Gary Blanchard
beloved, local musician
The new recording/mixing board has a compression knob. I've heard of it, but I really know nothing about it. So what does it do, and why should you do it?
I will likely want to continue to get him to produce my stuff.You will likely want a tutorial from Sonik.
Yeah, I always record with no effects and let Sonik do his thing. I do like to do a rough mix in the studio I can listen to while I wait for Sonik's mix. This new board will maybe allow me to do better rough mixes.In your case, Gary, I'm assuming that you are recording multiple tracks and leaving it to Sonik to mix them down and master them to stereo...if that is the case then leave the compression off and let him work with the raw tracks...
If you are going to be mixing tracks down yourself then some compression may be desirable to level out the dynamics if they are varied heavily or causing clipping in the mixer...
Compression works by creating a narrow envelope for the dynamics to exist in...it will raise the level of softer parts and put an artificial limit on the higher level parts, making the overall volume of a track stay at a relatively constant level...too much compression can squash the dynamics to a level that just kills all the life in it, and should be used as sparingly as possible...