Okay, compresses, as we've learned affect processes that time the peaks of your signal or in technobabble, they actually reduce the dynamic range. That's the range between the quietest parts of signal and the loudest parts of his signal. Now, you can do this to fix problems like maybe a slap bass guitar that you can't fit in the mix because of all those peaks. Or you can creatively shape your vocal to bring up the breath Enos. No matter what, sorry, which way you cut it, you compress it is going to be doing these two things over and over again. Number one, it's going to be detecting your signal.

And number two, it's going to be pulling parts of that signal down to different sides detection and gain reduction. Let's see this in the most basic example that I could bring out. Okay, so I'm opening up this sample file, it's in your example files. It's called sidestick snare. And I'm going to be working in Pro Tools right now. But I don't want you to be hung up and say, Well, I don't use Pro Tools, I'm going to be given lots of examples in different da W's.

So that we can kind of get an idea of how to use compressors, really no matter what tools you're using, either in hardware or software. But for this example, we are in Pro Tools, like I said, Now, I brought up an example, this is a massive difference between a sidestick hit and a snare drum hit. And I've set it up in this example, just to give you an idea of what you can do in terms of making these guys a little bit more level. You can see the problem obviously, is that if I placed this track in a mix, loud enough of these snare hits to come through and not overpower the mix, then I would probably bring this down, but then the side sticks are just going to get completely lost in the mix. So I'm really going to reduce the disparity between the sidestick and the snare.

And let's see how we can do this. So I've placed a compressor on this, on this track, and with it bypassed right now, you can hear the differences. Here's the size stick down here. And here's the snare drum way up here. And we want to kind of reduce the disparity between these peaks right here. Now, I said, I kind of alluded to before, there's two different parts of a compressor.

And by the way, the plan the way I brought up a compressor, it'll be different on any particular dw working on. Right now in Pro Tools, you select one of these inserts here, and then you go shopping through all of your different effects. And right here is where you could insert a compressor I've already done that, it's bypass the moment let me um, bypass that and make it active. So now with a threshold set up White House, What's gonna happen is basically nothing. You can see this is the input of our track. This is the output of that track.

And depending on the relationship between the threshold and the ratio, we're going to see a certain amount of gain reduction. So to get us familiarized with compresses, here's what I've done, I've set a very steep ratio here of a 10 to one, and I'm going to start pulling down this threshold. And so we can bring it down so much that affects these snare drum peaks, but it doesn't affect the side sticks. So let's actually look down here. As we play this track, we'll be able to see that the side stick is around here and the snare drum is about here. So I'm going to drag that threshold down.

You'll note that I can drag the stress out threshold down in a few different ways. And you can see that is affected over here in this graph. interface. And also you can do the same thing down here by pulling down this threshold here. I'm going to actually do it over here because I find that's a very, it's a great visual way, because you're looking at your input here. And I want to set this so that it the side sticks don't get affected.

But the snare drums, snare drum hits well, so anyway, I'm not talking let's actually see this in action. So right now you can see that the side stick, the top of the size stick is getting about here and the snare drums way up here. So let's start affecting that down here. If I bring this down, way down here, then you'll note that it's reducing the level of the systolic and the serum. I don't want that. In this example.

I just want to bring this down. I'm looking at this gain reduction here and seeing where it will Just affect the snare drum hits. Yes, so you can see right now it's affecting both the snare drum hits, and also the size stick, I don't want that. Let me just bring that up just a little bit. So now you can see that the size stick makes it through with no gain reduction because the level at that size stick doesn't exceed that threshold. But when the these big snare drum hits comes through, there's a massive amount of gain reduction.

Now this is happening because I have a big ratio here. I also have a very fast attack that is clamping down on these guys straightaway. So let's have a look over here. What used to be a size stick here on a snare drum right here is now pulling that snare drum those those peaks down here, so they can kind of live in the same Sonic space here. So I think I said Before that's what's going on with this compressor, there's two halves of the compressor. The first half of it is the detection circuit, which really looks for when the threshold has been reached and exceeded.

And then it starts going to work on the game reduction side, which is a part of the ratio right here and you'll see how much gain reduction is happening right here. You see, in this example, how the two different sides of the compressor, they're working together in concert, the detection side has been set up so that it only reacts when the loudest snare hits come through, and then it forwards those peaks over to the gain reduction part of the compressor who pulls down that peak. Now with the compressor properly set up, it can bring these two disparate sounds together. But note what it did it reduced the snare down to the level of the size stick. That's kind of like you know, when I told my son to scooch down to my daughter's height now, that's cool. But wasn't the problem that we couldn't see both of this my face, we couldn't see their details to get together.

Think about this, you can always get everyone's faces in the photo, if we pull 100 shots back, right. But in this case, what we want to do is have the tall ones kneel down. In other words, these peaks, kneel down and then we can zoom in to get all of those in the picture, we can do the equivalent in audio after we bring that snare drum down in what we call the makeup game. So with the threshold set down here to just catch those louder peaks, and the ratio set to squash them down by a large amount that 10 to one right here. We have the two sounds for me play that, basically coming in about the same level, but they're they're fairly low. Now.

These are Loud snare drum hits have been brought down here. Now we need to go into the makeup game to start bringing that up. So now you can see that the snare drum has come down a little bit. But the sod stick went from being down about here to bring right up here and the two are kind of living right side by side and that side stick will not be lost in the mix. So do you see that kind of the basic premise behind a compression, we had a problem in this track in the sidestick was too soft in the mix compared to the snare drum. We couldn't bring up the entire track because the louder snare hits would have pushed us straight into the red and we would have had distortion but with a carefully set compressor, we were able to tame those louder snare hits, bring them down to basically the same level as the side sticks.

And then we could bring up the overall level. So The two could live happily together in the mix. Okay, so now, let's look at the three main controls on your average compressor. We have a threshold ratio and make up gain, I caught up. This is called makeup gain or just gain for short. Okay, so let's look at these three different controls.

Like I said, there's lots of other controls that we'll get to in a while, but these are the main three that you really need to nail down before you can progress any further. So if you want to go into your examples folder, there's one called example number two is male vocal. And if you'd like you can bring that into your own record or your da W and kind of play along. So before I even get into compression, and right now with that threshold set Way up high, that means that actually no gain reduction be taking place so we can actually kind of have a look at this vocal. And I'll really be looking at this input level right here to kind of see where that average level of this sparkle is and where the peaks can last. Let's have a look at them.

Ah no, you are there. You are there no matter where you are most of the Burkle sitting around this crazy rat race round minus a chain, particularly right the beginning check out where most know you live. So I would say the average level is around minus 18. But the peaks are living around minus six. And these are just approximations. And certainly, you know, depending on how fast you're attacking, release and how fast your text detection circuit is looking at these waveforms, then these are really just approximations.

If you really want to geek out at the very end of these tutorials. We'll be working with some sine waves and you gotta see all that math, a lot of people are not that interested in math. So here's how I approach all of this, the first thing to do is set the threshold way up. So you're seeing that the basically unprocessed vocal and like I said, I'm seeing most of it live around minus 18. And the peaks around minus six, so therefore, the peaks live about 12 Db hotter than the the the average right around here, there's a 12 Db difference between an average and those peaks. So obviously, if I set the threshold were up high, nothing's gonna get processed.

If I set it way down here, everything's going to forget process. The trick is to set this down to around the average level. So therefore, only the peaks get get processed. And then you can actually see the amount of gain reduction getting taken place over here. Right now I have a ratio of two to one. Let me just bumping up to about three to one.

Ah, no, you are You are there no matter where live go, you are there. You are a tick tock. The clock stands for no one. This crazy rat race is no fun. Hold on, I won't stand strong. So you can see now that's that's a fairly subtle amount of compression, you're not really hearing any pumping or anything untoward.

It's just a way just to pull down those peaks a little bit with a fairly subtle, subtle ratio, and then we would make up that difference with the makeup game right here. So you can see that, you know, basically this ratio is only happening above the threshold. And then, like I said, let's just bump this up by DBS to compensate for the stuff that we're losing. So let me have a listen to that now. Ah, no, you are dead. Right then on that too with live, go have a look over here and see how the average level is vocal, and really now sits up here rather than peeking up here and mainly living down here.

Just check it out. Ah, no, you are there. You are there no matter where you live go You are there you are. Now, some people I mean there's there's really different schools of thoughts and how aggressive you want to be with compressing a lot of pop vocals, I hear just massive amounts of compression. And you can get all snobby and sort of say, well, that's not the way it should be or whatever. You know, it is what it is.

And some people like that sound some people don't. Let me give you an example of an overly compressed vocal here and how it will affect how the sound this vocal is, how to listen to this guy's voice. It's a Really there's a neat kind of growl growl in his voice. Ah, no, you are at the end of I know there's like a croak right there. Ah, no you are you out there no matter where live go You are there. It's kind of a neat quality.

But it's you know, we're just hearing this installer right now. But if this was placed within a mix, caught up in some of those little nuances, those lips max those breaths and things like that really will, it'll really depends on what you're trying to do. There may be some people that have like lips max or whatever that you want to get rid off or some people that like I said, right now there's kind of a neat quality about this guy's voice that I'd really like to, to bring up. So here's what we could do, we could ramp up the ratio a little more, and let's start breaking down this threshold so that we're doing a little Bit more gain reduction. So we're going to really start squash because that croak is kind of lives around here probably where the latter part is because they're just too loud and you won't be able to hear that so let's get a bit more aggressive.

Ah, no, you are there. You are there no matter where live go. You are. You are. Tick Tock. The clock stops for no one.

This crazy rat race is no fun. Hold on. I won't stand strong. I ain't got no strength that stands on bill stack on my back nervous please some carry these burdens lonesome bill in the Bantam but you said you never see from the top again. Ah No you are there. You out there no matter where live go.

You are Do I compare that to how it was before? Ah, no you are you out there no matter where and then with the compressor in ah no you are there you are there number two, we're live go you are. So now you can hear that quote is really coming up in the mix I'm not sure that'd be that aggressive with this but it's really up to see your own taste but you can really hear that if there's something subtle in your voice that you want to bring up. Then you know compression is a great way to do that. Keep this in mind though, is that if there's any if there's any noise floor of the of a bad mic cable or an air conditioner harmless like that, you know that will come up as well. So you've got to be a little bit more subtle in here.

So yeah, with this example, we Be able to see what a subtle compression is or more aggressive compression is it really comes down to that you know where you want to set your threshold. And of course your your compression ratio as well. So do you now see the relationship between the threshold ratio and makeup game threshold defines the level that anything above that will now be compressed by a ratio of something to one, a two to one ratio is a fairly gentle compression 10 to one is much more drastic. And finally, we have the makeup game that boosts the entire signal up after that signal has been squashed. So I mean, once you know these three main controls, you know, you know a fair bit about compression. But let's move this a little bit further on to two more of the most common controls and that's attack and release.

And to kind of demonstrate this let's go back to that analogy of where I was the audio engineer who's pulling down the fader whenever I hear The signal getting too loud or I see it too loud here. Now attack time is the setting to how fast I react. After that signal gets above that threshold, it's at a very fast or it's very slow. And then the release time is how quickly I stopped compressing. If the signal falls below that threshold, it's kind of a way to shape your compression. And if this all seems kind of too esoteric for you, and hard to find, let's look at a couple of different sounds that you're probably likely to compress.

Okay, so in order in order to demonstrate the attack and the release and how that can shape the sound of, you know, whatever you're putting through a compressor, I found the sound of a low time is just a great way to do this. Go on to your example files and have a look at the example number three which is low Tom. And I do that because the the shape of a low time is it's just great to demonstrate, attack and release. It's long enough that we can really play around with this towel and start to shape the sound of this the slow time. So you can see that, you know, there's really a bit, there's two parts of the load times down, the first part was the initial transient, the sound of the stick actually hitting the head. And then after that, then is that round tone of the of the shell resonating up to that Tom hit.

So let's, let's actually have a listen to this. There's a big difference between that you can see that the the stick hit kind of peaks around here, but the sound of that show resonating is down here. And it takes a while to kind of fade away but it does fade away until you get the next Tom hit coming up here. So I'm going to do some fairly aggressive whenever I started these examples, I get very aggressive with these ratios. And you know, low threshold it's really just to kind of give you an idea of what's going on and then you can back away from there. But when things a little bit too subtle, I find that it's hard to kind of understand what's going on.

So that's really what I'm going to do here, a pretty heavy ratio, I'm going to bring down the threshold until we can bring that peak of that stick down to where that the sound of that show resonating and we're really going to flatten out the sound of this time so let's have a listen. So you can see now it all kind of lives down here and we can put the makeup and bring it up. So you can see we flatten this out if this was actually on a scope, you bet it would be more looking like this, rather than this So now we're going to start playing around with this attack. The reason that the stick the initial transient is getting compressed so much is because our attack is set to microseconds, not milliseconds, so so that is, you know, 10,000,000th of a second. And so that what that means is that the detection on a compressor is always is always pretty fast.

I mean, it really depends on it's, it's detecting an RMS or peak. We'll talk about that later. But it's typically very fast, but the attack is how fast is this compressor going to start squashing this down? Once it's detected, that threshold has been passed. So if I start bringing this guy up, then here's what's going to happen. It's going to go past that threshold.

But the amount of gain reduction is going to take this amount of time. Given the milliseconds here, so it's going to take, let's imagine 100 milliseconds. So it's going to take a 10th of a second before it starts pulling down that fader. So if this initial attack here is less than 100 milliseconds, then the attack is going to go straight through and not get compressed until. So it's basically like the beta comes down about here. And let's actually have a listen to that.

Let me put back to Uber fast. And then we'll start playing around the attack and check out really want you have a look over here at the game reduction. So here we go. Lots of gain reduction on that transition. Ah, do you hear that smack. There is no smack right here.

But as we start getting a little further and you start here that sticks down right We're hearing more and more of that attacks. Just a ton of it. And then now we'll probably go into because we're doing so much Game Maker gain and all of that. Initially initial stick is getting through. So that's matching, absolutely smashing the initial transition. A little part of that transition is done in the come through and that's really coloring that sound.

Yeah, that's just sounding a little sweeter at the at the very beginning. And then of course, right here, the whole transcript comes through. So your job here with the attack is to set it if it's set to slow than the the entire front end of that sound will come through if you set it too low, then it's just going to be smashing the living heck out of that transient. So the question you should always be asking is, how do you want to shape the transients of your sound source? Do you want them compress like the rest of your signal, then set a very quick or short attack time. On the other hand, do you want to highlight those transients, and if so, then set a longer attack time so they can slip through before the rest of that sound is compressed after those transients.

In this example of the times we're talking about, imagine you want the Tom's to cut through a busy mix, then set a slower attack time. And that'll bring that stick noise up. If you want to bring up the boom that of Tom's in a song like this. Maybe you've got like a drum solo then set a quick attack time. So the relationship of the stick and the boomers now will be close and you can bring up that whole time. So out up.

Now by the way in, I would only do this in a very sparse mix when the Tom's are kind of solo in the middle of a drum solo because if you said a quick attack time and bring your Tom's up to hear them that it'll suck a lot of low energy out of your mix and your bass track will have a hard time competing in that busy mix. Now in a busy mix, play with longer attacks time, so the stick sound will cut through quickly and the low energy at that time will be reduced a little bit to start bringing some clarity to your low end is it going to make sense? Now another example is another one. If your vocal is kind of vocalist is kind of soft on his or her consonants, having a hard time getting them through the mix, then slow down that compression and let a few of those percussive parts of his or her vocal come through.

On the other hand, if your vocalist has a pronounced sibilance like SS and T's maybe even a list, then you might want to tighten up that attack and make it quicker to catch those transients. So to kind of see some real world examples of what we've learned, I brought in some some stringed instruments. examples here, I've got a rhythm guitar got a distorted guitar, and also electric bass. We'll start off with the rhythm guitar here. And just like we've done before, we'll bring in a compressor. And what we'll do is just leave this at its default values and actually listened that we just bypassed that and we'll listen to what we've got.

And you just saw it right. There you go. So here's the very first one. So you can see some of the peaks are up here, but the average level is down about here, perfect, but a compressor. So here's what I'm going to do is I'm going to ramp up the ratio a little bit, bring down the threshold a bit, and we'll probably need to bring up the game. Now you'll notice that I've got a big amount of gain reduction there.

But a lot of those peaks are coming through that is because this attack is relatively slow. Check out what happens with the same threshold, same ratio and same gain when I start to speed up this attack, like so, for example, you know, we try to really reduce the difference between the, the, the attacks, or you know, the peaks and the average level of the guitar and I think we're doing it yet check it out. start messing with the attack and go to the extreme and voila. The whole signal is completely mash so that you don't want that right. What you need to do is bring up That attack until you start hearing some of that, that initial transient attack on the guitar. So on rhythm guitar, that pit noise that just that initial transient just sounds sweet.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start off with very, very quick and I'm going to start opening that up until you kind of ascertain when it starts getting that pleasing. transient attack is a is allowed through before it starts clamping down to this ratio. Okay, so listen, I was gonna keep quiet happens around Form milliseconds, something like that, then what starts happening is that, with this, this threshold is always being reached no matter what you set the attack and release to what the attack is doing is saying, Look, I know the threshold has been reached, but let me just hang around for 4.3 milliseconds, which is, you know, 4,000th of a second. It's, you know, a very short time, but as you can see, just the difference between that and then we go back into this microseconds, boy, it's a big, big difference.

If you just wait just a few more seconds around four or five milliseconds, then what happens is that those initial picks, those initial transits, do get through unscathed and you'll actually see that over here in the in the LED ladder, check out what happens when we basically crash the signal straight off the bat. You see the levels right down here, but as I Increase the attack, you'll see that the levels increase here because those transients make their way through. So your job always, by the way, these thresholds are way too low. I would sit down here. So yeah, that was an example to kind of give you an idea of go ahead an exaggerated idea, so that you could actually hear these changes. Let's go to more of a real world example of you know, typical for a rhythm guitar, simply want to push it around for four to one and adjust that threshold and then let's Mattia getting through this mess around with that.

So you can kind of get the idea of what's going on with the attack. Whenever I explain things I always, I don't normally say this is the setting you need. I show you the two extremes, the benefits of both. And the downfalls of both. The benefit of a really fast attack time is that everything will get mashed, and you'll get a, you know, Uber compressed sound. The downside of that of course, is that just takes all the life out of it.

There's no presence, it'll sound it'll start sound getting getting quite dull because those transients are really the things that normally capture the mix. But if you leave it wide open with the attack very slow, then all of those attacks will get through and they're really the things you're trying to compress. So you've really got to kind of mess around. And I normally take it too fast, and then inch up from that until you start getting the pleasing sound of those attack transients, but not too much, where they where they kind of get through too much. And then you start peeking into the red right there. Apply this base as an example of what can happen over time with in a particular bass track within a song so you can see that right at the beginning here.

I think I had the salad, right. Yeah. So that's just been good bass. So it's a few little peaks in there. There's a little peek coming up here. But suddenly something happens over here.

And let's have a listen. So obviously, when you start slapping a bass, you start getting a hotter signal. But the hottest part of that signal is the initial, transient, right? I mean, right at the beginning of a slap bass sound. That's really what's going on. So let's see how we can affect this guy.

So dynamics, again, we'll bring up our trusty compressor. And what we want to do is kind of average out this track, so it's not so quiet because if you set up the level levels right here at the beginning of the song, then it got to miss the slap part, then, you know, it would be a lot. It would be too loud. It would obviously overwhelm the mix and you get the stores and things like that. In a situation like this, I also wouldn't just lean on compresses completely, because if it happens in a certain part of a song, then don't forget you have the old fashioned TGF beta that you can just pull down. And if you're in a DA W, you can quite often automate that as well.

So in a particular pattern, so you can just pull down that fader at that particular part. So anyway, let's just kind of have a look at what we might be able to do with this song. Let me actually zoom out. So yeah, so now we can kind of see everything. So right at the beginning of the song. We have a little bit of reduction here.

That's good. What about here? So that's living pretty well. Again, you make that attack really fast. And you've just lost the sweetness of that. That initial transient so I'm not sure it's probably gonna be around that five or six milliseconds.

So that seems to be a good place for most guitars, either you know, bass guitar or a rhythmic guitar is that if you can set that so that it can just let just that first little part in if you set a ton of it through them, those peaks will overwhelm everything else, but if you set it too low, I feel like I've just hammered this, this point, maybe a bit too much, but that's really kind of a sweet spot need to work it out depending on um, it'll be different on non string guitars or steel string guitars if your finger picking versus if you're playing with a a pic or like a said thumb slapping here with a guitar big changes that you can only really find by just dying around this attack time. Let's do another example with a lectric guitar. Just playing basically single notes this listen to this, I've got the compressor bypassed.

So you can see how that sustained no sustained note falls away right about here. Now this is a little misleading because a distorted guitar will naturally be compressed. The very nature of distortion is that the circuit is being overloaded so much it just can't soak up any more input at all. So it tends to have kind of a natural compression here, but this will just for this example. You can see how that Really drops away. And so what we can do is by placing a compressor on there, we can, in essence, kind of ramp up some of this plot some of this part, if we just bring up the makeup gain, so let's check this out.

Attack really get squashed because I speed it up that attack. I'll probably have to bump up the makeup game here and let's have a listen. So you can see with that fast attack, then the note even though here on the graph, we can see that note dies over here. It really doesn't have a lot of variants. That's because we've had a very fast attack. It's like the engineer is turning up the volume as you die away.

It's really a perfect way to get that never ending time, particularly with a longer release time. Actually, what a perfect segue, let's talk about the release control. Okay. Now on the other side of the threshold crossing, is how long will the compressor continue to clamp down or squash down that signal after your signal has fallen below your threshold, this can be just a few milliseconds, up to five seconds or more, I wouldn't normally go into a second or more. Except for maybe specific applications, most notably electric guitar if you want that monster system. on that, generally, it kind of goes like this, if you want to control peaks then sort of fast attack and release.

If you want to kind of control average level, then a slower attack and release is best. Now let's look at our examples of a guitar again. So now let's play around with the release time. And this is how long it takes up to the threshold, how you come up underneath the threshold, or the gain reduction to basically for the compression circuit to let go of that gain reduction. So let's play around with that. Obviously, if it's very short, then as soon as you get it will let go the compression.

You could put this all the way up to four seconds. But let's kind of play around with this longer takes a lot longer to stop compressing that sound, you'll also notice that the signal gets a lot noisier because it's really like an engineer is pushing up that fader, you know more and more and bring up that noise. So that's why quite often a half bar, if I have a very long release here, might just really be having a listen to that whether it's going to make things noisy and maybe polish up with a gate. So we'll learn lots more about attack and release when we go into the actual dynamics in action section. Later on, we can press all sorts of things like drums, vocals, guitars, bass, overheads, a whole bunch of stuff. Okay.

So on two knees, what the heck the knees have to do with compression? Well, a lot. A knee is how gradual the compression is in terms of how abrupt that gain reduction is, when we detect that that threshold has been crossed, let's see this kind of visually rather than all this talk. Okay, so I've gone back to my electric bass here. And here's where we're going to look at this control here knee. And, like I said, basically, a hardened knee means that it looks like a hard knee, right is that there's a discreet angle right there at the threshold, where look at this graphical display here, as we soften that knee up, it kind of makes that more into a curve rather than just a sharp angle.

And so here's here's how we can kind of experiment with this. Let's go to the very beginning here, and let's see what kind of threshold we can set. So that we don't get any gain reduction. And I think it was around monocytes. So right at the beginning of the song, we're not getting any gain reduction at all. That's because this is a hard threshold.

In other words, the detection side of the compressor is saying, Okay, let me look at the signal. If you're above, minus 18, you're gonna get compressed, if you're below. I mean, if you're minus 18.1, I could care less about you, right? This is like a kind of a binary decision is either you above or you below and I'm going to deal with you in that way. But as you can see, with the knee, this is a much more nuanced kind of position. It's saying, if you're below, you are going to get compressed, but you're not going to get as compressed as hard as you would be.

If you're above that threshold. So what does that end up giving you It gives you a kind of a more transparent compression. Let's test this by this example. We saw it right at the beginning. If we have a hard knee, and everything is she asked below that threshold, then we should see no gain reduction. We've already tested them, right.

So therefore, if I crank this knee up and make that more of a curve, you would surmise that you would start seeing some compression, maybe not all that you would normally see over the minus 18. But you'll start to see some of it and let's test that. Sure enough, it's barely taking over I mean, it's like minus one and minus two, which is, you know, almost imperceptible, but what it allows you to do is just give you some more natural sounds your compression. Now before we move on to gates, I'll quickly explain what a little limiter is, in essence, a limiter is just really a compressor with a very high ratio, some folks call anything over, say 10 to one, I tend to call that limiting. So you might kind of say a compressor kind of morphs into a limiter as you crank up that ratio.

Now there are also specialized limiters on the market in both hardware and software, they can perform these harsh gain redactions with less distortion than you would normally get with regular compressors. And by the way, in terms of the detection side of a compressor or a limiter, there are basically two different ways to detect whether a signal has crossed over that threshold and in turn, whether to tell the gain reduction side to start compressing that signal. And those two are RMS and peak RMS is just a fancy way of saying average level if you're, if you're really interested stands for root mean square which is just kind of a unique way of of averaging taking the mean measurement, and then the root and the square. So you'll always get the correct math for both above and below the zero point, whatever. It's just the average level. Okay?

So, a peak measurement sees the peak of a signal, which is really important in limiting, you want to quickly pull down both peaks and limiting. So the rule of thumb is typically, RMS is generally used in compression and peak detection is best to use in limiting. So there you have it. Basically, these are the basic controls used in compressors, and limiters. We'll look in much more detail when we get into routing and applications. But this should kind of give you enough info to be able to stare down any compressor or limiter and understand kind of what all those controls are.