Audio Compressor Settings For Vocals

At this point you re done.

Audio compressor settings for vocals. Table of contents the basic purpose of compression on. In this article i ll cover how you can learn to compress vocals like the pros the engineering gods. The characteristics of these compression settings are this. If the song s central focus is the lead vocal the goal is to make it sound like you re in the room or hall with the singer and avoid any extreme effects.

The lower the threshold the harder the compressor will work. Standard compressor settings for lead vocals. I wish i could do that too. When a sound gets too loud the compressor kicks in and reduces the volume.

Before we get into the compressor settings for vocals let us get some knowledge of its core components which can help you to understand how compressor effect works. Attack time of a compressor decides the contents of the audio signal. Your vocals should sound 100x better than they did before especially if you followed all of the other vocal mixing steps mainly equalization first. For a more mellow vocal sound start with a ratio of 2 1 and gradually bring the threshold control down to engage the compressor.

Let me state up front that there s no single setting you can use for every vocal track. We have set the ratio to 2 1. Vocals have a wide dynamic range they can sing really soft or really belt it out. Compression can make vocals sound dull.

A good compression setting has a fast attack to catch the stray transient a quick release so that the compression doesn t color the sound of the singer and a low ratio so that when the compressor does go on it smoothes out the vocals without squashing them. But the truth is it s not that easy. There is no one size fits all formula to vocal compression. You load up a compressor on the vocal and it goes over the threshold by 10db more on the threshold in a second.

Attack time 5 ms release time 50ms threshold 10db compression ratio 5 1. Let me give you an example. And i don t want to mislead you. There are no magic settings that work 100 of the time.

For an aggressive vocal start with a ratio of 4 1 and gradually bring the threshold control down to engage the compressor. So you ve recorded edited and mixed some killer vocals and now you re ready to compress the song to make it sound professional. Well you ve come to the right place. But keep in mind dynamic range on a vocal is good so you do not want to cut it too much you simply want to make it manageable.

The ratio determines how much the volume is reduced by. Many bloggers will tell you what the perfect vocal compression settings are. Don t use the. Take note that attack time is very short it is because vocals is highly transient in nature the notes of the vocal is very short so to capture effective compression in vocals one must set to short.

Heck it d certainly save me a few keystrokes. A compressor takes this wide range of volume and makes it as narrow as you want it to be.