Intro to Compressors - AudioTech

Hi, Gospel Guitars here with another installment of Audio Tech, this time covering compressors. Very quickly in this video, I want to go over the controls and the use of compressors. This model here is an Alesis 3630, which is very, very popular and has been around for almost about two decades just about, I think. Some of the controls that we have here, I'm going to go through this side. We have your compressor, and then over here we have a gate. So let's zoom in and take a little closer look. Okay, now first off, we have a threshold control. This control will tell the system when to kick in on the audio signal. Next to it, we have a ratio control, which controls how much we're going to crush the signal coming in to the unit. The next one is the attack control, which tells the unit how fast to respond once the signal has crossed over the threshold setting. The release control will tell the system how fast to release the compressor once the signal has dropped below the thresholds that you have set. And the output control is an output make-up gain, generally. When you do compression, you wind up losing signal, so you want to boost it when it leaves this unit. Okay, now that's the compressor side. Over here we have a gate, and on this unit we have a two-knob gate, which includes a threshold as well that sets, that you can set it for when the gate to kick in and out. And this one is the gate itself, so you can set the microphone to be turned on and turned off instead of you hitting the mute button on your mixer on and off. This will do that for you as well. Also on the unit, you have a meter, and via switches, you can always control whether you're metering the incoming signal or the exiting signal. You have a bypass switch, and on this one here, it's kind of unique to this unit, we have a peak or RMS, which controls how the meter is actually being used. And we have a hard knee and soft knee compression, which are two different types of compression used for various different things. So those are a quick overview of the controls of this unit. You will find these controls on virtually, you know, every compressor out there is going to have these rotary controls on it. Some of them may have a single knob for your gate instead of two, and the switches vary from unit to unit. But you want to make sure that you have at least these on your compressor. Now you can buy units that have multiple compressors in one rack, like four different compressors in one unit, and you're going to have to sacrifice some control over those compressors on those units, but they are space savers. So that's the control outlay on a compressor. Now how do we use these? Basically, you get a stereo unit that is two separate compressor units in one rack space. As I said, there are some that have four in one rack space. You would want one of these on your front of house speaker system so that you don't damage your power amps and your speakers, so that you can control the levels hitting them, because that's what these are for. Level control, automatic level control. When things get too loud at the mixer, we usually have to bring down the fader. On a guitar, or an evangelist, or a singer, they get loud, the system starts to overload, clipping lights go off, and we wind up what's called riding the fader. Up and down we go, and that gets really annoying really fast. So if you install some of these units, and put a vocalist on a compressor, put an evangelist on the other compressor, and put one of these units on your front of house so you got left and right control, or just two speaker sets, however you want to set that up, you will have less clipping on your channels, you will have less clipping and feedback in the system, and it will be a lot better sounding. It's more level. This unit allows the person or the instrument to get louder without losing control of the volume and the dynamics. So this will keep things under control. If you keep running into feedback, every time an evangelist gets loud, hit him with a compressor, and when he gets loud, the compressor will bring him down. And when he gets too soft, you can have it set to where it brings him up a little bit. So it keeps everything nice and level in the system. So that's a really fast overview of what this unit is used for, and how it can be used, and what all these knobs do on the front. If you hit thegospelguitars.com, I have links that will take you to places on the web that you can read up and study how these are used and deployed in the live venue or in the recording studio. They are integral in everything that you do with audio, so you want to get comfortable with compressors. They're hard to hear what they do, but you need to train your ear with them. Sometimes a good method is to plug one of these into your home stereo, put on a CD you're really familiar with, and start turning the knobs and see how it affects the music. That's the most effective way I've ever done to learn how these are used. It helped me a whole lot when I did that, because otherwise it's really difficult to really get a grasp on what they're doing. You need a constant signal going through there to actually learn how these things work. So I hope that helped you, and subscribe for further upcoming videos on sound technology. And don't forget to subscribe. Thanks for viewing, and I'll catch you in the next video.