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Appendix C: All About Compressors 73
De-Essing
Using the compressor’s sidechain, you can re-
move unwanted sibilance from vocals. Now it’s
8:00 AM and, after a brief nap, you notice that
the backing vocals are ripping your ears off.
Since you ran out of tracks about six hours into
the process, you’ve only got the stereo submix
to work from, so there’s no hope for manually
fading the “S” sounds on the individual tracks.
So fire up the BF76—it’s faster than the BF-2A
and more suited to this task. Instead of using EQ
to cut the frequencies on the input signal, use
EQ to boost the problem frequencies feeding the
sidechain. The BF76 compressor responds by
compressing more of the problem frequencies,
removing unwanted sibilance from the output.
Un-Pumping Drum Tracks
Using a similar technique, you can remove un-
wanted pumping from drum tracks. Perhaps
you’re doing a submix of drum tracks and you
want to compress the submix. One thing to lis-
ten for is any unwanted “pumping”—typically
low frequency energy sucking down the high
end.
Suppose the drummer is using mallets on a ride
cymbal while playing a kick drum. Because of
the enormous bass energy, a side effect of the
compression is the cymbal getting quieter dur-
ing each kick. Depending on the compression
settings required for the remainder of the pro-
gram material, this may or may not produce the
desired result.
Similar to the De-Essing process, if you EQ the
sidechain and reduce low frequency energy (per-
haps shelving everything below 300 Hz by
12 dB), there’s less low frequency feeding the
detector. You gain flexibility in the amount of
compression you can use, plus the option of us-
ing faster attack times without introducing dis-
tortion.
Pre-Compression
There’s a lot of marketing-speak about “pump-
ing and breathing” out there. Since they’re mod-
eled after the original devices, Bomb Factory dy-
namics plug-ins “pump and breathe” just like
the real ones do. Think of it as the old fashioned
pumping and breathing that started this whole
mess.
If you want more of an exaggerated effect, try
timeshifting the sidechain signal. Simply dupli-
cate the track you’re compressing and shift it
back in time. (Or get fancy with a delay and sig-
nal routing—whatever works for you.) Then
take the earlier signal and use it to feed the
sidechain input.
Depending on the amount of pre-delay, you can
achieve instantaneous attack times (a very fresh
sound on the LA-2A) or even unusual “pre-com-
pression” sounds where you hear the compres-
sion before you hear the louder program mate-
rial that caused the compressor response.