gain on the compressor

[leeguirado]

Can anyone explain to me what is the purpose of the gain on the compressor? does it actually affect the compressor in any way? or just make the track louder?

[skltr2182]

it just makes it louder. when you compress a signal, you're essentially lowering the volume. so you use the gain to make it back up.

[Blue Monkey]

"Irrespective of which compressor you choose, you'll almost always find that squishing a signal's dynamic range to taste will change its apparent overall level. You could use the channel fader to compensate for this, but because of the large level changes that compressors can bring about, this is rarely a good solution in the real world. Almost all compressors include a simple output gain control, usually called Output Gain, or Make‑up Gain (or simply Gain, or Make‑up), but whatever it's called, all it does is allow you to reinstate the compressed signal to roughly its former level in the mix."

 

From: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep09/articles/compressionmadeeasy.htm

 

A good read for a basic understanding of compression.

[Rev. Juda Sleaze]

It's been a while since I used it, but doesn't it have some effect if you have one of the compressor's distortion types activated in the extended parameters?

[leeguirado]

Thanks, i think i will leave the gain at zero as it seems like it would just be cancelling out the compressed signal. ill give that link a read, cheers

[Eric Cardenas]

Why?

It will not cancel anything.

Do you have Auto Gain ON or OFF?

[leeguirado]

i have auto gain off

[David Nahmani]

i have auto gain off

Good. Keep auto gain off and gain on zero while dialing in the other parameters: that's the best way to truly hear what the compressor does to your signal. Then later you can raise the gain back up to compensate for the loss of gain due to the compression.

[leeguirado]

ok thank you

[lagerfeldt]

The output make-up gain will not affect the behavior of the compressor*, so it's there in order to compensate for the loss of level you will experience after gain reduction.

 

An input gain would, however, affect the sound of the compressor as it would affect the level of the signal going into the threshold, but that's not available in Logic's stock compressor. You'll typically see input gain on compressor/limiters with a fixed threshold.

 

*There are two circumstances where the make-up gain will affect the sound inside the compressor plug-in:

 

1) When you have the post limiter (in the right side of the plug-in) activated and you're pushing harder into the limiter

 

2) When you have output clipping/distortion activated in the hidden parameter menu (click the disclosure triangle in the lower left corner). Pushing up the output gain will push into the output clipping effect.

 

Raising the output gain will always affect any subsequent dynamic plug-ins in the chain.

[leeguirado]

Thanks a lot for the good answer, i understand better now