On the meter that's labeled GR, that stands for gain reduction.
And whatever you see in terms of numbers coming down on this meter
is how much you want to add in the gain.
So let's test it out.
[MUSIC]
And you can see that that is coming down somewhere between three and
six DB on the meter here.
You kind of want to choose just an average.
You don't want to do too much or too little.
But remember you can always go back and
change this on a track if it becomes to loud or too quiet.
But as a rule,
you always want to make up with whatever you lost in compression on the game.
Because the meter we're showing somewhere between three and six,
I'm going to just set this at five just as a general guess.
[MUSIC]
So just to review, you set your threshold near the quietest word.
That means that anything getting louder than the threshold
will be subject to compression and made quieter.
Then you set your ratio, which determines how much compression you're going to have.
Once the compressor has done the compression.
Then you want to look at your gain reduction meter and
see how much gain you've lost.
Then add that number to the gain knob on the compressor, like we did here.
So let's listen to the final product.
[MUSIC]
And if that doesn't sound too different to you yet,
let's listen to it in the mix before and after.
And you can hear where it's, our quietest word was in the mix before
the compression and where it's is afterward.
So here it is before compression.
[MUSIC]
And here we are after compression.
[MUSIC]
And you can hear how each one of those words has just popped
out of the mix much better.
It's a subtle, but really important difference.
And you can use compression on any instrument.