Compression

GOALS:
- Practical motivations include preventing overload, overcoming noise, and de-essing bright vocals.
- Fit tracks together in your mix more easily through tamed loudness, improved intelligibility and articulation, smoothed performances, and cleverly reshaped amplitude envelopes.
- Feature tracks by extracting ambience and artifacts, manipulating timbre, and creating distortion through compression.
GEAR:
- Master the quirky set of parameters and features: Threshold, ratio, attack, release, make-up gain, hard knee, soft knee, stereo and multiband.
- Recognize the sonic traits and operational pros and cons built into the topology: Tube, optical, FET, VCA, PWM and Digital.
- Acquire an internal sense of the sound qualities and dynamics capabilities of each and every make and model.
from MIX SMART QUICK START: Compression and Limiting {pp. 81}