Drum Kick Compressor in Live

[iamdjkirk]

hey guys, so i was working in live tonight, i seen a kick compressor and thought i'd use that to kick punchier drums, but when i turned the threshold down on the loop, it only made them softer... i'm pretty new, and although i thought using a compressor while turning the threshold down would make them louder, it didn't... can you help clarify this for me?

thanks guys!

 

[krushing]

A compressor is like an automated volume control - whenever the volume goes above the threshold, it gets turned down the amount specified by the ratio. But since this means that the dynamic range (this is the range between the highest and lowest volume) is reduced, it allows you to turn up the overall level. A fast compressor can do this (well, they all can but some do it better) in the time frame of a single drum hit, which means you can basically level out the decaying "tail" of the drum sound, and then turn it up. And that's where the "punchy compressor sound" comes from.

Edit: this is a kind of extreme example of what the waveform might roughly look like before and after compression, just to illustrate the above.

 

[iamdjkirk]

hey guys, so i was working in live tonight, i seen a kick compressor and thought i'd use that to kick punchier drums, but when i turned the threshold down on the loop, it only made them softer... i'm pretty new, and although i thought using a compressor while turning the threshold down would make them louder, it didn't... can you help clarify this for me?

thanks guys!

thanks man, that makes sense! but for the overall output in my channel mixer or even the output on the compressor, there's no room to turn it up... which i thought basically i would have room to turn it up when i compressed it... like, i compressed the signal, now i'm turning up the compressed signal together in the output...

 

[scrapheaper]

thanks man, that makes sense! but for the overall output in my channel mixer or even the output on the compressor, there's no room to turn it up... which i thought basically i would have room to turn it up when i compressed it... like, i compressed the signal, now i'm turning up the compressed signal together in the output...

Have you got auto-gain turned on? Some compressors have a setting where they automatically do the turning up.
Also, what is your attack setting? If the attack is low then sometimes a big peak slips through before the compressor kicks in and you end up with a bigger peak compared to your body.
Usually you can hear this as a click at the beginning of the sound

 

[iamdjkirk]

ok i see your point man, i actually didn't look far enough... there's just a glue compressor and an eq, i apologize, but it's still useful information for something down the road... when i get working sometimes i click on the wrong channel, see the wrong equalizer, compressor, etc... my bad