SH Spotlight Compression & limiting in recording, mixing & mastering process: What is it? The good, bad, the ugly

EVOLVIST COUNT ME IN!

 

I can understand why people think this though. Watch enough "CSI"-type shows or spy caper movies and you'll invariably run across the geek with a white coat who magically enhances a crappy source, be it a videotape image or audio clip. I'm no audio expert, but I do know something about digital image capture and editing. Contrary to what you've seen on screen, there is no way to "enhance" a blurry image. A filter may make it "look better" but if the information isn't there to begin with, no program in the world will help. I'm assuming the same holds true for audio information but again I'm no expert.

 

Interesting.

The first time I ever heard a hi-res recording was at Dan Schwartz's house. It was a German baritone singing solo but with the mics at quite some distance. My comments upon hearing it were that it sounded like it was close mic'd because I heard all the breath sounds and lip smacks as if it was a close mic'd recording, but I also head plenty of hall ambiance because it was not.

However, your point about compression bringing up these types of sounds is valid. That's one of the neat things about compression. It can bring up the lower level sounds which normally are not so easily heard.

 

Well, as a professional mastering engineer with lots of skills in audio restoration I have to say that it is possible to enhance a bad source by far. Sure, it depends on the source material and sometimes there are very few ways to get it slightly better, but I also restored and remastered very bad-sounding recordings to bring some brilliance and clarity back. You have to spend a lot of time and patience to get it right. Every little improvement is worth the work.

 

Compression is a great thing I think. It always depends on the music, the punch that shall be on the recording and so on...but in the end it is an essential tool to work on mixes and masterings - if you handle it gently and fittingly.

 

As an amateur recording engineer mostly interested in recording my own stuff - how do I get increased volume from a mix, without limiting?

I struggle with getting my recordings loud enough to sound good on other systems/bad systems not cranked. In my studio, or on my stereo, or on my headphone rig - I'm pretty happy (Although I'm always learning and improving, and remixing!) - but until I use more limiting or compression than I would like, I'm not able to get anything close to a normal loudness level (not a shameless plug, but my soundcloud in my signature below has examples)

Hopefully one day I will be able to produce great sounding, dynamic recordings of myself and friends

I have decent equipment - Universal Audio Apollo and UA/Waves plugins

 

Hall ambience is exactly what is missed from many of these recordings, to the the extent that because I listen to a lot of close-mic'd music a properly mic'd instrument can sound unnatural to me.

I very much like the ECM house engineering style, for example, where instruments (not always, but often) hang in the air with very little in the way of natural echoes to establish the original performing environment. There's an intimacy to those recordings because they sound as though the instrument is being played directly to the listener, not to some other real or imagined audience, and it can be quite difficult after listening them to switch to, say, a normal chamber music recording where the instruments have been mic'd at a conventional distance with all the room echo in place.

 

Isn't that the Deutsche Grammophon way Steve? My understanding was they attempt to capture the hall ambiance as well as the actual performance, which I never quite understood, frankly.

 

What causes that dreaded "clangy" sound...?

 

When the the piano, on a recording, sounds incoherent with complex runs, with notes having a noted KLANG like quality during louder
passages.

 

Hence my statement in another thread (or several!) that not all compression is bad, and that dynamic range isn't everything.

 

I feel a good comparative example of the effects of compression is Steely Dan's AJA album, and the Cisco remaster. I believe Steve, you had noted many years ago that the Kevin Gray Cisco reissue is more judicious in it's use of compression, and as such, has a very different sound. I love the original version very much too-it's exciting, but the Cisco has a noticeably more relaxed presentation that seems to let more detail reveal itself.

 

Because compression raises the level of a fading sound, it increases apparent sustain. And the sound of a room. These are both pleasing things. Honestly compression gets a bad rap. It's a completely essential tool for recording and mixing. It's great when it's not abused. And frankly, even compressor abuse has a time and place.

 

You know what you should do? You should just say screw it, and pick an album or song you worked on, or know the details about, and create a thread about your experience mastering it, or however much information you are allowed to divulge about it. Kevin, too! I know you have done that for stuff you've worked on for many years, but there are still things you've not posted about. There are people here who luuuuv the technical stuff. Might only be ten of us, but, so what?

 

Steve, I disagree..... many great albums were poorly recorded or mixed. Even an audiophile mastering can't change history. I don't buy only very well recorded albums... always music first!

 

Actually this I did know, for the simple reason that the first guitar I tried to play was a bass guitar, and the first thing I ever learnt about bass is that a compressor is regarded as essential for the bass effects chain.

This comes back to Our Host's comment about how few comments there have been to this thread. I honestly think that unless you've had occasion to happen across this sort of device in real life then it represents a level of technicality that people probably want to read about but don't feel secure talking about. Given that there are people here who have actually used compression/limiting in a relevant studio context, the rest of us probably have too much sense of self-preservatio to wade into a discussion that will only reveal our ignorance. But I'm confident that we all want to hear more from the 'people who know'.

Fortunately, the length of a thread does not always indicate its perceived importance here and it can only be better for a technical thread in the long term that it have a greater ratio of signal to noise.

 

Those are two perfect examples, and readily apparent to me even before I knew anything about the topic. Thanks Steve.

 

Sure. It definitely worked for "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Ticket to Ride," among many others.

I grew up in the 80s, so my first exposure to Beatles for Sale was the '87 mono CD, and I always thought the album sounded pretty bad. My Capitol "Red Album" cassette had the stereo Eight Days a Week, which sounded much better to me. Of course at that time I didn't realize the mono was mixed with more compression, and I just chalked it up to mono being inferior to stereo (ah, how much I've learned). Regardless, while the 2009 mono CD from the box (and the 2014 mono LP) are an improvement, overall I still prefer the stereo mix of Beatles for Sale.

 

I really hope you'll let us know when this is available, it sounds very interesting.

There's a load of stuff I'd like to try this on.

 

Coming from a classical music recording background, I had no understanding of compression. The first 4 or 5 rock albums I produced and engineered used no compression at all and I just panned the instruments so each one could be clearly heard. Everyone hated the sound of the CDs (although they were super dynamic) and the work I was getting started slowing down. These recordings are a joke when I listen to them now. They were thin, too clean, and had no rock n roll sound to them at all. I started hiring good engineers to mix (and master) the projects I was working on and slowly learned over the years how to track and mix with various vintage compressors. I never once worked with an artist who asked for a loud record, and early on I found a mastering engineer who did great work and never brickwalled. Compression is so much a part of the rock n roll sound, I had to learn this the hard way and had to stop listening to the hype about "compression is ruining music" that was the new hip thing to say 15 years ago. Once I figured out how to correctly use compression on individual tracks (vocals, guitar, bass, drums, etc) my mixes started making clients happy and it became easier to trust the mastering engineer to finish the sound with their ears/tools.