How to use compressors?

[OceanDweller]

Does anyone have a full-on tutorial and or tips for compressors: how to use them, when to use them, what the hell do they even do, etc. ? I'm an 80% noob, broke high school kid, so I'd only like to learn how to use LMMS's built-in compressors or free ones from the web.

This is a piece of my most recent project; any advice with fx, etc, would be appreciated. Currently I'm not using any fx at all (besides sidechaining).
https://soundcloud.com/ocean_dweller/project-41

[D.Ipsum]

This is Part 27 of A guide to mixing music. See also the previous and following parts:

http://en.audiofanzine.com/getting-star ... press.html


About your track, I think it's a good start.

[musikbear]

I'm an 80% noob, broke high school kid,

and new in forum too, so Welcome to the forum OceanDweller! Here are all our important links:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4740
-And a few rules for Avatars, signatures, posting and using the right sub-forum :)

In case you like to introduce yourself to the rest of the community, this is the right place
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4480

[Douglas]

This image may clear things up: https://www.image-line.com/support/FLHe ... Makeup.png

[brandystarbrite]

Hello and welcome OceanDweller.

Believe it or not, we have two tuts in the Tutorials section.
One deals with compressors and the other deals with equalisers.

Compressors - https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=690

Equalizers - https://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=688

Also, Douglas gave you a good example pic too.

[OceanDweller]

This is a slightly late reply, but anyways:

Thanks for your answers guys! Much appreciated.
@D.Ipsum: thanks for the link. I'll probably be reading a lot of the rest of the articles on that site over the coming weeks.
@musikbear: thanks for the welcome! I'm glad to be here.
@Douglas: took me a bit to realize that was amplitude vs time. I thought it was some kind of frequency distribution at first lol
@brandystarbrite: I actually did check the tutorial section first - albeit halfheartedly. I didn't quite understand the organization of the forums, so I gave up looking rather quickly.

So compressors attempts to balance the "velocity" of the channel they are applied to? - if I have understood everything correctly.

One other question: is there some kind of plugin that takes the loudest frequencies at a given time and quiets them? In other words, smoothing out the frequency graph - like I first misunderstood the meaning of the image to be?

[D.Ipsum]

So compressors attempts to balance the "velocity" of the channel they are applied to? - if I have understood everything correctly.

That's it. The compressor acts as a "gain reducer", it keeps under control the "gain", the "volume", or the "amplitude of the signal".

Before the compressors appeared, the sound engineers did this manually (like when you lower the volume of your radio when the sound is too loud). The compressor makes it automatically.

One other question: is there some kind of plugin that takes the loudest frequencies at a given time and quiets them? In other words, smoothing out the frequency graph - like I first misunderstood the meaning of the image to be?

You have multiband compressors that make it automatically.

The simple compressor acts on the whole signal, over the entire spectrum of frequencies.
The multiband compressor operates on defined frequency bands (e.g. band2 = from 1kHz to 2kHz).

[ACYDE Music]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVY-lkqIMvk

This tutorial helped ME to use a compressor correctly. Hope it helps