This setting regulates the character of the gain reduction affecting an audio signal. The Knee parameter ranges from zero to one, where zero is a hard knee and one is a soft knee. Once the pre-compression and post-compression dB levels are equal, you can more accurately assess if your changes are improving the sound or not. This can be an important practice as otherwise, your ear will naturally think that the louder sound is the better sound. Apply Make Up Gain so that the values are equal. Then, switch it back on to see the reduced value. If you don't, bypass (switch off) your compression plugin and make note of the original dB level. 4.3 dB), increase your Make Up Gain dial by that amount. If your compressor displays the gain reduction (e.g. The Make Up Gain dial lets you make up for the level decrease post-compression. Switch off the Auto Gain function to give yourself more control. Sometimes you'll hear an automatic increase in volume when you activate a compression plugin. The gain reduction value is also useful to determine the exact Make Up Gain to apply within your compression plugin.Īs we've discussed, compression actually lowers the overall level of your track(s). Here, the gain reduction is 14 dB.Īs you can see from the gain reduction value, lower ratios lead to more subtle compression, and higher ratios lead to the opposite. If your ratio is 8:1, and your audio signal exceeds the threshold by 16 dB, then the signal will be reduced to 2 dB over the threshold. This also means that the sound experiences a gain reduction of 6 dB via compression. If you set your ratio to 3:1, and your audio signal exceeds the threshold by 9 dB, then the signal will be reduced to 3 dB over the threshold (9 divided by 3). Let's go through some examples to see how the ratio works. While the threshold relates to what dB level you want to compress from, the Ratio relates to how much compression you want to apply. While certain instruments may benefit from heavy compression, you may want to use a more subtle approach and only compress the loudest portions of a track.īear in mind that any volume changes you make to a track after you use a compression plugin will change the degree of compression applied. Thus, you should choose the threshold value in line with your track's dynamic range. For example, very little compression will occur if a track mostly plays at -32 dB, and your threshold value is set "low" at -30 dB.
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