I've developed a rational relationship with EQ (she's so cerebral), but I've struggled with Dynamic Range- that fiery & passionate muse that can get out of hand, but man what a lover!
A lot of the material I record is highly dynamic and stands to benefit from a reduction of that extreme range for playback on systems owned by mere mortals, who don't listen with their hand glued to the volume knob. Yet it seems I can never get a compressor to sound really clean and transparent enough. Instead, even if it sounds OK in isolation, the music sounds squashed and dead in comparison to the fully dynamic version. It usually works better and sounds more natural if I draw volume envelopes that bring up softer material, but it's a pain to do and still doesn't always get the result I'm looking for.
I also feel like I'd like a tool which allows me to set a separate EQ curve for the softer material verses the loud parts and automatically switches smoothly between them. If I set EQ so that the quiet parts sound right, things get hard when the levels heat up. If I EQ for the loud sections, the quiet bits sound slightly dull, washed out, thin and distant.
So I finally tried applying a technique I'd read Bob Olhsson discussing (once Motown's mastering & mix engineer, still actively mastering) that was used then and is a now a somewhat standard mastering technique - and it seems to have given me a much better handle on both problems. It's also discussed in Bob Katz's book on mastering, where he refers to it as parallel compression.
Last night I took a completed 4-mic stereo mix-down of a show that I've been working on, brought the stereo track back into Samplitude, copied it to a new track and left the original alone but applied compression/limiting and EQ to the copy. I set a low threshold and an aggressive compressor curve with lots of makup gain that radically boosts the low level material and was hard limited above about -10/-15dBfs. I also strongly EQ'd the heavily compressed stereo copy with a 'loudness' type curve with boosted lows, presence region and highs and scooped lower mids and upper bass. It took a good bit of listening to the solo'd track to get the compressor attack and release settings and the EQ near where they should be. Alone, it sounded very contoured and squashed- nothing like what was shooting for, but not grossly distorted either. I then unsolo'd the track and brought down the level to something like 20dB below the uncompressed stereo track. I played around with level and eq of the compressed track a bit more and for the first time ever I ended up with something that was better sounding than the original at both low and high level passages.
The contribution of the compressed track primarily becomes apparent in the lower level passages, where it brings up the details and adds the appropriate EQ at the same time. It also reinforces the punch and thickness of the drums solo parts that have full peaks (which remain cleanly unsquashed) as well as little bush-work details that now can be clearly heard at sane listening levels. At high level portions the uncompressed track drowns out the compressed copy completely- no lopping off of the peaks or squashed transients. It really helped to bring out the somewhat buried contribution of the third member of the trio- a muted bass trumpet player that played rather softly can now be heard much more easily.
I'd previously tried doing something similar 'within' an in-line compressor plugin that provides a wet/dry mix control, mixing uncompressed signal with the compressed output, but never got the results I was looking for. Maybe its the additional control that doing it this way provides, but I suspect it's most likely the seperate EQing of the compressed signal and the way that the separate track technique makes it easy to see, hear and adjust what the relationship is between the compressed and uncompressed material that makes the difference.
I need to go deeper, with it, but I'm thrilled! If you're struggling with compression, give it a try.
