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Using compression on a stereo mix for vocals vs. drums.
10/30/2003

Q: "How can I use compression on my final stereo mix that will affect the vocals and not the drums?"

Compression on your final mix is an art that many mastering engineers have been able to hang their hat on. In other words, it's not the easiest thing to master (pun intended). There's really no way to do anything to the stereo mix without it having some effect on all the elements. With that said, you can sometimes manipulate things in ways that can emphasize certain aspects of a recording while not causing too much harm to others. The secret to this with compression comes from understanding the attack and release parameters. The basic idea is that fast attack compression will usually help to tame drums on stereo masters, while slower attack settings tend to affect vocals and other similar instruments (bass, strings, etc.). Just how fast or slow depends a lot on the specific instruments and how they are mixed. There's simply no hard rule on this, to get started you can turn up a pretty extreme amount of compression and play with the attack and release controls. You'll begin to be able to hear how different elements are changed by the compression. Once you get close to understanding the attack and release times that change the vocals while not killing the attack of the drums you can dial it back to a more reasonable setting and go from there. It's all about experimentation.





Other Techtips from October 2003:
October 31 - The AKG C 3000B and Roland V-Studios
October 30 - Using compression on a stereo mix for vocals vs. drums.
October 29 - Discovering "hidden" arpeggio patterns in the Triton Le
October 28 - Studio foam does NOT equal soundproofing!
October 27 - Studio foam does NOT equal soundproofing.
October 24 - Apple's Clipboard and memory issues while in Mac OS 9.
October 23 - David Stewart's Guide to Specs: K2600 Polyphony Discussion
October 22 - Creating transitions on the fly in Apple's Final Cut Pro.
October 21 - HTDM and latency.
October 20 - Parallel vs. Serial relative to MIDI and more.
October 10 - dbx DriveRack hard reset instructions.
October 09 - Body Pack transmitter antennas - coil them up, or let them hang?
October 08 - Strip Silence in Logic explained.
October 07 - Does the Tascam MX-2424's monitoring system function much like a tape machine?
October 06 - Kurzweil's V.A.S.T. technology and its gain structure.
October 03 - Differences in digital storage for audio and video.
October 02 - Memory allocation in BitHeadz's Osmosis.
October 01 - Mackie CFX mixer tips.


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