Comments

farss wrote on 3/9/2009, 8:30 AM
The track compressor is a different compressor to the wave hammer compressor. Not only are there different types of compressors where you put them in the signal chain has a signifcant bearing on how they work.
One important piece of advice would be to always look at the meters in the compressor. If it's never showing any gain reduction i.e. the signal is below the knee then it's doing pretty much nothing!
Can I respectfully suggest you do two things.

1) Take some time to learn how a compressor works.
2) Study the signal flow diagram in the Vegas manual.

I say this because there are millions of words written on this topic and there's people who've become legends through their innovative uses of compression.
Used correctly compression is a wonderful thing, used incorrectly it's a horror. There's no simple, single answer to your question without knowing a lot of specifics and even then you need to be the final judge of what sound suits you from the multiple all correct answers you'll get from the experts.

Bob.
L_Town wrote on 3/10/2009, 7:51 AM
Hi Bob. Thanks for responding. I have been reading lately about compressors and I know that they reduce the dynamic range in the audio but hear are the details on the audio track. My original audio track was recorded with a lapel mic. The levels were recorded low and I want to use a compressor to make it "appear" louder. I have tried just using increasing the volume but doesn't work very well.

On average, the levels are about -15db. At its loudest is at -4.6db and at its lowest around -28db. So as you can see the levels are all over the place. I have messed with the track compressor and Wave Hammer and gotten it sounding "ok". I know the compressor is working because the meter shows read when it's doing the gain reduction.

Right now it's set to normalize. Then I added the Wave Hammer. I have set the threshold to -24.7db. The ratio is 6.3:1. Attack is set to 5ms and release to 50ms. Using RMS with smooth saturation.

Any suggestions on setting the threshold or ratio? How do my settings look?
farss wrote on 3/10/2009, 3:07 PM
Settings look pretty good although my personal preference with speech would be for a lower ratio, no more than 3:1. I've gone a lot higher than that when it was a short advert kind of thing and we wanted a lot of punch.

Trick I use a lot is to add a buss, apply Wave Hammer to that and route the track to that buss. Then I might add some gain in the track header, say 12dB. Then I add a volume envelope and adjust the first node to -9dB. Now I've got an overall gain of 3dB going into the compressor on the buss i.e. I've 'normalize to the -4.6 peak with a bit to spare.

I then add nodes etc to the volume envelope so I can bring up the really quiet parts of the track easily as I have 15dB of gain available via the volume envelope. What the volume envelope is also letting me do is push the sound into the compressor. This can be good because when people talk quietly no matter how much you turn up the level normally it always sounds quiet compared to when they're talking loudly or it can help even out the differences between different speakers with soft and loud voices.

One thing though with this technique. You need to keep an eye out for interstage clipping. I always have the Wave Hammer FX open and keep an eye on the input level, if it goes seriously over I know I have to reduce my volume envelope's level at that point as I'll clip the signal before the compressor and it'll be distorted.

Bob.