How The Hell Do I Use Compression?

“The sound of modern records today is compression.”

– Jerry Finn (mixing engineer for Green Day, Blink-182, and Sum 41)

There are many reasons you may want to use a compressor in your productions.

But, it’s more important to know the two reasons why you should NOT reach for a compressor, so let’s start there:

1. You don’t know why you’re using a compressor

2. The signal doesn’t need to be compressed

Ok, simple enough, but easier said than done. So, when SHOULD you think about using a compressor?

1. It’s hard to find a static volume level in your track. The louds are too loud, and you can’t hear the quiet parts. Here you need Compression for Consistency.

2. You crave the delicious flavor of a vintage compressor, and are using Compression for Character.

3. The instrument was recorded with a microphone. We’ll call this Close-Mic Compression.

4. You want to glue several sounds together to make them feel like one cohesive element. This is an essential technique — it’s called “Mix”, “Bus,” or “Glue” Compression.

5. You want a signal to duck in volume when another instrument plays. This is called Sidechain Compression, and it breathes life and movement into your productions.

6. You’re going for Sheer Experimentation. You learned the rules, so now go ahead and break them!

1. Compression for Consistency

In Dynamics in Music: The Key To Emotional Productions, we talked about how change is precisely what makes any performance feel human. Many musical ideas can gain weight when their opposites are included. In a simple example, a beautiful, lightly fingerpicked guitar performance will feel more emotional by including its contrasting element — a heavier strummed section.

The distance, departure, and difference create a foreground and a background, providing depth and context to a song.

Alright, so now you’ve recorded a highly emotional guitar performance. The one where you started soft, then really dug in for the final chorus. You’re sweating, there’s a baby crying outside, and you realize you haven’t had a glass of water in 4 hours. What next?

First the water. A walk around the block wouldn’t hurt either. Now, when you look at the track in your DAW, there are huge peaks near the end and you can hardly see the transients in the first two verses. You, my friend, have shredded your way straight into mixing hell.  

Compression is NOT the answer to escaping this mixing labyrinth — you’ll end up as the minotaur’s lunch. The compressor settings that work to reign in your loud chorus won’t get your soft verse where it needs to be unless you flatten the living daylights out of the whole track.

If you’re stuck with the recording, try a technique called “multing” — here, you split the louder parts off to a new track and process them separately for more targeted balancing and control.

But, like most areas of production, the best answer lies in a thoughtful composition.

If you’re recording, aim for a performance where you can retain those differences in texture at a more consistent volume. Try to play loud and project even when you fingerpick, and keep your strums manageable and contained. Compressing on the way in can help, too. If you’re an electric guitar or bass player, the Xotic SP compressor can straighten things out during tracking. If you’re recording an acoustic — keep doing that! It adds a great human feel to any track. For guitars, you can get away with higher ratios (like 4:1 or 8:1), and reasonable amounts of gain reduction (try starting with 3-5 decibels). 

When compressing for consistency, your top focus should be gain reduction for your loudest peaks. After compression, you should be able to hear the softer parts more clearly without the loud transients poking through. Check out the further reading section for resources on setting the threshold, attack, and release settings of a compressor to achieve proper gain reduction.

This also helps with loudness. If you want to learn more about LUFS and the loudness war, check out The Ultimate Guide to Loudness.

2. Compression for Character

It’s no secret that vintage hardware compressors are loved for their ability to add more than just gain reduction to a signal.

Many engineers will use classic designs (or software emulations) of the Teletronix LA-2A, Universal Audio 1176, or Fairchild 670 for their distinctive sonic and harmonic richness. You could thrill your friends and family by taking out a second mortgage for a Fairchild, or go straight to flavortown with software compressors like Klanghelm’s MJUC, Waves CLA and PuigChild emulations, or Universal Audio’s excellent models.

It can be tempting to dial in extreme amounts of gain reduction and make-up gain, which tricks you into believing the signal sounds better because it’s louder and more saturated. But, when compressing for character, focus on the tonal changes of the compressor without applying any gain reduction or make-up gain. That said, don’t be afraid to dime the knobs and hear what happens at the outer limits of normal operation. Gain reduction may be your goal, but that’s just icing on the $40,000 tube-rectified cupcake.

3. Close-Mic Compression

If I was speaking in your ear, you’d be a lot more sensitive to changes in level than if we were chit-chatting at a crosswalk.

Our ears have become accustomed to heavy amounts of compression on most everything we hear in a song. Live instruments are often recorded quite close to the sound source to capture the cleanest signal — but, microphones are extra sensitive to bass frequencies when the sound source is close, just like our eardrums.

With vocals, even a simple turn of the head can swing the balance of a recording enough to lose those syllables in the mix. What may feel like unnatural amounts of compression on recorded tracks are necessary for the mics to return a sound that’s more faithful to what we hear when someone sings or plays the violin in the same room as us.

If you recorded something with a microphone, chances are you can compress it. From subtle (1-3 db gain reduction) to moderate (3-6 db), you can use compression to make a live performance feel more level and professional.

When applying Close-Mic Compression, focus on replicating what you would hear if that instrument was in front of you. This normally involves gain reduction for short-term events (loud spikes), and over longer periods (from the verse into the chorus).

Using two compressors with less processing is always more effective and tonally interesting than forcing one to do the heavy lifting. Short-term gain reduction can be achieved with a quick attack and quick release to tame transient spikes, and setting an additional compressor with a longer attack and medium release times will apply gradual gain reduction over longer phrases.

4. “Mix”, “Bus”, or “Glue” Compression

Here’s an area where compression really shines. It involves processing two or more sounds together for cohesion.

When two seperate sounds run through one compressor and have their transients shaped in the same way, the resulting sound feels more like one single element. When you eat a cookie, you don’t taste the egg, flour, and sugar separately. Glue compression is the heat that fuses ingredients together.

Glue compression is as simple as it is powerful. Set your compressor to its most gentle and transparent setting (slowest attack and quickest release), and keep the gain reduction seriously subtle (aim for 1-2 decibels).

There are many ways to compress multiple signals together. Note that they all use the same attack, release and subtle gain reduction logic. Here are some of the most common:

1. Master Bus Compression – use glue compression to gel the whole song together.

2. Group Compression – your drum bus, guitars, synth stacks, background vocals, or other groups of tracks will thank you for glue compressing them.

3. Layer Compression – use this technique for gluing a sub and top bass together, or creating a cohesive percussion hit out of multiple samples.

4. Compressing Doubles – make double-tracked vocals and guitars feel even more like one performance by applying glue compression.

When glue compressing, focus on fusing multiple sounds together to feel like one.

Sometimes “glue” isn’t enough and you need to layer. That’s why I put together an epic, FREE 90-minute workshopcovering some of my favorite production techniques, layering included.

5. Sidechain Compression

Sidechain compression is the silver bullet to creating headroom, space, and groove in your music. You can use sidechain compression as an effect and as a creative mixing tool.

Sidechain compression as an effect

You’ve heard it before — the classic electronic sound of a bass ducking in volume when the kick hits. A four-on-the-floor kick pattern creates a rhythmic, quarter note pumping when sidechained to a compressor on the bass. It also creates valuable space in the low frequencies for the kick to shine through, reducing masking and clashing between the two instruments. Plugins like Nicky Romero’s Kickstart or Xfer Records LFO Tool can help you nail this vibe instantly.

Sidechain compression as a mixing tool

The possibilities of using sidechain compression to assist your mix are nearly endless. Set a compressor on any track, and tell it to listen to the signal from a different track — you can duck synth layers in response to your snare, guitars away from your vocal, and effects away from the source signal so they bloom in between phrases.

It’s worth repeating: sidechaining your effects (especially reverbs and delays) away from the main instrument will instantly add groove and space to a production.

When using sidechain compression, think about creating space and groove between two signals. I generally find that a quicker attack and release (10-25 milliseconds) works well for most cases. Does the sidechain compressor solve masking issues between the two instruments? Does it contribute to the overall sense of groove within the context of the mix? If so, let it ride.

Do be aware that huge dips in volume can sound a bit unnatural. Sometimes that can be just what you want — so start subtle and see how much you can get away with.

For further reading on sidechain compression, check out our article on achieving the ultimate kick-bass relationship.

6. Sheer Experimentation

Now that we’ve learned the rules, we’ll conclude by throwing rules out the window. Compressors can be used in new and experimental ways, so try something new next time you’re working on a track!

Try overcompressing field recordings or room microphones to give a sense of a space that’s larger-than-life. Or, try parallel compression — set up an aggressive compressor on a return channel and feeding your dry track into it (an alternative method is by using parallel processing racks in Ableton). EQ-ing to cut the mids beforehand will focus the compression on the highs and lows — this is a favorite technique of ours called New York Compression.

There are times when I reach for a compressor in the sound design phase. The OTT Compressor is a beast for colorizing synths to have a bright and upfront electronic sound. A little goes a long way, so it may help to exercise restraint and pull back on the Depth knob.

If you set up your effects via send & returns (also called aux busses), you have the ability to process the effects themselves. Use this to your advantage! A compressor after your reverb/delay will give the sense of a larger space because the sound isn’t fading out as quickly. Compression before these same effects reduces their tendency to over-react to loud signals.

Though it shouldn’t be your leading strategy, compression for the sake of trying something new can yield interesting and musical results.

Final Thoughts

Compression doesn’t occur within a vacuum. Compressors work as a link in the processing chain to produce a balanced and polished mix. If you’re interested in more resources on compression, see below. If you’re interested in diving deep into how these strategies converge within the processing chain for full mixdowns and compositions, you’ll learn a lot from our Mix Master Flow and Masterclass courses.

There’s a lot of information here, but I hope your deepest takeaway is this: compression was built for one purpose (to reduce the dynamic range of a signal), but it can be used to achieve many specific results within a mix. You can use a compressor for evening out a performance, tonal enhancements, gluing sounds together, trying something new, making microphones sound more natural, or sidechaining to create headroom, space, and groove in your track. Chances are, you’ll use a compressor for all of these purposes within a single song.

Still, it’s important not to abuse compression, because if the dynamics are totally gone, so is the emotion of the original performance. So, keep it subtle, keep it dynamic, and keep it groovy! Do you have other favorite uses for compression? Let us know below. 

Further Reading

Hyperbits Ultimate Guide to Multiband Compression

Patches Animated Guide to Compression

Sound on Sound Compression Made Easy

Why Dynamics in Music is Key to Emotional Productions

This post was originally published on Hyperbitsmusic.com. I learned heaps about music production from taking Serik’s class, and gladly took the opportunity to write for his website.

A New Way to think about Dynamics in Music

“All things change and will no longer be; constantly bear in mind how many of these changes you have already witnessed. The universe is transformation; life is your perception of it.”

– Marcus Aurelius

We’re about to dive deep into why dynamics are the key to creating emotional music – but first, let’s step back in time.

It was a summer of dusty roads and tanlines, and I was impressed with one of my travel companions, a photographer with an especially sharp eye. We were biking through parts of America I had only read about — the great plains of Indiana, summer typhoons in Arizona, and the Mojave desert. At every turn, my friend was ready with his camera. It was an extension of how he saw the world.

I always admired the depth and emotional power of his photos — how he captured a moment with action, intrigue, and clarity. Years later, when I had a camera of my own, I asked him for his secret.

And I’ll never forget his answer…

“I turn my viewfinder to black and white — that forces me to look at the light in a scene.”

Light!

It was the Master Key — the one thing that will never steer you wrong when taking a photo. I was stunned at how simple it was.

From that moment, I started hunting for the Master Key of music. I wasn’t optimistic. How could there be one answer to the hundreds of questions that need to be answered in every composition, mixdown, and arrangement?

Well, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered how many words within our musical vocabulary allude to the same theme. Balance, Difference, Contrast, Change, A and B, Separation, Depth — the list goes on and on.

These words all  bring us home to one thing: Dynamics.

The concept of Dynamics is at the heart of what makes music memorable, special, and relatable to our lives.

Every Day is Opposite Day

“DISTANCE AND DIFFERENCE ARE THE SECRET TONIC TO CREATIVITY. WHEN WE GET HOME, HOME IS STILL THE SAME, BUT SOMETHING IN OUR MINDS HAS CHANGED, AND THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING.” 

– JONAH LEHER

Do you remember the scene in The Incredibles, where the villain whispers “when everyone is super… no one will be.” Chilling, right? It’s exactly this that makes the dynamics theory work.

If every element in your song is drowned in reverb, nothing sounds far away. If a song’s energy stays constant, there’s no emotional lift by starting in one place and ending in another.

To add emotional impact to a song, there must be change.

Let’s say you write (or borrow) a great chord progression. By shifting from sustained chords in one section to staccato 16th notes in another, your dynamic choice offers the listener another point of reference. It’s like being whisked away on a bullet train —  wistfully looking back at those distant mountains of stable chords.

If you kept those sustained piano chords for the entire song, you would be narrowly looking at a close cropped photograph of one subject. Through dynamics, the camera pulls away and establishes a foreground and a background. Space, dimension, and depth are created through difference.

Change creates context. Vivid impressions are made through their vitality, intensity, and energy. But, contrast is needed to have this effect. It’s like throwing paint against a white brick wall — a brilliant result is created by two things that were individually quite dull.

This is one of the most consistent bits of feedback I share with my students time and time again. They will often create a good idea, but then repeat it ad nauseum. I know, it sounds harsh — but that’s the reality.

If you create an amazing idea, or sound, or 8-bar loop, you have to find ways to maintain the interest in that idea, which, lo and behold, might include removing it from the song once in a while.

Tension and Release

If we think of dynamics simply as change, we can use this knowledge to create push and pull — a feeling of tension and release — in our tracks. As a cousin of dynamics, tension and release is another fundamental principle of creating emotional music. Tension and release comes down to setting a series of expectations throughout your track.

Back to your chord progression — when you introduce the contrasting rhythm, the listener’s ears perk up. They start to wonder if the mountains will return around the next bend, or if they’re speeding away into a new landscape for the rest of their journey.

As a composer, you can have a dramatic effect on your listener by confirming or denying their expectations. You can steer into a bittersweet emotional impact by returning with some type of difference — perhaps a key change, a new rhythm, or new instruments.

The great thing about tension and release is that it can be created many different ways. One of the most effective is through chord changes. You can use dominant chords to signal a change in direction. Try ascending and descending motion, inversions, chromatic steps, and surprise chords to create dynamics.  

In electronic music, sweeping filters open and using pitch risers during a build are tried and true methods of signaling an emotionally satisfying moment on the horizon. Don’t be afraid to layer risers, and take your automation seriously. Attention to detail on individual tracks is what it takes to achieve a professional sound — don’t take the easy road by automating a filter on the Master Bus. For further reading, check out 6 Tips for Effective Build Ups.

By broadening our minds to think of dynamics as change, we see how dynamics are necessary for creating tension and release. A big, lush “Wall of Sound” chorus is fulfilling precisely because it comes after a sparse, lower energy section. If your song is a full frequency attack from beginning to end, you’ll never have a chance to build into a rewarding release. It sounds obvious, but to have a high energy section, there must be moments of lower energy.

12 Ways to Use Dynamics In Your Music

Dynamics in music, or a dynamic choice can made  by asking two questions: “What do I have?”, and “How can it change?” Here are some of our favorite ways to create emotion through change. Feel free to attempt to apply these directly in your music today.

1. Move from sustained (legato) chords to rhythmic (staccato) chords.

2. Crescendo — build from a moment of low energy to a satisfying release.

3. Add or remove an element from the percussion every 8 bars.

4. Use the human voice when possible — use it early and often. Vocals are cheat codes for interest.

5. Remove or change your kick during drum fills.

6. You don’t want your drums to hit at the same volume every time. Change the velocity and timing of your notes, and complement steady grooves with fills to keep things dynamic.

7. Pharrell Williams says music lives in the transitions. Using a combination of reversed cymbals, reverb tails, and impacts will add movement in your own tracks. Learning how to effectively use reversed elements is an important step in making your music sound more professional.  

8. Make subtle changes over time. You can do this with almost every parameter, including synth amp cutoffs, stereo width, reverb/delay/chorus mix, tremolo intensity, hi and low pass filters, drive in saturation or distortion plugins, panning, aux send amounts, and more. If it can be automated, it can be used to create dynamics in music.

9. Melodic fills — change something about the ending of your melodic idea every 8 or 16 bars.

10. Create harmonic change by inverting your chords the second time through the progression, or adding a few 7th or 9ths. For further reading, see A Simple Man’s Guide to Music Theory for Producers.

11. Move an instrument from the foreground to the background, and vice versa. Try having the keys play your lead melody, and let the vocals wash into a background pad.

12. Key, tempo, and instrument changes are time tested techniques. Rhythm changes can be useful – try going to your chorus a measure early, or holding the build for an extra beat before the drop.

6 Examples of Dynamics in Music

1. Coldplay – Fix You

I remember hearing the epic final chorus of Fix You by Coldplay for the first time and immediately restarting the song. I didn’t know at the time, but Fix You is a dynamic masterpiece. Listen to how Chris Martin ends his first chorus at 1:29. Then what happens at the same part in the song at 2:35? That. Is. Dynamics.

The emotional impact comes because he has built an expectation, but then denies it. Instead, he offers us something much more raw and unrestrained.  But, we’re not done — listen to how it is brought in at 4:26, and how gently it ends.

Jonny Buckland knows that he can’t come out of the gate with the guitar hook. It feels satisfying because it arrives after an initial section of sparsity and restraint.  Coldplay found out long ago that dynamics are the ultimate storytelling tool.

2. Louis the Child -Better Not

The dynamics of the lead synth in Better Not by Louis The Child make the performance feel human and groovy. At 1:24, there is an interesting lead synth melody but, the volume variations in the notes are what makes this song special. Accents to create a groove are a great example of just how catchy dynamic changes can be.

3. Bebetta – Megalon

Megalon by Bebetta is a fantastic example of compositional dynamics that keep a song interesting. Here, a simple three-note arpeggio melody is slowly introduced throughout the course of the song, initially  a backing element and atmospheric layer. But in the breakdown of the track, all the other elements of the song go away, leaving just the arpeggio —the softer original synth transforms into a huge, aggressive bass arpeggio for the main drop of the song.

4. Petit Biscuit – Problems

Sidechain has become a staple in the world of electronic music. Many songs effectively use the groove and pump of sidechain compression to introduce rhythm, and Problems by Petit Biscuit is one that stands out above the rest. After the intro (at 0:17), there is a pump of aggressive sidechain compression on the white noise and pad. This change in dynamics after a more ambient intro increases the energy and musicality of the track.

5. Sailor & I – Turn Around

Âme’s remix to Turn Around by Sailor & I is a beautifully simple example of dynamics. The track is a brooding 8-minute deep house track with exceptionally simple production. A 1-bar arpeggio loop plays the entire length of the track — which, on paper, sounds like it should be absolutely terrible to listen to — but, the dynamics of this sound keep it interesting for the entire track.

The filter cutoff opens and closes, the resonance changes, the sound gets washed out in reverb, and then it becomes totally dry again. It becomes an evolving and dynamic  base that the other elements of the track can ride..

6. Mike Posner – I Took a Pill in Ibiza (Seeb Remix)

Seeb’s Remix of I Took a Pill in Ibiza starts with Mike Posner’s vocal and some soft synth plucks. The filter opens slowly over the course of the verse, but it’s really the drop at 1:30 that hits hard. Why does it feel so impactful?

Because it’s full of contrast. We go from Mike’s lyrical hook (“All I know are sad songs”), to a full frequency synth barrage. The kick enters while the lyrics step down for a searing vocal chop lead. With the lyrics gone, and this big up-front lead on top of a higher energy chorus, we can lose ourselves until the lead vocal returns to emphasize the message.

For those looking to try something similar in their own productions: the vocal lead is a short snippet of Mike’s voice spread across a keyboard in a pitched sampler (like Ableton’s Simpler, Logic’s EXS24, or the TAL Sampler). The pitch glide is dialed in to taste, and the sound is processed quite heavily with compression, distortion, and EQ to tame the lows and emphasize the stereo width in the highs. If you’re using Ableton’s Sampler, try dialing in some FM Synthesis with a short decay. Bring in a touch of volume, and adjust the coarse and fine knobs to taste. It can add a great burst of harmonic energy to the attack of any sound.

Though it’s not as deep as we can go with a full week of vocal production in our Masterclass, you must treat this sound like a lead instrument and process it to be forward, bright, and present. Guitar amps and other types of distortion can be fun to experiment with here.

We Live in a Dynamic World

“YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD TO SET ANOTHER GOAL OR TO DREAM A NEW DREAM.”

– C.S. LEWIS

Our lives are dynamic. Nothing ever has consistent energy; we wake up — sometimes tired, sometimes refreshed — and the day surges and dips in energy. Our conversations are dynamic. We lean in to speak in hushed tones, and raise our voices to address a group. We laugh and cry on the same day — sometimes in the same moment! We feel close to people who live in other time zones, and miles away from the people sitting next to us. Being human exists in the space between A and B: life and death, comedy and tragedy, innocence and experience. To understand either we need to know both.

In fact, I would argue that the only constant in life is change itself. And in music, that is the biggest problem with almost all amateur productions: they don’t move enough.

Every artist must think about the emotional impact they intend for their work. For some, the ultimate goal is to create music with life, humanity, and shared experience. And for those artists, there is no solution better than injecting music with dynamics —  the lifeblood of what makes our human experience so real, beautiful, and unique.

Next time you’re introducing a new element in a song, ask yourself – “How can I include its opposite? In what ways can this change?” With practice, your music will become more dimensional and full of life as a result.