COMPRESS TO SUCCESS UNDERSTANDING ADVANCED COMPRESSION TOOLS

Compression is among the first things any budding producer should want to master to get their mixes sounding professional. Threshold, ratio, attack and release are all you need to make something happen, sure. But as your skills increase and as you struggle to eek that extra 1 per cent out of a mix or master, you’ll start to wonder what all those other controls on your compressor do – and how to use them.

What’s lookahead doing? What does hysteresis mean? What’s the difference between a feedback and feed-forward style compressor?

We’re here to shed some light on compressor controls and cover some expander/gate and limiter terminology too, giving you an overview of dynamics that will help you get the most out of your existing processors. With that, here’s our A to S of dynamic processor parameters.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• A DAW with compressor, expander, gate and limiter plug-ins