Digital Anti-Compressor

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Drone
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Digital Anti-Compressor

Post by Drone » Sat Dec 10, 2016 3:58 pm

I want something that takes quiet passages and makes them louder (roughly and simply, not for a finished product), while not doing anything to the louder parts, like a compressor in reverse. I know it's not an expander, that expands the dynamic range of the loud parts, so what is it, or how can it be achieved?
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Post by floid » Sat Dec 10, 2016 8:39 pm

I might be totally misunderstanding what's going on, but to my ears the dbx 118 does this in linear mode - threshold acts like a center of dynamic range, so moving it around affects whether you're pulling down the loud bits, pulling up the quiet bits, or some of both. It's how I started thinking about it anyway, kind of opened up how I use it. There's a sweet spot in there where switching modes is more of a tonal shift, useful for creating movement without changing the overall sound too drastically.
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Post by Drone » Sun Dec 11, 2016 1:02 pm

Sorry, I should have said I was trying to do his in the box. It's just some recordings of rehearsals, I want to bring the quiet bits up, so I can hear them better. The loud parts are OK, and probably already a little compressed by the recorder itself. I wondered if there was some kind of thing that could normalize quiet parts and leave the rest?
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Post by darjama » Sun Dec 11, 2016 9:09 pm

You could duplicate the track and set up a gate to duck the louder passages, and adding that back in to the original would make the quieter parts louder. But you'd have to be real careful setting it up or you'll get some funny sounding pumping.

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Post by vvv » Mon Dec 12, 2016 4:17 am

I would manually hard-limit, boosting the low-level sections and not boosting but taking a cuppla db off the high-level sections to even 'em out some.

That assumes you can do that in yer DAW, and have the time.
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Post by RoyMatthews » Mon Dec 12, 2016 8:17 am

The only thing I can think of is something Like Waves Vocal Rider with is just "ghost" automation. I don't know if there is anything similar by any other company.

I feel like there's a way to do this by sidechaining some stuff but I can't figure it out right now. I haven't even showered yet.
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Post by Drone » Mon Dec 12, 2016 10:45 am

OK, what I've done is this:

1. Take the track, make a duplicate track, Invert it.
2. Gate the inverted duplicate track.
3. Mix with original.

So far what I have is a very tinny sounding quiet loud parts, and clear quiet parts, I'm going to play with the settings until it's no loud part, and then mix it back with the original.
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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:48 am

why not just cut up the track into sections, and simply raise the gain on the quiet sections?

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Post by Drone » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:50 am

I'm an engineer :D

I'll spend more time mechanizing a solution than doing it manually. Plus I figured it was something I should learn how to do, expand my repertoire as it were.
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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:52 am

you're an engineer, so you figure out the simplest way to solve the problem, cmon!

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Post by Drone » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:58 am

Which is what I'm doing. This way is still quicker, in man-hours, if not in length of time.
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Post by Scodiddly » Tue Dec 13, 2016 11:59 am

AGC, aka automatic gain control. The way it used to be on cheap tape recorders!

Basically you take a compressor, you give it a reasonably fast attack time and a very long release time. It squashes the loud parts with minimal artifact because it takes so long to release.

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Post by Drone » Tue Dec 13, 2016 12:01 pm

How long is very long? What sort of ratio of compression? I have around 20dB of difference between the very quiet and very loud parts, so won't that be dreadful with makeup gain?
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Post by MoreSpaceEcho » Tue Dec 13, 2016 12:53 pm

like 5 seconds or more. maybe 3:1?

or just do it the quicker, simpler, cleaner way!

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Post by RoyMatthews » Tue Dec 13, 2016 1:21 pm

I was bored so I did a test in Logic. It's a rough idea but might be ok for reference listening.
Route the track to 3 busses (A, B, C) all with the same gate and whatever plugin to invert phase on one (C). B and C will cancel each other out. Set the Gate on C to close on the quiet part and that section should play through. Bring in Bus A (about 12 db down) to fill in the loss when B and C cancel out. Just remember to have all the same plugins to make sure there's no latency.

I'm sure I explained it poorly but is seems to work well here.
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