>> We're continuing our conversation
about multi-stage compression here.
We're looking at a song from my album 6 tape.
These are my vocals in this tune,
and these are vocals that I self-cut actually on
this exact same rig that you
are hearing my voice on right now.
The compression is coming from
the Universal Audio LA-610 Mark 2,
which is an LA-2A style compressor.
My voice is actually quite dynamic.
I usually compress myself quite a bit on the way in,
but you may not necessarily need to have as much as I do
depending on how much dynamics
the vocal you're recording has.
I tend to sing quite quietly in
some places and really nearly scream in others.
But ideally,
you're cutting with some compression on the way.
That is the first stage of the multi-stage compression.
You would either be using an outboard compressor or
a real-time virtual compressor
that you're actually cutting.
To my knowledge, the only company doing that
is also Universal Audio through their console app.
But if you know about
some other companies that are doing similar things,
I would love to hear about that as well.
We're going to take a look at
the lead vocal on this song here.
I'm doing a little bit of multi-band compression,
which I like to use on a lot of things.
Let's just take a look at that first.
[MUSIC]
Yeah, you can see that it's doing a little bit of work,
probably no more than a negative three dB
of compression on any one band at
any one time and you don't necessarily need to
use a multiband compressor for your tracks,
but I'm just showing you what I do.
This is the more important one
I would say for you, especially,
this is your main compressor on
every individual channel of vocals.
I am using an LA-3A,
which I mentioned specifically in the course.
It's very easy to use because there's no attack or
release time and the ratio is set.
That's all just happening
automatically underneath the hood, which is great.
All you have to do is set
how much peak reduction you want
and then set your gain, and you're good to go.
Let's take a look at what that's doing.
[MUSIC]
As you can see there,
this thing is just getting kissed.
It's probably never doing more than
negative 2dB of compression.
That's because I knew I recorded
a lot of compression coming on the way in.
In your particular case,
I would say you might want to look at negative 3dB of
compression or something like that on
average for all the individual vocals.
But the whole idea of
multi-stage compression is that you're just doing
a little bit of compressing in
each stage and this perfectly illustrates that point,
really just kissing the compressor here.
As you can see,
all the vocals have
that multi-band compressor and then have that LA-3A.
These are all the individual vocals.
There's like eight or nine of them here.
Then those are all being bust to my vocal bus.
I also happen to have a dry vocal bus here too to
a little bit more the transients through,
as you can see, that's more than
main vocal bus.
But yeah, as you can see here,
all the individual vocals are going to Bus 7 and 8.
Then the vocal sub is
picking them up here at Bus 7 and 8,
and then I have a compressor there.
This is the last stage
of your multistage vocal compression.
In this case, I'm using this Metric Halo ChannelStrip.
In case you don't know, a channel strip
is just something that
has multiple things like
in the case of an outboard channel strip,
there would be a preamp, usually an EQ,
and then a compressor,
or a limiter,
or both, or an option to choose either or.
As you can see here, this channel strip
has a gate and a limiter,
which I'm not using in addition to
the EQ and compression which I am using.
Again, this last stage of compression is compressing
all of the vocals rather than each individual vocal.
What that has the advantage of doing
is making it so that when there's just one vocal,
or whether there's many vocals,
they're all going to be at approximately the same level.
Again, it just provides you
one more stage of compression to
make sure that you're getting a nice,
smooth, even product at the end.
Let's take a look at the chorus here and see what
this is doing to compress all of the vocals.
[MUSIC]
There you go.
Again, you don't necessarily need to
use any of these particular compressors.
That's not the point.
The point is that you're recording at
multiple stages on the way in when you're
actually cutting the vocal and then on
the individual tracks and then on the vocal bus
and each of those stages of compression
can be pretty small or can be a lot too,
depending on the circumstance.
Typically, if you just compress a little bit
in each of those stages,
you'll have a nice even product at the end.