Ableton Forum

Tonight ive been working on a project for uni for engineering exercises and i realised that my teacher was right that i use to much compression. Example hit me when i ran a compressor through a atmospheric pad i created on alchemy, the original had 3 peaks at different times where the sweeping filter was used and then the rest was alot quiter giving the pad nice feeling and dyanmics, then i thought oh i use a compressor to bring down peaks a little and bring up the quiter parts a little more audible, and then when i looked back at the waveform between the compressed and original it shocked me that for past 2 tracks ive been sucking the living hell out of the tracks in the past 2 mixes and what i thought was adding to my productions has actually been taking away.

Ofc ive changed the ratio dropped it down a little and twiddled with the release and kept the attack short about 10-30 ms etc but the point is i heard so many times people say it wipes dyanmics out and is used way too much on dance music now thats why they all have no dynamics, and thought yeah right and obviously tonight ive heard for myself.

As anyone esle went like that before, its a great learning curve for me because in a sad way it shows i can now differeniate between the dynamics been lost and better been left alone, but do you think that our dance music has become a boring listening experience, as people compete against each other for louder and louder mixes with less and less dynamics?.

Best

Mike

I think everyone worrying if they are over compressing things is getting out of hand. there are some cases where the music sounds like total shit due to over limiting or compressing (the first track on my sound cloud for instance) but sometimes music is annoying when it is ultra quiet and the really loud and then quiet again ( I feel this way more so with movies rather than music). If it sounds good who cares what the wave for looks like.

I think it's more an issue of people not knowing when too much is really too much. Certainly dance music more than other genres can hold up fine when loud and proud. Too many people approach that without realizing how important the attack and release phase of their chosen tool really are. So on one hand you have tracks that are loud but still have groove, and on the other you have tracks that ar eloud and sound like mush.

Part of it is just monitoring, bedroom producers with $300 speakers trying to compete with established artists with years of experience and really nice monitors/acoustics. Some people just CAN'T hear how what they are doing to make it louder is not helping their songs.

Compressors are, to my ear, almost as important as the source to the final sound.

By that, I mean that the choice of what and when to compress and by how much with which compressor is almost as critical as which synth, which kick, etc.

I personally couldn't agree more with Nathannn that the dynamic range in most movies these days is a joke.

Bond movies are the worst.

Gunshots ARE deafening in real life. They hurt. By attempting to use a "real-life" ratio of 1:1 they make the use of manual feed-back compression (i.e. using the volume control *after* it gets too loud or too quiet) the only way to reasonably deal with it without using a spare hardware compressor on the output... Or you could just let yourself go deaf.

My point is that I'm not a fan of dynamic range in movies or in music.

People carry on as though it's some holy grail of fidelity. Music hasn't had the pretext of reality for years- not, at least, since the introduction of multi-tracking. Dance music especially shouldn't be burdened with the relics of old school practices such as thinking of compressors as merely corrective devices.

Times change, compressors rock*.

Ian

* - When set up appropriately.

^this

In a word: yes. And pop music especially. I mean listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1C7Hf0gEkU

It's totally overlimited and compressed. I know, it would sound like sh1t anyway but now the instruments are all over the place 'cause of the over compression.

Modern dance music is over everything

Thanks for the comments people so far, make some really good points to argue the opposite, nathans comment on the movie dynamics is a good point too where i can see the dynamics can be just as frustrating to the ear, i suppose its one of them subjects that countless threads over past few year have been talked on its down to perference or how you taught i agree there too, keep em coming anyone esle, interesting to hear how other people see the same thing.