One of the music signal processing effects that many people struggle to understand is the compressor, the reason they fail to understand it is because firstly with a compressor it is harder to hear it’s effect but also because they haven’t learnt why and what’s it for, this quick tutorial will quickly explain what a compressor is and hopefully put some people on the right track.

What Does A Compressor Do?
Putting a sound through the compressor will make the loudest parts of a sound quieter, reducing the volume gap between the louder and quieter parts of a sound. If you could see the waveform it is basically flattening the peaks down closer to the troughs. It is basically an automatic volume fader.

When Should I Use It?

1. Because the peaks of a sound are clipping (sending the volume into red) - compressing it will bring down these peaks and so no more clipping occurs and you have a better behaved sound.
2. Because you want to raise the quieter parts of a sound (such as the tail/sustain section of a sound) - A compressed sounds peaks are reduced and so therefore the overall volume of the sound can be pushed up via the output gain (see below), in effect making the quieter parts of a sound louder and because a sounds tail section is louder, it makes our ears perceive the whole sound as louder. (This technique can be used on the final mix to make the track loud). Also Advertisers use this on TV adverts so the sound is much louder, so you can hear it when your in the kitchen making a brew.
3. Because you want to emphasise the first part of a sound - Using the attack (see below) we can let the first part of a sound through uncompressed and then compress the rest of the sound (Making the sound more “Punchy”)

How Do I Use It?
The best way I can explain this is to go through each part of a typical compressor and tell you what each one does. These should be on most Hardware and Software compressors.

Threshold
This sets the volume level at which the compressor starts to do its compressing. Whenever the sound volume goes above the level of the threshold the sound gets compressed. Anytime the sound is below the threshold the compressor is doing nothing and the sound will stay the same volume.

Ratio
When the volume goes above the threshold it gets compressed and the ratio is by how much should it get compressed. 1/2 ratio is going to compress any volume above the threshold to 1/2 the amount for example if the threshold is 50dB and the sound going through the compressor is 70 dB. The sound will come out at 60dB. At 1/4 ratio it will come out at 55dB. 1/10 ratio 52dB.

Attack
This sets in milliseconds how fast the compressors reacts once the sound level goes above the threshold. Most of the time you will want to set this to a very low setting. As you set it higher will let more of the sound through which first breaks the threshold allowing you to place emphasis on these parts (commonly used on kicks to make them more punchy).

Release
This sets the release time that the compressor tops doing it’s compressing after the sound has dropped below the threshold, setting this too low can make the sound sound like it is pumping. Commonly used on dance style recordings as a wanted effect.

Knee
Not seen on all compressors, sometimes might be seen as a soft knee on/off button and on other compressors you can control it with a proper dial. The Knee is the time it takes for the compressor to reach the maximum ratio of compression once compression has started to set it. A soft knee will take more time to reach maximum compression.

Output Gain
This is where you can increase the overall volume after it has been through the compressor.

Common Mistakes

1. Compressing a recorded sound can cause any noise or hum in the background of the recording to become louder reducing the quality of the recording.
2. Too much compression applied doesn’t sound good. Sometimes a pumping like effect can be heard which can sound dreadful on the wrong sort of music. There is also quite a backlash from some people saying that some modern music sounds dreadful and of less quality because it’s so loud.
3. Removing the ups and downs of music on recordings that don’t need it. You won’t hear very much if any at all on classical music because you want to keep the very quiet sounds quiet to give more feeling and flow to the music.

Hopefully this should help you to use compressors easily and effectively, one last thing is to think about when in the effects chain you apply the compression. After or before reverb and delay effects can sound very different as your also raising the levels on those effects.

If anyone has anything to add or other ideas on how to use it, please add it to the comments and we’ll bring it up to the post and credit you.

Tutorial Written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

One thing I try to do when creating drums for my tracks is to really try and get a BIG sound. I love big fat drum sounds :-). The drum tracks are the first part of a track that I lay down and I believe that if I can get the drums to sound great to me before putting any other sounds on, I know that my track will sound great to me also. One way I try to get a great drum track is by manipulating every single drum sound and layering it up so for example my main snare sound could have as many as five or six different snare samples in there. These are my tips and also my routine that I use for creating multi layered drum samples.

I use the Redrum in Reason for my drum layering because if you flip it over you can link the gate out on one sample to a gate in on another sample. This means that when sample one gets hit all the samples linked through these gate outs/ins will play together. This means that I can then manipulate each drum sound individually on the front of Redrum and play them together very easily. Whatever software or hardware you use, you need some way of editing each drum sound you are going to layer as well as some easy way to play all sounds together. This should make drum layering a much easier process.

Now you need some samples and there are loads to be had for free around the internet (Free Sound Samples). I doesn’t matter if some of these drum sounds you download sound weak or sound too much like a drum machine as when we layer them up they will sound stronger and very different. You need a good selection of different hits organised into categories (Kicks, Snare etc) so that you can choose a few that you like to layer up easily.

I start off by loading a single hit and manipulate it to how I want it to sound. Usually this is by pitching the drum sound up or down, changing the length, change the tone etc. Just do what sounds good to you for that particular drum sound. Don’t be afraid to change it drastically, or edit it in a audio editor either.

Now I find another drum sound that sounds nice with my first sound, I link the samples together (explained above) and listen to them together. You want to get a nice sounding mix between these two drum sounds so you can hear them both at the level you want to hear each of them. Now edit our new drum sample exactly like we did with the first by changing the pitch etc until we find something that sounds like what we want and mixes nicely with the other drum sound (re-adjust the levels if you have to). Now repeat this by layering up even more samples until you are happy with the overall sound of all samples together.

After this add any processing (for example a bit of compression or EQ). The example above shows a very basic drum layering technique and the more you do this yourself the more you will find different combinations of samples that will sound great with each other and find your own techniques that give you your own sound.

Here are some more of my tips that I use for multi-layering certain drums.

• Multi-layering kick drums can be trickiest as when we add more and more kicks our drum sound can actually sound weaker and more muffled as they are all fighting for space. You can stop this from happening by EQing each kick to have different dominant frequencies. For example if you are layering 3 kicks, on kick one increase the volume of 30Hz to 60Hz (or decrease the frequencies outside this band), on kick two increase the volume of 80Hz to 120Hz and on kick three increase say 150Hz to 180Hz. This will give each of our kicks a different space in the mix between them.
• Try layering bass sounds with your kicks. Create a very quick bass sound so it’s the length of your kick, filter out any high frequencies and then layering it together with your kick can give a nice low end sounding kick if done properly.
• For snares reduce one sample in length so it’s very short with hardly any tail (a snare that sounds poppy or cracky at the start) and layer this with another sound that has a nice sounding tail will create a very nice effect. This works great too with layering different crash and ride cymbals as well as other drums.
• Pitch up and down the same sample. For example take sample one and pitch it down, then take the same sample in another channel and pitch it up. Try this with already layered samples, by exporting your multi layered samples then reimporting.
• and finally experiment with different drum sounds as much as you can, drum layering seriously increases the number of samples and styles of drum hits available to us for music production and is well worth having a mess around with.

There is a lot to the art of drum layering, but I think once you know the basics you will develop your own techniques and way of doing it and in the process the sound of your music will benefit and you will create your own sounding style by creating different drum sounds that others don’t have.

Tutorial written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

I used to make a lot of hard house music and one of the most common sounds in hard house and similar types of hard dance music is the hoover sound. Even though it is used a lot (sometimes too much) some people have trouble recreating this sound themselves and end up using samples. The original sound was made on the Roland Juno Synthesizer and I’ve even heard of people buying that synth just to create this type of sound and spending hundreds of their hard earned cash in the process. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to make a basic hoover without a Juno. If your not sure what a hoover synth is then play the sound below.

Click Here To Listen To The Final Hoover Sound

I made that hoover style sound above as an example for this tutorial using the Malstrom and the NN-XT sampler in Reason within a few minutes and I’m going to show you how to get that style of synth sound so you can make all the hoovers you require without a Juno and also so I don’t have to hear a hoover sample that I’ve heard hundreds of times before next time I listen to some new hard house/dance tracks.

The following tutorial is done in Reason but you should be able to reproduce this sound using any synthesizer or softsynth which is good at making some sort of nice fat lead sound.

Creating the Starting Sound
First we need to create a fat lead type sound, I shall leave you to choose one yourself here as most synthesizers should be able to create sounds which are good enough. I used the Malstrom in Reason, I chose the preset in the soundbank called EBM Lead and just turned off Filter A. Here is that sound, so you can get an idea of the sort of sound that you need to start off with.

Click Here To Download The Starting Sound

As you can see it’s nothing special, it is in fact just 2 x Sawtooth like waves with one of them an octave lower than the other. There is nothing special about this sound and you can find samples of this sort of sound all over the internet for free. Experiment with different sorts of lead synth sounds as your starting point for the hoover, but to get a real fat hoover you need something that sounds quite fat to begin with. You want to aim for lots of high and low frequencies in there as it will make the hoover sound fatter and more Juno sounding.

Making The Hoover
This is the bit which most people who try to make hoover sounds and fail don’t know about. We need to use a sampler such as the NN-XT in Reason which allows you to use a mod envelope (ADSR) to control the pitch of the sound. I’m sure that there are many other samplers that can do this too.

For this you need to first export the sound from your synthesizer and save it as a sample to reload into your sampler. You want to create a very long sample or create a loop in the sampler so you can hold the sample down for a long time without it ending.

Once you’ve loaded the sample into you’re sampler, you need to make the mod envelope affect the pitch of the sample. For the example I set the mod env to pitch setting to +600cents (about the 2-O-Clock position) on the NN-XT. I increased the attack on the mod envelope to about midway up and the decay just that bit higher than the attack. The sustain, release and hold were set to none.

I also made the sound play three notes at one time to give it more substance, these were C3, C4 and C5 on the MIDI keyboard and placed a notch filter on the sample with the frequency set about half way. Now we have the basic hoover sound, you can now go and add some effects on if you want to make it sound even better.

See it isn’t that hard to create a hoover once you know how it’s done. Hopefully this has shown you that you can create Hoover type sounds very easily and quickly within Reason. You don’t need a Roland Juno or other fancy kit to create one. You can also achieve this with most synthesizers and a sampler with the mod envelope to pitch ability. Experiment with the hoover sounds too by starting with different starting synths, there are loads that can be made. If you use Reason there are some great ones that can be made with the Subtractor and Malstrom as a starting point.

Tutorial written by Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.