Pro Tools Plugins (Lesson 10) - Posted on 2018-03-16 by Hunter Rick

Today we went over compressors. I had already a familiarity with all the plugins so I asked David to explain to me in depth about compressors. He showed me multiple hardware compressors and their software imitations. A compressor at it's most basic has a threshold, a ratio, and a release and attack time. The threshold decides at what dB does the signal get compressed. The ratio decides by how much, for instance 3:1 means that for every 3dB that go over the threshold, it'll be converted to 1dB. The attack and release times decide how quickly the compressor reacts and disengages from compressing. Compressors are very handy for big dynamics in your sounds and vocals to make them sound nice and consistent in volume.