Recording: Compression & EQ

[Insignis Productions]

Hello FP, at the moment I'm working on becoming a Mix Engineer. I understand things as far as EQ and compression but I've been hearing about people adding EQ and Compression to the channel while recording. If so, how much EQ ? How much compression, such as how much threshold, attack, and release. Thanks!

 

[Adrian-MarQ]

Not sure how to determine what "how much" means for using EQ. For compression, I'd have just about the same settings I would for whatever I'm compressing if I were doing the processing after recording. So for vocals I might have a 2:1 ratio, slow attack, and a threshold set so that The quiet parts aren't being touched too much (assuming there is variation in dynamic range for the vocalist). Just kind of play around with the settings while practicing until you get something you like!

 

[sleepy]

Don't. And if you do, it depends. This is one of those things that if you have to ask, you're best not doing it. Unless you're doing it for a very specific reason, I wouldn't recommend using a compressor on recording if you're just learning.

 

[DarkRed]

Hello FP, at the moment I'm working on becoming a Mix Engineer. I understand things as far as EQ and compression but I've been hearing about people adding EQ and Compression to the channel while recording. If so, how much EQ ? How much compression, such as how much threshold, attack, and release. Thanks!

The idea of adding effects on the way in has several key purposes, but the primary one is that the recording should sound awesome by itself when the recording is done, hence whatever that is needed to get there is what should be done during recording. You can and should of course provide the mixing engineer with the required options for approaching the recorded content. Because it's not really 1 single awesome sounding recording you go for, at least not if you're a pro. If you're a pro struggling to get by, then maybe yes because time is your main issue, but if you are doing really high quality pro stuff then you have a number of final awesome sounding recordings to choose from as a mixing engineer. That also might give you some additional insight into why hardware is used on the way in, it's simply so that you can pick the right mix of characters/emotions/playing for specific song sections in isolation as well as for a particular combination as a series of verse, chorus, bridge etc. A really nice bi product of using hardware on the way in, is that with hardware effects on the way in, less effects - hardware or software - will likely be needed during mixing and mastering. This leaves a finer processing footprint on the audio - the final quality is set early, you are not dependent on later process stages to achieve what you want and you minimize the risk for additional quality loss at later process stages by not having the mixing and mastering engineers feel they need to take the production to a completely different level, because they should not. But great mixing and mastering engineers do not start working on stuff that is not ready.

It is also important that the recording is not in the way of the production, in fact most often the recording is in the way of the production. The production should be a clean music creation and orientation process - who does what when playing what how with what. And that is much more important than the capturing of the audio. And since the production is based on a song, the song is even more important. And because a great song expressed out of tune does not work, the tuning is even more important than the song. And it is with great ears, great tuning, great tuning gear, great tuners and great monitors/monitoring landscape that you nail that one. Tuning is therefore everything.

 

[Kalm]

Main reason I've used compression on the way in was for tonality and timbre shaping. Of course this could be handled during the mix but what if you know that's what you want the vocals to sound like before mixing? I can't really say there are set parameters to this but you never want to hurt the recording. But let's say you're working on an EDM track. Maybe a 1:7 ratio compression and an attack around 100ms / release at 50 ms could be tasteful. The point in this being we're not mixing at this point, we're still producing and as a producer I may want that sound mixed. It's like taking sampling a kick drum and applying it through effect or hardware to make it sound good. Now we take this NEWLY produced sound as if this was the recorded source and mix it into the song.

Sometimes the producer wants things a certain way to forcefully keep their decisions and choices, that way the engineer must work with those decisions. Maybe a graphic EQ is used to notch specific frequencies in a room for better recordings . .who knows?