trying again..
Seems not to benefit really good raw recording but for “B” tapes seems to tighten things up. Any thoughts? For most shows I’m 😈 and running my 620 at -15 which results in levels around -12. So I need to amplify and also compress? In what order?
Thanks!
I take this as asking about management of overall dynamics rather than just taking care of stray peaks doing normalization. If so, my answer is "it depends". If I've got mics on stage close to the sources I often need to do some compression to get the live on-stage dynamics down to something reasonable and reproducible without having to constantly adjust the volume knob, otherwise if I turn it down enough I loose details and can't hear the quiet parts.
But from a more distant AUD location there is less of a need as the dynamics are nowhere near as great out there.
Similar thing with PA amplified stuff. It already has compression and limiting applied, sometimes lots of it. Sometimes a touch more overall compression helps, sometimes not, but the musical content is always more compressed to start with (even though the overall dynamics between the quiet parts between songs and the songs themselves may have a larger difference in dynamics)
You can raise level and/or compress in either order. Since most any compressor will have a make-up-gain control, you can do both as a single step.