hey Chris Liepe here with how to use a compressor on your voice for singing it'll even things
out make you feel better and sound better when you're recording or doing things live
and if you want more help dialing in your voice click the link below and join my free singing
course I hope you get the foundations down so you can make great recordings perform confidently live
get all sorts of sounds out of your voice you never dreamed you could likely if you've ever
done recording you've run into the problem where you're either too quiet or you're too loud and
you end up getting this horrible sound out of your preamp this clippy sound or you're not heard over
the mix this is where compression comes in we're using a single compression this is a stock logic
compressor here are how these controls work first is threshold the threshold is the point at which
the compressor actually turns on I'm going to bring this down to minus 20 and this threshold
is going to start acting on my voice every time my voice gets over minus 20. but it has to work hand
in hand with the ratio the ratio dictates that for every numeric value I have this dialed into
so let's say three for every 3 DB my voice goes up above the threshold the compressor will only let
it go up One DB that's why it says here three two one so the higher the ratio the more compression
is acting on my voice now you can even see it right here as as this is sort of taking a real
time recording of my voice I'm at seven to one the knee is what allows this transition to happen
either smoothly or abruptly as I turn my knee up notice how it Smooths out the transition now if
the compressor is not either on or off after -20 which is where my threshold is set it is
gradually turning on or off now I want to add a little bit of gain but before I do that I
want to make sure that I'm not clipping on my preamp so I'm going to take all of this off I'm
just going to bypass this hey hey okay I'm too loud still I'm going to bring my volume down a
little bit and then I'm going to add my volume back with the plug-in test test test test test
test see I'm bringing my overall volume level up I'm making myself louder and quieter at the
same time you see that smooth out my knee a little bit I've dialed in my threshold
still a little too crunchy so what we're going to do is we're going to bring my threshold down
test test test one one now I'm just going to talk a little bit I want to adjust my threshold
make my knee come back just a little bit like that I'm going to adjust my
threshold so that even when I'm talking I'm just talking the compressor is acting on me
just a little bit and I'm going to increase my ratio just a little bit more and my makeup hey
you can see how as I get louder it's bringing it's not bringing the sound down it's taming it
be quiet as I add even more makeup one two three four it can be quiet or loud and I do not clip
it also has this effect of bringing my voice forward because I can be more expressive quieter
and louder it's always right here to The Listener attack is how long it takes the compressor to turn
on after the signal passes the threshold so right now it's set to 15 milliseconds which
is pretty short but for a voice that can be kind of percussive if you want to avoid clipping you
do want a pretty fast attack time if I slow it down you almost hear this thing happening
if I speed it up you can see this meter acts the gain reduction acts much quicker but you
never really want it at zero give yourself a little bit of time the release dictates how
long after the signal has gone below the threshold the compressor continues to act
so if I have a long long release time watch this meter long see that this will smooth
out your approach but can also result in pumping of your voice hey right because I
got there quickly I want this compressor to be responsive enough to deal to not be acting as
much on my quieter voice as it was on the louder voice it's all a timing thing hey hey foreign
I hope this was helpful and that you're inspired to try stuff like this in your
recordings to even out your vocals make them more present and sing more confidently