51m0n

Yep, once you get all the way to being able to predict how a specific compressor will sound given a certain input source, try one with a completely different circuit. Similar settings will sound completely different. Go through this enough and you start to get a feel for the compressor most likely to suit the sound in your head. A VCA compressor (like the Becos) is a superb place to start because its a bit of a toolbox, tends to be capable of very transparent compression but has enough parameters to get a lot of more overt compression effects working. In contrast an optical compressor tends to be a bit of a one trick pony, its all about the attack release curve and how that can make your bass sound. A FET compressor, is really a limiter type circuit, FETs are super super fast. A real tube (vari-mu) compressor tends toward a mix between an optical and a VCA. And are hens teeth in the pedal world (Compressore being the only one I have ever heard of). If you want to have a go at all of these on the cheap your best bet IMO is download Reaper, load in a piece of music with no bass, put down a bass line, and play with Reacomp, its about the most full featured compressor I have found (you can change the duration of time it measures for RMS level ffs!!!!) that also happens to be free. This way you also get to concentrate on what the hell the compression is doing rather than playing anything into a compressor and fiddling with the knobs. Get far enough down that route and you can cover off parallel compression (New York compression), side chaining, filtered compression, and with ReaXcomp even multiband compression. For free. Do the chaps at Reaper a favour and buy a license for $60 dollars, they've saved you thousands of pounds in buying kit to allow you to learn how to use something well when you get it. Tell them I sent you

If he can't hear the difference he's not much of an engineer. Of course he may have simply slapped a limiter on your channel so that unwanted mahoosive spikes don't wreck his drivers. This he wont hear because its not on without the peak hitting the limiter.

Well I am not sure I can agree there. Becos Stella, Empress, Compressore, Retrospec Squeezebox, Ovnilabs Smoothie, FloorQ, Cali 76 are all really great and very full featured compressors. What stands apart in a rack/plug in compressor normally is monitoring. However if you want have a look at an 1176 or La2a, the common holy grails of rack comps and they are not as full featured (no wet/dry mix, less ratio options, no low pass filter etc etc), but have other things that set them apart, higher voltage circuitry, superb preamp stages, massive meters) and because they live in a studio all that other stuff (wet/dry, low pass, saturation, even more monitoring) can be produced via other tools in parallel or series. If you go for a one knob no metering comp on your board though then you are not doing compression right IMO. Unless you have years and years and years of experience with how compressors sound/feel

If he is any use at all of course he can hear the difference within the mix...

What do you mean by pedal board compression? Compression is just a way to manage your waveform in either a very microscopic or macroscopic way (settings dependent). Where you apply that change to your signal in the complete chain from string to ear is irrelevant. So an old school P bass damper is actually doing a form of mechanical compression on the string itself, at the other end of the chain, play as loud as my band does and anyone in the front row are having their hearing compress the signal. What I hope to guide you towards is that a compressor can change not only the average level (the common conception of compression) but more importantly (in a real life mix situation) the ease of perception of different parts of your bass notes by controlling the envelope of the note in comparison to other instruments in the mix. A point to note though is that given that at high volume your ear is also compressing by its very nature, this will change how you (and your audience) perceive what your compressor is actually doing to the signal. You need to appreciate that you may need to change your compressor settings for louder environments to achieve the desired effect when the SPL causes ear compression as well. Most importantly these are anything but super subtle changes when heard in the context of a mix, but are often very hard to hear not in a mix. Because your ears/brain perception of volume is the way it is...

So Al here's some home learning for you. Set up your Becos with a hard knee, 4:1 ratio, 35m/s attack time, 90m/s release time. Bring the threshold down until you are getting between 3dB and 6dB GR. Play with the attack until you like the sound. Use the output make up gain to equalise the volume with and without the compression on. Record this along with a track. Now try a soft knee, 1.5:1 ratio, 35m/s attack, 90m/s release. Bring the threshold down until you are getting 3dB and 6dB of GR. Again play with the attack a tad to get it just how you like the sound. Use the output make up gain to equalise the volume with and without the compression on. Record this along with the same track. Compare the two in the mix, check out the waveforms, and discuss....

On top of which when doing this research/learning initially dont be playing too loud, as your ears will behave differently at volume.

I have said it before, and I will reiterate it here again, compression is very hard to hear because our ears are designed to cope with huge volume variances. The only way to hear compression in is a mix. Rather than listening to your bass at home on its own and struggling with the compressor always always play along to a track, preferrably with no bass in it, and play with the compressor in this situation to learn what it is really doing. This is paramount. Seriously...

They sound different, and they 'feel' different. Typically a hard knee has a more overt effect on the sound so you tend to hear the change more obviously. If you are looking to hear a tonal change rather than transparently change things the hard knee is almost always the right option.

I very much doubt that I have ever suggested 2:1 is too low for bass! When I wrote my 'compression setup 101' post I am pretty sure I mentioned you can get something groovy happening way lower than that (I have gone as low as 1.5:1 for live and just about 3dB of gain reduction on a heavy hit note, but crucially always some GR even on the very lightest note, but never on the transient of that note, or the subsequent one). Non-sound engineers don't get compression like non-photographers don't get the exposure triangle (manual mode), because the variables all interact and they are not really obvious in how they do that. A compressor has a ratio and a threshold and the actual input gain, and it is the way these three interact that define the total gain reduction. With a threshold set at X if the input level exceeds X then the compressor will cut down the loudness increase by the ratio. It sounds so simple, but its got 3 variables, and one of those changes all the time (input level). If you get a single note into the compressor the non engineer thinks "I played that note at volume X", but the compressor is measuring that volume all the time throughout the note duration (well an RMS interpolation of the volume over a short (ms) time, but I digress). It sees a transient peak, the subsequent dip to the main note, the (very short on a bass) sustain phase and then the (very long) release phase of the envelope of the note. The way the volume changes through each part of this makes a difference to when the threshold gets crossed on the way down (turning the compression off). It may be that you cross X twice on the transient, or cross X on the transient, and then again just after the sustain phase, or not until a second or two later. The threshold is what determines this. Couple this with the added fun of manual attack and release controls, which determine how long after the crossing of the threshold level X as the level rises (attack) and falls (release) that the compressor actually kicks in (attack) and turns off (release) and it starts to become obvious as to why this is complex, but its really not until you intuitively understand that all compressor circuits achieve that compressor activated/deactivated state as a curve rather than a switch (even the fastest are not binary in their behaviour, except some digital limiters) which is what makes them sound different that you can start to make use of a compressor as a tonal tool rather than just some kind of extremely heavy handed fix for peculiarities in your playing.

Depends on what you want to achieve. That and where your threshold is set. Even at 2:1 you can generate an easy 9dB of gain reduction....

I give it two weeks 🤣

Another vote for the MojoMojo, sounds fantastic for just having those moments when you want to go from a clean tone (my core tone is very clean) to something a bit more sixties soul warmed up with the edge taken off the transients and absolutely no loss in low end. The other option for me was the Sold Gold FX Beta Overdrive, but that's about 5 times the price and does nothing more that I can see...

Nah, no beer, no drugs, they just make everything less professional, less gets done, its all bad when you need to use your time well. One cigarette break halfway through. Ten minutes for a chit chat, then back to the funk

All the more reason to try stuff out in a rehearsal... If what you do makes you cringe that's nothing to go on, if it makes the whole band cringe then time to try something else

Yeah, a skill to be honed through practice. I hate talking over the mic so I've worked at it, plus I've worked at ensuring I don't have to do it too much too 🤩

I do think when it comes to prepping for a gig that far too many bands worry about the songs first and foremost. I think they are just a fragment of the whole. What so often gets lost in inexperienced bands is the other bits that are super important things like:- How to transition between songs How to perform, not just play songs How to cope with the inevitable pink torpedo ups during songs, whether that is equipment malfunction or pilot error How to engage the audience during the set, which breaks down to:- How to engage the audience during songs How to engage the audience between the songs All of this can and should be rehearsed, that is what rehearsal time is for, not simply playing toons together and rocking out. IMO.

Cheers chaps!!

We endlessly prune ideas. Last year we worked on a track for 8 months on and off, in the end it just became boring. In some ways that is a great reason to be spending a long time on a track, you see, in my experience, you cant tell what is truly fantastic in a couple of hours, or weeks even. The best stuff we have written we have played for years and years, and its still fun and intriguing to play, although the makeup of the sets have led me in particular to want to add a new set so we can swap things about better. Variety etc etc. Fact is, its good enough material to last. Sometimes you work really hard on something but you lose that initially visceral quality of it that felt so good day 1, or you realise its just a bit obvious. I record every single rehearsal, in full, chop out the best parts and they get saved, everyone is sent every single piece, its a huge huge library of variations and ideas and jamming - literally weeks of it now - that we refer back to and use when thinking about new parts. Again its to be noted that gigs are not necessarily our number 1 purpose, creating music to play at gigs is. So we can spend for ever on a track, before anyone hears it, and if it lasts the course it will be good enough for our audience to enjoy, because its something we are enjoying playing. Having said all of that one of my favourite structures we have goes:- aABABCABCDABCDEBB The track in question is almost 8 minutes long. Too complex? Or clever because it means people get to hear section A 5 times, section B 6 times, section D and E once each and so have an idea whats coming but it keeps changing at the same time. The punters seem to dig it whatever It sounds like this:- https://mistersuperjuice.bandcamp.com/track/frisking-the-whiskers

Only if you are playing 3 minute 'standard-ish' toons with nominally trivial structures in my experience... Which is not having a go at that at all, its just if you are writing more complex stuff this can't be done I think, unless someone turns up with all the parts written out and you have a band prepared to work from charts a lot.

Our rehearsals follow a very different format to a lot of yours I think. We 'rehearse' every other week for 3 hrs normally, if we have a big gig coming up we extend that to 4 hrs. Rehearsals are usually not related to a gig though, we are almost always working on new material. There are 7 people who have creative input in the band, a lot of time is spent working on new ideas for grooves and fitting old ideas together with new ideas in different ways experimenting with them to get something we feel is really really good. We've worked this way for a very long time (7 years) and this is a huge part of the reason everyone enjoys the band. Gigs are really good fun and all, but if you are creating music for a 7 piece band with no singer and average track lengths of 9 minutes you have to work on the material in a different way or pay everyone to turn up to rehearsals, the opportunity to be creative together is what the band is about. You see most punters on seeing us for the first time are (even if I say so myself) pretty bloody impressed, because its good music, lots of layers and interesting interactions/dynamics and plenty of hooks that reappear all over the place in different forms, even without the 'normal' front person role. Yet a lot of what is going appears to be highly improvised. If they see us again they start to 'get' that there is definite improvisational stuff, but maybe less than they thought, I get asked about this quite often (from musos and civvies equally strangely). The first 45 minutes we play is a single suite with no breaks at all. Most punters truly think its written as a single track (its not its 5 pieces that interweave and hang together really beautifully). We have tracks that took just a couple of months to get sorted, others that we refined for years to get where they are now. There are motifs in the first fifteen minutes of the set that occur literally an hour later again in subtly shifted forms, the upshot is punters think they've heard this track before from the first time they catch an entire set. Our only problem at the moment is we have finally got to the point where we have this all nailed down. And we are rather bored of the 'same' 2 sets. So we are taking a break from all gigging until November, when we will play the old sets as they stand one last time, then in December we have a gig where I hope we will be replacing at least one entire set with a new suite, with just one break in it. Cos that's how we roll So we don't really rehearse, we just collaboratively write. Rehearsal per se is just where we top and tail tracks and transitions and go over anything particularly tricksy (like the 9/4 break, its a beach, I regularly have to work that in my own time or I am going to look the proper fool and train wreck everything). It only happens in the last rehearsal before a gig, and we only gig a few times a year. I have done cover bands before and find them so tedious, not enough creativity for me, each to their own....

We rehearse at close to gig volume. Works for us 😀

Mono

Dude, did you read anything I wrote about compression at all, ever?

Or before and after. This is one of my favourite examples of this by George Massenburg, its a long watch for a single 8 bar phrase. Welcome bass peoples to the life of a mix engineer....