Using Compression To Make Home Recordings Punchier
Home recording is capable, in 2020, of producing the same audio quality as pro recording studios. It comes down almost entirely to the knowledge of the people involved.
For example, there are tools like software effects available for free. But if you don’t understand how to use these effects, or what they can do to help (or hurt) your audio, then they aren’t very useful at all.
But in the hands of people who have some knowledge – and often, not even hard knowledge – effects like compression can take a bland audio recording and really make it sound awesome.
Compression can be applied to individual tracks in a music mix to treat that specific instrument or vocal. And then compression is almost always applied to the final mix of the entire song.
So what is compression? The quick answer is that it is an effect used to simultaneously turn down volume of the loudest sections of an audio, and raising the volume of all of that audio. This makes the audio loudness levels more consistent, bringing the lowest parts up and loudest parts down.
For an idea of what compression is, see my articles:
Should You Use Compression In Audio Recording?
Improve Or Ruin Your Audio With an Effect Called Compression and
Vocal Compression Using Reaper’s ReaComp Effect Plugin.
Free videos from “The Newbies Guide to Audio Recording Awesomeness”
