Kick Compression Guide

[Críoch]

Gate before compressor.. Like that idea.

[SpecialGuest]

I am still experimenting with attack and release time. But it helped me a lot to turn the volumes on my bus channels down so I don't need to limit how I did before.

Still I think the limit drum bus sounds punchier but in the whole mix the drums are now more present. But I think that I do many things wrong or could do better If I knew better.

[Lost to the Void]

You don`t need to limit your drum bus.
Compression is fine, limiting is killing the transient.

[TomasHD]

You don`t always want massive thumping kicks, so you don`t always want hard compression on your kicks, but generally a little compression will always benefit, you don`t have to have everything running at 11

Really interesting advices, I will definitely try them out. What I usually did is to make a parallel compression of the kick, and it kinda worked for me.
but sometimes the kick lacked of that body or punch you said.

Just really curious about what you said of not always wanting thumping kicks, it comes to my mind this track in which you hardly feel the kick but its really good in my opinion. It isn't better to have a good punch and a kick where you can feel more the attack?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR9IoKN1mhw

[SpecialGuest]

I am not an expert but I think it is a layered kick. There are lot of tracks from Regis and Surgeon especially the older ones that are build so. They have a huge amount of baseline from a synth or from a 808 with long decay bassdrum or tuned lotom and in top of that only the attack of the kick which have the impact but also build a body with the underlying heavy bassline.

http://youtu.be/TC9ly3cOMdE

http://youtu.be/TVVm_0Lx9e4

[Aline N]

very informative , thank u for the knowledge !! now about the Drum Busses. what is the goal to compress a Drum Buss ? i mean , i hear some people say to glue things down . and other
say to pump the drums and make it more bouncey . compression sometimes confuses me

[yentz]

I hear very few long decaying kicks in electronic music these days. Most of the records I hear have a short kick almost consisting just of the first hit with little to no body.
Not completely sure on how those are archived. Using an analog rytm from electron I have quite nice control over the envelope as there is a separate aeg to the decay parameter of the synth engine itself.
I tried trimming those to get the desired effect which works kind of ok.
However with the drum compression I should be able to get a more attenuated and longer "hit" shouldn't I? Just wondering what happens to the initial transient which passes the compressor (I suppose this ideally has to be left to sound like a drum and also is needed to trigger the comp if it is not using any delay to look ahead) when gaining up the compressed "tail" i might end up driving the transient too hot into the reds.
Another possible reason for the kicks sounding the way they do I thought might be that they are just tuned to the bass underneath and the side chaining off the bass makes it sound like kick + bass instead of short bass drum and following kick.
Hmm compression sounds so easy in theory but is rather difficult to translate to real world use.

[Chael]

Awesome guide thanks for posting

[surface]

@yentz

http://theproaudiofiles.com/compression-techniques/

Someone (maybe Planar?) posted this link earlier and it helped me get a clearer "visual" understanding of what was involved.

I knew the effect of compressing and the various settings and was reading through thinking "ah yeah, basic stuff" but I guess I never considered different specific settings for specific situations as clearly as they are shown here.

There was also a seperate upwards compression article on there that's interesting ..

[yentz]

Thanks a lot. Checking it out straight away.

[Críoch]

Just wanted to say thanks again to Steve & everyone that contributed to this thread. Theres some great info here to come back to.

Very useful!

[zukenbauer]

great in depth conversation, thanks everybody

[1nfinitezer0]

necropost ftw!

[Lost to the Void]

Cleaned this thread up as it is a useful guide.

[Hades]

Cleaned this thread up as it is a useful guide.

I just knew that moment was gonna come...
no prob Steve, probably for the best

[Lost to the Void]

Not every thread needs cocks and buttplugs.

[Hades]

but we didn't even make it to the buttplugs yet !

[Lost to the Void]

Speak for yourself mate.

[Críoch]

Don't know if it was mentioned already.,. But using something like bram's smexoscope (??) is pretty handy I find. Let's you see what the compressor, Sat or transient plug etc., is doing.

http://bram.smartelectronix.com/plugins.php?id=4

The 'Span' for kickz?

[rktic]

I'm currently preparing the final guide to compression. Hopefully with videos and shit. Stay tuned. Can anyone recommend me a good screen capture software for windows? A free one?