Dynamic Signal Processing (lesson 14) - Posted on 2018-06-02 by Hunter Rick

This lesson focused on compressors, exapanders, and gates of all types and what they can be used for. My mentor told me because of the way a signal is processed and changed inside analog compressor hardware, 1's and 0's simply cannot mimic the same tone perfectly if you overdrive the compressor. On analog you get nice warm distortion from overdriving the compressors, but with digital you'll simply get harsh noise. A compressor is often used to narrow the dynamic range of a signal then brought back up to its original level with makeup gain built into the compressor itself. An expander does the exact opposite by setting a threshold that decides where things will get quieter, thus widening the dynamic range of the signal. Finally, we moved onto gates, which are like an extreme version of an expander. A gate will completely silence any noise below a threshold within a given amount of attack and release time. My mentor also went over parrallel compression, also known as New York compression. This is often used on drums and involves mixing an overcompressed drum signal with an uncompressed drum signal giving the final mix extra thickness to the drums.