I am trying to learn compression so i am trying to compress different kicks to get an understanding for it.
I wanted to ask you guys to get an understanding of compression.
1. Why do i lose lowend as i lower the threshold ?
2. What happends to a the sound of a kick with, lets say attack at 0 and if the attack is at 30ms?
3. I notice when i make the attack slower, the volume of the kick gets higher, why ?
Also i would ask the same question about the release.
4. I notice when release is at 1ms the kick gets squashed. Why ?
I then took the relase all the way to 4000ms, and i didnt notice a difference in the kick from like 100 and to 4000ms (Maybe because i dont know what to listen to lol)
Any answers is appreciated, i know you wouldnt want the release at 4000ms but im just experiencing, and i feel like if i get these answers i will understand this alot better
Know this is old, but I'll help if I can.
1) On top of what everyone else has said, are you even sure you're losing lowend? Lowering the threshold is going to the overall volume unless you have automatic make up gain. Otherwise, as people have said, lower frequencies peak higher, but kicks can have all sorts of frequency changes. There may be a 60hz tone for only 15 ms and then the rest is high end. Who knows. That initial portion is going to be a lot quieter and the high end will be brought up louder. This is a really rough explanation, but it's one of the possibilities
2) You just let more of the initial sound through before it's fully compressed. This is a hard control to explain without the context of the threshold, as it can be useless depending on where the threshold is. Generally speaking, attack is used to allow more of a transient through, and transients can tell you a lot about a sound. But a lack of transient can also push a sound back and get it out of the way of sharper things. It's another way to separate sounds. You don't want everything to have a sharp transient or everything to have a completely flattened transient.
The attack control is also hard to give you any numbers for, because it depends on the kick AND it still will affect transients. If you set the attack control to 30ms, it's not like the compressor is not working at all for 30 ms and then suddenly goes from 0-100. It's a gradual rise in gain reduction, and that can still "shape" your transients in a way. This is getting a little ahead of ourselves though, but if you want to know more about this, ask.
3) Do you mean you hear it being louder or you see it peaking louder? It's absolutely going to peak louder if you do that, because almost every kick sample you have has a transient that peaks way louder than the rest of the sample. That doesn't mean you're going to hear it being louder, because different frequencies peak differently even though we hear them differently. You're also going to hear it being louder, just because rolling up the attack means less compression on that initial transient. And if your threshold and ratio were high enough to be compressing at all in the first part of the sound, you'll probably hear it get louder as you roll the attack up.
4) Well as a compressor gets lower on a source signal, lower release settings will have a few effects. The first one is obvious on snares, and it's a wooshing effect. Say your attack is zero and you're threshold is low enough to compress the first 50% of the snare sound. A release of 800ms on a single snare hit (as in not a song, just ONE hit) will mean you're immediately compressing every part of that snare, and even with the signal falls below the threshold, the release is so long that it keeps compressing it. You've essentially turned down the snare. As you increase this release from 800ms, to 200ms, to 100ms, to maybe 50ms, you will start to hear a wooshing effect. Instead of the snare being completely compressed, the tail end of it rises in volume as the release is kicking in. Initial Transient --> Gets quieter --> Suddenly the tail rises in volume. This woosh is sometimes used on whole drum patterns to create an artificial groove that wasn't there before. And this wooshing effect is often what's considered "smashed."
Now I'm not going to get super into the second effect, which is harmonic distortion, and you are almost certainly getting it with a release of 1ms. I typed out a long explanation, but I don't think it's necessary. Essentially, lower frequencies have slower oscillations, and when we start changing volume at the oscillation level, we get harmonic distortion. This is like waveshaping, though not exactly. The consequences are that signals with low end require a slower release time to get rid of distortion.
The reason you aren't noticing a difference between 4000ms and 100ms is probably because you aren't listening for the attack. Ideally, your kicks aren't so fast that they are within 100ms of each other. So your compressor is triggering, and then gradually releasing for 100ms as the signal falls below the threshold. When you have a release of 4000ms, you're essentially just turning your kick track down forever, no matter what your attack is. It compresses, and before it can release at all, another kick comes at the same volume. It compresses still. It's essentially always compressed. If you increase your attack to 50ms, it will only let in the transient of the first kick. The release is so slow that the next kick is still compressed, so the transient isn't being let through. Hopefully, with a release of 100ms, your compressor is recovering fast enough that it lets every transient through, if you were to have an attack of 30-50ms. if your attack is 0ms, you probably won't hear a difference between 100ms release and 4000ms.
