of the sound. The audio sounds and looks fuller, with less dynamic range, with compression on it, but without the heaving breath of overly-compressed levels. I am no expert, being an autodidact, but I have arrived at this according to what I've pursued to try to make my recordings sound as I feel that they should – aside from that barking and moaning, of course.