Time to start another little discussion on tracking with or without compression.

In the analog world the need for comression while tracking is fairly obvious. You need compression to help mask the tape hiss. As tape and analog improved compression became more of an effect.

Hi to you all,amazing board plenty of good advice
and not to much BS.Just started out on mixing my demo and a local S/Engineer told me,
to put compression on everything in the mix,is this true.I would appreciate your advice to see if this is the way I should go.
Regards. Dr.

what are your guys' thoughts... preamp before compression, or compression before preamp? thanks

Tyler

Assumed that i compose and produce music within Pro Tools Mix and the master will go to a Post suite, where they will add voices and sfx using a Fairlight Prodigy and then they will squash the result with a multiband compressor and finally it will be cut on D1:

This is a topic of intense debate, since it is very much like EQ'ing...there are guidelines, but to do this well, you need to use your ears and a bit of experience.

Ok so I'm not a huge fan of crazy amounts of compression, but people want a lot of it, especially when you record mostly heavy rock like i do.

My problem is I feel like compression and limiting dont seem to take well to my mixes. When i get stuff back from mastering its still not INCREDIBLY loud, but i can hear all the compression artifacts and feel like my mix fell apart.

Anybody know of a good compression plugin of the DX or VST type that has side-chain capability?

Thanks.

Well I'm sure this one has been asked a billion times, but, I've just mixed an album and copied the songs onto my computer, nearly ready to burn to CD. Are there any tips or tricks I could employ with the EQ or compression to add the finishing 'fairy dust' to make the songs sound as professional as possible.

Could anyone tell me a good starting point for settigs for hard rock style vocals. I'm using a
Mackie board / RODE NTK / BBE / and a dbx DDP compressor. Looking for specific
settings for
ratio,
threshhold,
attack, r
elease,
knee.
Thanks a lot, Carl

Analog compression before digital? I do it, because I am not totally knocked out with plugin compression so far. and I am pretty much doing what I used to do while recording to 2" tape..

I dont do it for "tape sound" (*see below)

Or to serve max level to my converters (*see below)

I do it to compress!

What do you DAW guys do?