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Welcome to our sound for video session great to have you all here today on a it's not quite it's not quite winter but almost winter it feels like winter here

I hope you're all doing well hope you got a chance to work on some of your sound projects throughout this last week and let's jump into our agenda and take a look at what we're going to cover here today so um just first I want to kind of take a step back and we've talked about compression a bunch of times but I think it's worth um taking kind of a different look at it this time we'll talk we'll do just a quick review of sound what sound is what amplitude is we'll kind of review very quickly some of the settings you'll typically see in a compressor and what its purpose is typically for spoken word audio in particular and then we'll talk about or demonstrate how to set a compressor by ear as opposed to relying on visual tools and cues and things of that nature so that'll be the main thing that we'll focus on today and then we'll go to our chat here and see what questions we have out there today so with that let me just do a quick run through here on what sound is and I want to just show a little video here over on the Mac really quickly so I have this video here what is represented here this let's say over on the left hand side this gray bar here is essentially a speaker cone it is the it's the part of the speaker that vibrates back and forth and then here we have our error particle or error molecules um and then this is this is kind of a visualization of what or How Sound is produced and what happens so you have these what are called condensations when the speaker cone moves forward and the air gets compressed goes to higher pressure and then there's a rarefaction when the speaker cone moves back so here's a condensation where there's it's higher pressure and here's a rare faction where it's lower pressure and that of course is all produced here by this moving speaker cone so sound is energy moving through the molecules of the air um and it creates these waves now it's very distinct from wind wind is different wind is actually taking a whole ton of particles or molecules excuse me of air and moving them from say one city to another um very different here you can think of where as sound is a little bit more like vibrations so it's vibrating all of those molecules in the air and they're moving like demonstrated here again here's a little look at that okay so that's just again a quick reminder of what what that is again and to hear the different pitches of sound of course it has to do with how quickly that wave moves up and down within a given period of time so within a single second if a wave moves up 100 times up and down uh 100 times it will sound something like this okay so that's a low frequency sound if we have a higher frequency sound now

Danny asked me to warn everybody this can be a pretty grating sound that I'm going to play next so be prepared on your volume or your headphones or speakers this is a 12 kilohertz tone it looks like just a block if you look at it here but if you if we Zoom away and you can see in fact it is a waveform but this is going up and down 12 000 times per second and it sounds like this okay they don't want to do that one too long this guy can be a little bit like fingernails on a chalkboard out of context so and so that's how different pitches are how we perceive different pitches is based on how quickly those waves go up and down moving the molecules of air now there's also amplitude and amplitude is in essence how we perceive loudness but it's a little bit more complex than that but it's generally loudness so if it's represented here is this kind of waveform if I zoom in here amplitude is the distance from the middle line here the zero out to the top and out to the bottom so you could think of these as maybe our condensations and rarefactions here but the the closer up to the top or to the bottom it gets generally the louder we perceive it so that's what amplitude is and that brings us to the concept of a compressor now let me let me let me clarify one thing really quickly if we have a transient let's go ahead and let's go back here this is the video that we posted this is the audio from the video that we posted on our other YouTube channel just this morning this is a clap right here and it happens very very quickly you can see like the the waveform goes up and down very very quickly it's it's almost at zero so this should be about the loudest you could possibly experience but the reality is because it happens so quickly yeah it definitely sounds like a loud click but it doesn't per it doesn't um generally strike us as especially loud unless it sustains High amplitude over time so that that's one distinction that's important to make it's just a psychological thing and it has to do with the physics of and and the just the way our hearing works um the way our eardrums pick it up and the way our brains actually interpret the information that our our ears are sending via the nerves um to the brain so there's a lot going on there but the idea with a compressor is that I want to be able to do a few things here even things out so a lot of people a lot of times um when we talk some people more than others but when we talk we tend to be maybe allowed in many many cases louder at the start of a sentence and then we get quieter and quieter and quieter as we go on and then it can be a little bit hard to hear because you get as you get quieter but then when you start a new sentence you might really emphasize something and get louder again and so one purpose of a compressor from a spoken word audio perspective is to even things out a little bit to make it easier for the the audience who's listening to be able to hear everything without having to jump for their volume dial and keep cranking it up and then back down when you get louder again and back up when you're getting quieter and so on and so forth that's one thing another reason that a compressor can be really helpful is to make the overall audio sound louder so here for example if we measure how loud this is right now I'm just going to do a quick scan here we're in Adobe

Audition this is currently sitting at -32 lufs that's pretty quiet to put that in context in the European part of the world the broadcast television standard for loudness is it should come in at about minus 24 lufs in the United States it should come in at minus 23. lkfs basically the same thing as lufs so this is pretty quiet this is substantially quieter than that but the problem is if I just go and boost this up the problem is a lot of those transients start getting clipped they end up at zero and those will sound they'll play back in a distorted fashion it will sound really really unpleasant so I can't just crank it up but if I do well let's see if I Crank It Up what does that get us to that gets us to minus 25 I still need to get a little a little bit louder then that got us to minus 23. so but look what happened look at all that clipping that occurred now there's actually a Nuance here that I didn't explain um the the measurement is actually stereo in this case we're using a monophile to demonstrate this so yes I know for those that are very particular that wasn't the perfect example but nevertheless the idea is that with compression I want to be able to manage some of these transients maybe push them down a little bit so that when I boost the overall levels I won't have all that clipping and I'll be able to achieve my loudness

Target that's another purpose of compression and in fact on live streams

I think it's especially important to to be able to apply some sort of compression so that the listening experience is great for your audience and you can provide it at a reasonable loudness level and typically what we aim for here is about -23 on this live stream so all right so those are kind of the purposes now compression can be used for more than that too it in music especially it's used to really really sculpt the sound but even in spoken word it's used it can be used to to give somebody's voice a little bit more weight a little bit more warmth um and things like that so there's some some elements of compression that are more than just kind of the Practical being able to loudness normalize that's part of it but also being able to sculpt the sound a little bit when you really figure out how to use a compressor really really well so those are some of the the different things that you can do and that's why I want to talk about compression today because I think when I've taught compression in the past and in fact let's just pull up here let's get pull up a compressor and I'm not am I going to play yeah I'm going to play this back to you and I'm going to kind of tune in the compressor here and we're going to have all sorts of visual feedback we're going to see how much it's compressing um actually you know what let me let me mute the sound so you don't hear it I'm just going to set it visually and show you what why that's a problem why setting it purely visually is a problem so we're going to come back over to our mixer and I'm going to mute the computer sound come back over here to audition and let me go ahead and as I'm playing back I'm going to adjust the compressor so here we go okay

I'll stop it there so let's just take those settings and let's apply them oh good news um you know the collapse I can get rid of here I can just pull those down whoops those are just the sink claps for the video so I don't need those but look I got everything managed those I don't have those huge spikes sticking out anymore and what I can do here is let's do a scan again we're currently sitting at minus 35 and if this was stereo let's go ahead and convert it to stereo

I'd be aiming for -23 so that means actually let's do another measurement so right now we're going to be at minus 33 roughly right amount of K minus 32. so I need to boost it by about 9 DB to get about to where I want to be for my loudness Target let's boost that there we go measure it again now where are we at we're at minus 23.32 brilliant are true Peaks at minus 3.5 so we've got plenty of Headroom there we're not going to clip even after compressing it and exporting it as a lossy format in the video Let's listen to it now and see how it sounds let me go back to the mixer and we'll unmute the computer which is right here and then we'll come back on over play a little bit of that both the focals my regular mixing monitors and also the JBL 104 BTS and what we found is that they weren't substantially different now yes I can definitely hear a difference and yes there's closer to your listening position your ears that's how we found they actually sounded the best we got the most out of them it's actually not the worst I've heard but that's also not the sweetest sound that I've heard either and let me just kind of go back let's unless undo command Z command Z command

Z command Z um and let's pop that compressor back in here again so I'm going to come down here and the type of compressor I mean you can use any compressor this this one just has lots of visual feedback which is why I showed it so we could we could tweak things around so let's let's go like a really fast release in a fast attack we really want to take these and pull them down fast let's let's just play that a little bit and see how that sounds while I'm out and about so I think that's really kind of the bottom line I wanted to try and put that into a perspective that makes sense obviously in a review we can't just play them back and you can it doesn't really work all that well for you to hear them through another mic and then process through

YouTube but hopefully that gives some perspective on what these will do for you they have an integrated Power Amp so there's 30 watts per speaker so again it's you can with the uh there's some of my mistakes in my recording but nevertheless you heard an example of what it sounds like when it's really really over compressed and what it um again not a great sound so let's go on over to our slides again and let's just talk about a couple of things here so first of all what is amplitude again we mentioned we mentioned that what amplitude is has to do with how tall those waveforms are how close in digital audio at least how close they get to 0

DB okay so that's amplitude and that's what we're generally trying to manage when we're working with a compressor or at least at a practical level that's what we're changing we're changing the amplitude of the tallest amplitude parts of the waveform when we're using a compressor and um just to do that there are several compressor settings that you'll almost always see so there is the threshold so the threshold is basically you choose a level DB full scale when you're working with a digital compressor and essentially what you're saying is for the compressor don't do anything until the amplitude of the audio exceeds gets louder than or goes above this threshold that's the point at which the compressor starts to work okay and then the attack refers to how quickly it starts to work once it passes that threshold and the release is how quickly it lets go it stops compressing after the audio amplitude comes back down below the threshold all right and then the ratio actually I need to slow down so let's let's do a review there threshold is basically where you tell the compressor to start kicking in and when the amplitude exceeds that threshold um then the compressor will start the attack is how quickly it starts to apply its compression and releases how quickly it lets go and stops compressing after the audio goes back down below the threshold okay and then ratio is how much it compresses the audio that does go above the threshold so for example if my if I have my my compressor set to a four to one compression ratio and we get the amplitude goes 4 DB above that threshold in essence what will happen is it will actually take those four DB and compress them down to Just One DB above the threshold so that's that's one way to think about it in Practical terms so the ratio is like how how much compression it does attack is how quickly it starts to compress once the audio exceeds that threshold and releases how quickly it lets go of the compressing once the audio amplitude goes back down below the threshold so with that let's let's pause there are there any questions in the chat that we need to take a look at let's go ahead and pop those up and take a look at those there's an unrelated question you're going to come back to that um um yeah let's come back to the unrelated questions but here's a few okay a few comments

Jake I always talk about compression on vocals is bringing the quiet Parts up

Peaks will always be controlled with gains so really we're talking about The Valleys in the waveform lowering dynamic range I think that's a good way to think about it definitely lowering dynamic range you do you want to make it easier so that at a given volume setting for your audience they'll be able to understand everything that's the important thing the reality is with with the human voice there can be a lot of dynamic range so much so in fact that you um if you were to set the game on your recording so that the loudest Parts say you have an opera singer so the loudest parts are not going to clip when you're doing a digital recording then the quiet parts are going to be so quiet that very few people can hear them if they go into a whisper it's going to be really hard for them to hear the audience to hear the whisper so that's a great way Jake to think of it um is that we're going to manage our the you know the highest amplitude things initially at least we're going to handle the highest amplitude things by our set by setting our game and then we are going to use that compression to pull that down and then we can use makeup gain to bring it all back and once we've compressed it and leveled it out so that it's a little bit more even you don't have these big transients sticking out then you can boost the overall level with makeup gain which is another thing you'll typically see in most compressors so that they're the the loudest parts and the quieter parts are closer there's less dynamic range and yet it's all loud and loud enough for everybody to hear everything so that's a great way to put it thanks for that Jake audio Buffs tonight is our church's

Christmas musical I'll be using 42 mics our sound system will be moving a lot of air yes and again it's not like wind but it is be it'll be vibrating a lot of air if you want to think of it in those terms I'm excited for you audio buff that'll be fun and I wish you all the best on that cool uh Christopher I forget do you normally have compression dialed in on your shelf or channel for your live stream yes in fact you're hearing some compression right now my voice is being compressed right now and that's in fact why when I whisper you can probably hear that just fine but also when I get a little bit louder it's managing that at the same time so yes okay cool all right let's go back and just again let's go and review these settings here really quickly threshold is where you set you can move the threshold up or down in terms of DB full scale starting at zero you can move it down and anytime a the audio amplitude exceeds that threshold the compressor starts doing its work the attack is how quickly it starts doing it the release is how quickly it lets go of the compression once the amplitude goes back down below the threshold and the ratio is how much compression it does when it does go above the threshold when the audio does go above the threshold the waveform how much does it squash it down in the say for example a one-to-one ratio it does none it doesn't do any compression if you go to a two to one ratio then for every two DB that go above the threshold it's going to squash that down to 1 DB so that's a mild amount of compression if you go eight to one and ratio of eight to one every eight DB that goes over the threshold will be squashed down to one that's quite a bit more compression in fact you're starting to get into the territory of a limiter at that point and usually most limiters are somewhere in the 12 minus or the somewhere in the 12 to 1 to 20 to 1 to even a heart like a brick wall limiter sometimes you'll hear that term sometimes that's an Infinity to one ratio so brick wall limiter will let literally nothing through it just stops the audio amplitude right there wherever you set that threshold so those are the different types of ways we typically control a compressor or a limiter which by the way are kind of just the same thing with at two different extremes like a compressor is going to be much milder a limiter is basically just a really much more extreme compressor so all right so those are the settings so let's do something let's actually get rid of all the visual well actually let's go back to the to the Mac again here really quickly and on the Mac here so this compressor has plenty of visual cues let me show you so I'm going to go ahead and play this back that's really kind of the bottom line I wanted to try and put that into a perspective that makes sense obviously in a review we can't just play them back and you can it doesn't really work all that well for you to hear them through another mic and then prop so we have these visual cues here's we have the the gain reduction here we have [Music] um we you know you can see where the threshold is set right here we have this set with a soft knee that's another concept that where we're not going to really cover a whole lot today but um when this is basically the threshold here so when the audio amplitude exceeds this that's when this compressor started in this red line was showing how much it was was compressing for each of those we have our ratio here set three to one right now let's go ahead and increase that let's uh give a really extreme example here process through YouTube but hopefully that gives some perspective on what these will do for you foreign we use sonarworks sound ID reference kit to measure the output of both the focals my regular mixing monitors and also the

JBL 104 BTS and what we found is that they weren't substantially different now yes I can definitely hear a difference and yes there how's that sound to everybody Danny just gave me two thumbs down on that one awful sound over compressed by far really not transparent at all definitely affecting the overall sound of the the spoken word so I think typically for let me just give you some kind of starting points there's no magic numbers I can give you that will work in every single circumstance but I would say that for most dialogue a ratio of 2 to maybe four to one is pretty it's a pretty good place to start in most cases if you're trying to manage transients a little bit threshold is going to change on every single recording there is absolutely no magic number there and for me that's where really using your ears and listening to here when it's doing things is is really important again the attack has to do with what you're trying to accomplish now with music a lot of times for example with maybe if you're recording a drum maybe let's say a snare drum you might want to let the attack of that snare drum through the compressor you might not want to compress that too much you want that crack but you might want to compress the tail of the sound of the snare drum being hit and that's where you might move for example to a slower attack time but for dialogue you know it can start we're gonna we're gonna listen and hear how the attack changes the sound in just a minute here when we have Danny start reading some

Sherlock Holmes for us and we're going to go and and try adjusting the compressor settings release is an interesting one too with spoken word you heard when we move this release really fast it started to have and when we kind of adjusted some of the other settings as well started to have this sort of pumping sound to it let me play that again and listen for that pumping sound it's almost like the voice is going you can really hear the compressor working let's do that again start right here much lighter weight that's because all of the electronics in the power amp are in the main speaker 30 watts per Channel as I said Tiny footprint overall and they have what's I think really interesting is their coaxial design so here's a trick okay I think you can hear that um that was what Danny gave us the two thumbs down on so so those are some of the things that you can see there now this one also has uh makeup gain is something you'll hear a lot you can do it manually uh well actually this one is um yeah you can do that manually here I don't want to get into the too much into the details here this is wet gain versus dry gain but wet gain is the process signal what what the compressor has done and you can just boost that up however much you choose to or there's also this

Auto gain setting it'll automatically basically try to keep it at the same overall loudness um and so it's going to apply after you've done your compression and you've brought some of those those Peaks down overall your audio levels will get a little bit quieter and the auto gain will help boost that back up to where it was so in essence what you're using the compressor for in that case is just like what Jake was talking about where you're you're reducing the dynamic range in essence so all right let's switch on over to our other camera oh yeah we have some questions let's just pop out to the questions here and see what we've got going on okay this is two parts two parts uh homesick Mac I've heard I've started using compression in my live streams learning what are your precise compression settings for this live stream Curtis um well I'm glad you asked and I cannot tell you uh exactly but what I can tell you is that on the shelfer Channel I have the there is no separate attack and release setting there is a general speed setting so in the shelford channel which is an analog piece of audio gear um there is there are setting these are your speed settings and this applies to both the attack and the release and they're kind of basically like hard-coded numbers and I'd have to look up at the manual to see exactly what they are but you have a choice of fast medium fast medium medium slow slow and

Auto

I have it set to medium um I'm using a three to one compression compression ratio and I have the threshold set remember this is on a different scale than digital audio so digital audio is usually on a full a digital a DB full scale dbfs um this is an analog piece of gear so it's a different scale it's using a DBU scale and it is set to -2 sometimes I put push that up a little bit closer to zero but that that's where it's at right now so let's um so so my point actually of this lesson homesick Mac is that

I think it's really important instead of

I I understand the the reason for asking for settings that's a good place to start and then you can tune it in for your particular voice and your particular mic and how much gain you have applied and so on and so forth so um that's why I give you some kind of General guidelines but I would say this threshold you have to set the threshold based on your own voice and how things sound that's where you have to use your ears a lot ratio I think again for spoken word typically between two to one to four to one is probably generally where you want to be assuming um like I'm assuming here that you're trying to do compression that's fairly transparent you're trying to make it so that it's not super obvious and it doesn't sound fatiguing for your audience to listen to unlike that example I gave just a moment ago here attack I usually set relatively fast for spoken word again because I'm mainly in this particular case if I'm just trying to reduce dynamic range I go fairly fast on the attack and then on the release

I go somewhere between I mean the fastest I would ever go on the release typically for at least for my voice is about 150 milliseconds usually I move it closer to 250 maybe 300 milliseconds if you go farther out the nice thing about a fast attack and a slow release is generally it doesn't sound like it's been super compressed the problem is if you make that release too slow then every time there's a breath in between words it's going to compress that as well because it still hasn't let let go of the compression yet it's still doing the compression even when you take a breath so there's work there's where kind of the art and listening is really really really important and that's going to differ based on a person's Cadence how quickly they speak um so that's why that's why you know typically I say there are no hard and fast settings that I can just give everybody that they can set once and there are a ton of video people can't tell you how many video editors are like just tell me the settings and then they put it in as a default on all of their video timelines and they forget about it and they never talk about it again and they never look at it again and the problem is is that when they get different voices in there or even the same voice on a different day and maybe the gain setting got changed a little bit during the recording those settings don't apply anymore they may actually be more destructive more more damaging than helpful and so that's why it's really important to just spend a little time practicing is not all of you can do it every single one of you can hear well enough to do this effectively and we will demonstrate that in just a minute so that's a fantastic question homesick

Mac I'm so glad you asked it

Darren says his compression always applied at the beginning of your signal chain um yeah if it's a vocal and specifically in the case of vocals not necessarily um a lot of times I'll have a I may have an EQ before it

I might do another round of EQ after

EQ can be used for a lot of different things too just like a compressor we were talking earlier EQ can be used for fixing problems for example resonances that is a combination of somebody's voice and a particular microphone or perhaps in a in a particular room uh so EQ can be used to come to perhaps solve or and reduce some of those resonances before compression and then you might use another round of compression after or sorry another round of EQ after the compressor in some cases to sweeten the audio even more so um and to kind of scope the sound a little bit more so it depends um Darren to answer your question but typically I'll do the the repair EQ before the compression and then the sweetening EQ after the compression is usually how I think about it mark to clarify ratio example four to one is for every 4 DB reduced by 1 DB so the 12 DB over threshold is reduced 3 DB yes

I think if yeah I think the math is about right there so yeah that's that's a that's about right

I think that's daddy's taking a look through the the chat here so yes Mark I think you're spot on there another question from Drew should I apply compression to in the uad Apollo or in the atem mini pro um Drew I you could do it either place either one is perfectly valid where I would do it is in the universal audio Apollo personally because I think the compressors there are um I I I that would just be my personal preference you could do it either place but I think the the choice of compressors in the Apollo are really pretty fun and they sound great and they tend to be fairly transparent again if you get them set right in fact we're going to use an analog compressor here in just a minute to illustrate our point of using your ears as opposed to trying to just look at the waveforms and use the visual cues so I would go to the Apollo but either way can work maybe a question for later from Thomas do you have different guidelines for setting with a look-ahead compressor or any new things to look out for so the question is specifically about look ahead um good question there there are some other considerations there I don't know we'll probably get to that today Thomas but let that's a good question I think I'd like to come back and address that at some point as well so look at compressors in essence usually something that they can look ahead in the digital file and see what's coming and kind of prepare for that um so anyway we'll come we will come back to that at some point we have a couple others that we'll come back to later okay a couple other questions that we'll save for the Q a little later on so with this let's go ahead and switch on over to the other camera here and we are going to take a look at this this is a an analog compressor here and we're going to have Danny Danny's microphone is connected to this and she'll be again reading some Sherlock Holmes but before we do that I want to just kind of run through some of the settings here now this one's a little different you'll notice so here for example let me just drop the this is the ratio setting here if I set it to one to one here's a quiz how much compression is it going to do

Downing answers zero compression it's not going to do any compression and she's right and you might ask well why do you even have a one-to-one ratio setting if you if it's not going to do any compression and the answer is a kind of a Nuance for this particular unit itself this is an analog piece of gear with uh um vacuum tubes for some of the electronics some Transformers so that the compressor itself actually colors the sound to some extent as the sound moves through it so that is a weird kind of situation here where it actually imparts some color just going through the compressor even if it's not doing any compression there's also a bypass setting so we can just turn the compressor off all together if we wanted to do that now here's attack and you can see it's very vague it's fast all the way to the right and slow all the way to the left it's not telling you how fast it's not telling you the number of microseconds or milliseconds same with the release it's fast all the way to the right and it's slow all the way to the left again no indication about what that means this is a classic analog compressor this is how they did it and I think there's some advantages to it too because it really forces you to use your ear to understand what's going on as opposed to relying on a number we then have we have our ratio we already talked about that but then we have no threshold and we have this input and output instead so what gives what does that mean well you'll see here actually on the unit itself it calls this an 1176 limiting amplifier and so what's interesting about this is that when instead of a a threshold that you adjust directly what you do is you increase the input level to boost the overall level so that the the amplitude will run into that threshold okay so it's a little bit different way of thinking about it um

I'm going to turn the output for now down to zero so that's that's how you change the ratio in essence as you you push more like you push the levels of the audio up as they go into the compressor so that they will bump up against that Threshold at some point and that threshold to be honest actually changes to some extent when you um when you change the ratio here that's the kind of non-linearity you're experiencing with this kind of compressor so let's go ahead and have Danny start reading I'm going to go ahead and mute myself just so that we're not picking up a lot of room noise and Danny's we're gonna have Danny read a paragraph let's do one paragraph and so you can hear what it sounds like with no compression so here we go

I will tell you then what occurred in your house last night your niece when you had as she thought gone to your room do you have my mic on because I'm not hearing myself in okay your niece when she had when you sorry your niece when you had as she thought gone to your room slipped down and talked to her lover through the window which leads into the Stable Lane his foot marks had pressed right through the snow so long had he stood there she told him of the Coronet his Wicked lust for gold kindled at the news and he bent her to his will

I have no doubt that she loved you but there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves and I think that she must have been one she had hardly listened to his instructions when she saw you coming downstairs on which she closed the window rapidly and told you about one of the servants escapades with her wooden legged lover which was all perfectly true your boy Arthur went to bed after his interview with you but he slept badly on account of his uneasiness about his Club debts okay so that's where we're starting I had to adjust some things here since we're not applying any compression yet so you could hear it really well and since we're bypassing the compressor um it wasn't doing this additional amplification here so I had to boost the levels a little bit over here on the pre-amplifier okay so that's where we're starting from and it's actually not bad the reality though is if Danny decided to do a really dramatic performance there would be some really loud parts that might be at risk of clipping so we'd have to turn the gain down and then when she got to the delicate uh Whispering bits then you may not be able to hear her say for example if you're listening back in your car to the audiobook of the barrel Coronet by

Sherlock Holmes as presented and performed by Danny so that's what we're trying to address to some extent here so let's um let me what I want to do next is I want to just kind of start with the settings let's just kind of go to the I think of these maybe as Unity settings kind of the default settings there I'm going to be playing with that a little bit I'm just going to turn the ratio to four to one okay and I'm going to probably need to start with the input and the output right again right around there and just watch what I do to change the settings and while I'm doing that

Listen to How it changes Danny's Voice that's what we're looking to do here okay so I'm going to just do our first round here and let's go with that so with that I'm going to mute myself and then turn and then Danny is going to read do you want me to pick up where I left yeah we're going to have you pick up where you left off in the middle of in the middle of the night he heard a soft tread past his door so he rose and looking out was surprised to see his cousin walking very stealthily along the passage until she disappeared into your dressing room petrified with astonishment the lad slipped on some clothes and waited there in the dark to see what would come of this strange affair presently she emerged from the room again and in the light of the passage lamp your son saw that she carried the precious Coronet in her hands she passed down the stairs and he thrilling with horror ran along and slipped behind the curtain near your door when she could see what passed in the hall beneath he saw her stealthily open the window hand out the Coronet to someone in the

Gloom and then closing it once more hurry back to her room passing quite close to where he stood hid behind the curtain as long as she was on the scene he could not take any action without a horrible exposure of the woman whom he loved but the instant that she was gone he realized how crushing a misfortune this would be for you and how all important it was to set it right he rushed down just as he was in his bare feet opened the window sprang out into the snow and ran down the lane where he could see a dark figure in the Moonlight

Sir George burnwell tried to get away but Arthur caught him and there was a struggle between them your lad tugging at one side of the Coronet and his opponent at the other in the scuffle your son struck Sir

George and cut him over the eye then something suddenly snapped and your son finding that he had the Coronet in his hands rushed back closed the window ascended to your room and had just observed that the Coronet had been Twisted in the struggle and was endeavoring to straighten it when you appeared upon the scene okay thanks Danny good dramatic uh performance by the way thank you very much appreciate that okay so let me just uh kind of debrief a little bit on what we changed there you'll notice when we first started it sounded very obviously compressed in a really unpleasant sort of way so um what was going on there I have to remember where the settings were I believe that the attack was slow or medium the release was medium the input was fairly High and the output was about medium there too by the way this meter that we have right now is set to gr which means gain reduction so what it's showing us is how much gain reduction the compressor is doing during the during its work here so that was where things sounded really kind of weird so what was happening is that when Danny would start to get louder it was taking a while before it would start to kick in and it was taking a medium amount of time to let go once it dropped back down below the threshold but this compression this essentially this threat this is the equivalent you can think of this as the ratio in this case the input level we were pushing it way too hard and it was compressing in fact if we have Danny go and do that again Watch the needle and you will notice it's almost entirely pegged against the left meaning it's doing massive amounts of compression continue on all right is it possible gasp the banker you then roused his anger by calling him names at a moment when he felt that he had deserved your warmest thanks he could not explain the true State of Affairs without betraying one who certainly deserved little enough consideration at his hands he took the more chivalrous view however and preserved her secret and that was why she shrieked and fainted when she saw the Coronet cried

Mr holder oh my God what a blind fool I have been and his asking to be allowed to go out for five minutes the dear fellow wanted to see if the missing piece were at the scene of the struggle how cruelly I have misjudged him when I arrived at the house continued homes I at once very carefully went very carefully around it to observe if there were any traces in the snow which might help me I knew that none had fallen since the evening before and also that there had been a strong Frost to preserve impressions okay so there you can see what's happening now what's interesting on these the like a vintage compressor like this in some respects the input level does the amplification so you don't really need uh well actually I guess the output is more like the makeup game you can think of the output as the same as makeup gain and you can think of the input roughly it's not exactly the same but roughly like the threshold setting so those are the the differences we're seeing here and you can see with Danny's Voice we were able to get to a fairly um we were able to reduce the dynamic range enough so that it was fairly even even with the dramatic performance issues by the way you're doing a very good job on that um so thanks for that but we were able to manage some of those transients the big the bigger Peaks the taller Peaks um and we were able to you know we brought it in fairly quickly here and then had a release it was kind of medium-ish and um we we brought this input level down quite a bit just so that we weren't hitting up against we weren't compressing every last thing um I also experimented a little bit with the release time here again if you leave the release time too long the breaths can become much more prominent especially with you know if you're using a compressor live where you don't have an opportunity to go back in and attenuate any of the breaths so the the release you know you kind of have to dial that in a little bit more so we ended up somewhere around a little faster than the mid setting and again the idea here is in the beauty of using something where you don't have all the numbers I mean these numbers are kind of just arbitrary I think the nice thing about having the numbers is you have to rely on your ears so there's some definite benefits to that okay let's take a pause and let's go to the chat and see what questions we have out in the chat here we'll go back to the main camera foreign 's gonna scour through things there see what we've got okay from Jake I love the sound of the 12 to 1 ratio on the 1176. well we can try that um shall we shall we give that a go let's switch back over to the compressor this is an 1176 compressor from universal audio so I'm gonna uh

I'm gonna go ahead and mute myself and

Danny's going to keep on reading

I passed along the tradesman's path but found it all trampled down and indistinguishable just beyond it however at the far side of the kitchen door a woman had stood and talked with a man whose round Impressions on one side showed that he had a wooden leg I could even tell that they had been Disturbed for the woman had run back swiftly to the door as was shown by the Deep toe and light heel marks while wooden leg had waited a while and then gone away

I thought at the time that this might be the maid and her sweetheart of whom you had already spoken to me and inquiry showed it was so I passed around the garden without seeing anything more than random tracks which I took to be the police but when I got into the Stable Lane a very long and complex story was written in the snow in front of me there was a double line of tracks of a booted man and a second double line which I saw with delight belonged to a man with naked feet I was at once convinced from what you had told me that the latter was your son the first had walked both ways but the other had run swiftly and as his tread was marked in places over the depression of the boot it was obvious that he had passed after the other okay thanks for that Danny so that one um you can hear when when the when we did hit transients there it was compressing them a fair bit more so when you get up into that 12-1 you're really treating this a little bit more like a limiter um again that there's a kind of a fuzzy line between the two but um that's that's what we were hearing there so thanks for that Jake okay we'll go back to our main camera here and we'll take a look at the chat and see what else we've got out there

Drew thank you so much for the Super

Chat very very much appreciated thanks so much all right Glenn are you using just balance cable or a cloud lifter um let me just describe um I'll describe my audio chain and downies so Danny is on a Shure ksma dynamic microphone so that's one of the newer Dynamic microphones produced by sure that's coming into the universal audio 6176 which is a channel strip it has both a preamplifier in it and it has the compressor in it and there is no Cloud lifter that's going the output the line output of that is going into the Canon c200 camera that's where it gets converted into digital and and uh kind of lined up with the video and then that goes into the

A10 Mini and then that is connected to my computer and streaming out over OBS to

YouTube so that's the that's Danny's signal chain my signal chain is this

Earthworks ethos microphone which is right here and then that's going into the Rupert name design shelford Channel no no Cloud lifter or nothing like that so that's a pre also a preamplifier an

EQ and a compressor and then that goes line out into the Canon c200 and the same signal chain from there so that's exactly what you're hearing today Glenn and yes just a balanced adds a lot of sibilance uh oh sorry adds a bit of sibilance yes yes that's another thing to watch for when you're doing compression you can change the sibilance so you want to listen for that as well we'll come back to that in just a moment here you can actually emphasize sibilance so it can be something you want to watch for and in fact that's one of the things at the tubes so that the tube compressors instead of using transistors it uses vacuum tubes the old school tubes that we used it before there was such a thing as transistors this uses that and those imparts um some harmonics and some other coloration that also has some

Transformers in it for isolation and the

Transformers also impose a little bit of color so there are definitely some things it's changing the Timbre of the voice a bit as well that's that's a reason like a lot of musicians get really excited about all this analog gear spend a lot of time playing with it because you can really scope the sound Mark says I think there is confusion regarding bi and two for four to one compression every 4 DB over the threshold again would be reduced by 3 DB down to 1 DB passing over the threshold okay thank you great Mark appreciate that and and confusion regarding buy and two

I think what it would be reduced to okay and the ratio by which it's reduced oh yes it's reduced by okay I follow what you're saying now it's reduced by 3 DB down to 1 DB passing over the threshold thank you very much for the clarification completely follow you now yes I completely agree can the attack be too fast on voice will that make it too Punchy yes absolutely it can and we should we should experiment with that as well let's do that as well and listen to what that does to Danny's Voice we'll go ahead and switch back over to the compressor okay oh wait just

I think you you yes you agreed with this but just he just clarified okay yes and and thank you Mark again so in Mark

Holloway's example 12 DB over the threshold at a four to one compression ratio would be reduced down to 3 DB and not reduced by 3 DB correct okay cool okay so now let's switch on over to the other camera here and we can take that chat off the screen thank you again mark all right and I'll mute myself and Danny will continue on

I followed them up and found they led to the hall window where boots had worn all the snow away while waiting then I walked to the other end which was 100 yards or more down the lane I saw where boots had faced round where the snow was cut up as though there had been a struggle and finally where a few drops of blood had fallen to show me that I was not mistaken boots had then run down the lane and another little smudge of blood showed that it was he who had been hurt when he came to the high road at the other end I found that the pavement had been cleared so there was an end to that clue on entering the house however I examined as you remember the sill and the framework of the hall window with my lens and I could at once see that someone had passed out I could distinguish the outline of an InStep where the wet foot had been placed in coming in I was then beginning to be able to form an opinion as to what had happened a man had waited outside the window someone had brought the gems the deed had been overseen by your son he had pursued the thief had struggled with him they had each tugged at the Coronet their United strength causing injuries which neither alone could have affected he had returned with the prize but had left a fragment in the grasp of his opponent okay yeah I think that was a really great way to describe it is that when you do use that really fast attack it will sound punchier definitely have a punchier sound to it as opposed to a more mellow and transparent sound to it so yes that's another reason why it's really I think important to adjust that attack and use your ears to figure out what you would do here in our case with Danny's Voice I probably would go somewhere here under the mids if I wanted a mellower sound if

I wanted it to be a punchier sound a little bit more in your face then you would go with a faster attack but you can adjust that to some extent there but that's where using again using your ears as opposed to just using some settings that somebody told you that some guy on the internet told you like even Curtis

Judd told you to use a whatever use your ears to find what sounds the best and accomplishes what you needed to accomplish okay cool let's go back out to the chat see what we've got going here today uh hi Curtis the focusrite Scarlet solo works on the Chromebook I'm so glad to hear it I'm glad that that's working well for you and also thank you so much for the Super Chat uh and happy recording get out there and make some great sound I'm excited for you

I remember my first audio interface I was so excited I got a Roland I don't even remember the model number they don't make it anymore it was a pretty good little audio interface just a USB 2

Channel anyway it's pretty good Linda says I like this 12 to 1 setting through my laptop speakers very good again that's one of the things you can really um you can really you can sculpt the sound it's amazing how much it changes the of person's voice and Linda also notes that it sounded breathier with a fast attack interesting yes okay very beginning okay Danny's going back to the start because we had some questions early on so we're gonna go take a look at those first up from Kami uh question what picture profile Luts do you use for client work and YouTube videos I don't use Luts um

I don't even usually film in log profiles I'd have you know sometimes I do but even when I do I typically will grade those individually so I don't use a Lut typically so there's a short version picture profiles usually on the so on the Canon

I'm filming so here's the c200 this is just straight out of the camera Rec 709 nothing special beyond that I think for me it's more about the lighting and getting things dialed in as far as um exposure and creating the lighting design that I want so I don't usually use any sort of picture profile it's just Rec 709 into standard on the Blackmagic pocket 6K and actually that by the way that applies not only to Canon c200 but for our regular videos on or sorry the not regular videos our videos on the main

Channel I usually use the Canon C70 and that's also usually set to rec 709 so I don't actually use Lots generally uh Daniel says I know that on voice a fast release can cut off the end of words but what would a two fast attack do to a voice it's less noticeable when

I play with it does it make the voice too Punchy and I think the answer to that is based on what we I was just hearing on Danny's Voice yeah it does make that it gives it a little bit more of an in-your-face sound um so it didn't sound quite as transparent is is how I would probably term it but yes I think that definitely yeah definitely you know get a recording and start playing with a compressor you can really hear you'll start to hear the nuances it's a lot of fun actually

Matt Ruff says off topic did you see the new sound devices a20 Nexus 8 channel digital wireless receiver looks really great really expensive as well I did see it um I don't have a need for so I'm not planning to buy it but um yeah it looks really neat I mean it's so small eight channels um really small I can get up to eight channels right now on the SL2 if I had all the receivers to support it I have two a ten receivers that are actually currently getting upgraded to a20 hardware by the way I sent those into sound devices to get those upgraded to the new version and that'll give me four channels of Wireless which is usually plenty for me but yeah for those that need a lot higher Channel counts that a20 Nexus looks really neat and you had two other people asking you what you thought of that uh what I think of it I think it's fantastic yay yay for the people that need lots of Wireless channels um it looks like a fantastic device I would love to play with it maybe I'll get a chance to do that but yeah it looks fantastic

I'm what I'm waiting for next what I'd love to see from sound devices I have no Insider information about what they're working on or not working on is I would love to see a new a20 transmitter like the regular size a20s or like the A10 transmitters but an a20 version that has a wider tuning range and all the new features the gain forward and and all of that that's what

I'd love to see next the writing of the wall seems to suggest that's probably going to happen too

Darren nice uh demo of applying compression thanks for the info have a good work week thank you so much Darren and I wish the same to you that you have a fantastic week and that you're able to make some great sound thanks for the

Super Chat [Music] it's for c200 has a balanced xrm how would you rate its converters um yes it does have two XLR inputs and I would say that for a camera it's converters are actually surprisingly decent um yeah that's exactly what you've been hearing on the live stream here for I can't remember how long now several at least eight or nine maybe 12 months maybe longer we got the c200 right around this just before the pandemic started so I think we got it at the start of 2020 or maybe the very end of 2019 and then it kind of became the main live stream camera not too long after that so it's actually probably been closer to two years um but yeah not bad good enough for a live stream is what I would say uh I don't like the sound of the atem compressor is too squashy the limiters are great in the atem just not the compressor thanks for that Jake I you know that's

I think there's going to be some Nuance there they're digital um and they're not a lot they're not yeah they're not they're not going to have the coloration that the uh that the analog type compressors have they're not going to have the sweetness necessarily that you're going to find on the analog compressors okay and also did we Derek thank you so much for the Super Chat yeah Danny has a question do you want your mic on let's let's turn your mic on no no Danny asked if we had any pre-submitted questions and we did not have any this week so we're good there it's time isn't it ah we were just getting started I was having so much fun that I lost track of time

I hope that this was helpful for all of you thank you so much for those of you that were able to join us today and um I hope that you're able to get out there and make some great sound and use a compressor compressor in a in a very delicate way for spoken word audio I think it's really important to use your ears to dial in that sound exactly where you want it and where it sounds the best so fairly transparent is usually the strategy I'm going for and hopefully this was helpful in kind of getting you started on that Journey if you've if you haven't already headed out on that

Journey already so with that get out there make some great sound and we'll talk to you again next week take care everybody [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you