Why even have a clean blend on a compressor?

JTEX

JTEX

Well-known member
Can someone explain to me what is the point of having a clean blend on a compressor? It seems to me that the same effect can be achieved by properly adjusting the compressor controls, without any blend. You want more clean and less compressed? Just dial in less compression. Play with the threshold and ratio to taste.

It just seems to me that a clean compressor blend is as useless as a wet/dry blend in an EQ. You want a 3dB treble cut? Cut it by 6dB and mix in some dry, until on average it's just a 3dB treble cut 🙄.

Thoughts? What am I missing here?
 
Person opinion, I like squashing things and mixing clean back in. You get to keep most of your tone and transients and gain sustain. Also on bass, it’s generally accepted you sacrifice low end for all the benefits of a compressor, a clean blend lets you have it all.
 
I remain unconvinced. It's like splitting the signal 2 ways. One half goes through a mixer channel that you don't touch. That's the dry. The other half goes through a mixer channel whose fader you're riding. That's the wet, and it's basically what a compressor does. It rides a fader for you.

The end result is the sum of the two channels. The dry just dilutes the effect of what you're doing with the fader riding. Might as well ride the fader less vigorously and get rid of the dry, I think.
 
Parallel compression. That is how it has always been done in recording and mixing drums and vocals.
Wikipedia:
The human ear is sensitive to loud sounds being suddenly reduced in volume, but less so to soft sounds being increased in volume—parallel compression takes advantage of this difference.[2][4] Unlike normal limiting and downward compression, fast transients in music are retained in parallel compression, preserving the "feel" and immediacy of a live performance. Because the method is less audible to the human ear, the compressor can be set aggressively, with high ratios for strong effect
 
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That's not exactly an explanation. It sounds like one person just doing what they maybe saw another person doing, without necessarily understanding what goes on behind the scenes. And I take exception with "it's always been done this way". I work in pro audio and I've never seen anyone dial any "clean" on top of a compressor. For some background, people I work with every day have some 20+ combined Grammys, including a Technical Grammy Award, of which only a handful have ever been granted to people such as Ray Dolby, Rupert Neve, Les Paul and Thomas Edison. My boss is a former president of the Audio Engineering Society, and every staff member above me is a regular contributor to the AES, up to the level of delivering the keynote speech. Some of them judge AES competitions.

So yeah, I guess I can say I'm pretty well-informed...
 
Einzeln said:
That is how it has always been done in recording and mixing drums and vocals.
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Not always. But pretty popular since the Chris Lord-Alge era and the loudness wars.
Parallel compression has different benefits, depending on the source material.
But to answer JTEX, it gives you the opportunity to increase overall RMS while still maintaining some dynamics. It's especially useful for material that has a loud or sharp attack but sustains notes/sound. Outside of chicken pickin' and maybe some soloing, I don't think it's all that useful for electric guitar, personally. Well, not on a pedalboard.
But if you slam an acoustic through a LA2A in a parallel scheme, it's wonderful.
It also allows you to impart character from the compression without losing transients. Think SSL buss compressors or 1176 all buttons.
Piano, drum room mics, accoustic guitar all can benefit. Your sustain and decay are brought up but the attack is still there. Yes, in some instances you could get similar results from just a compressor, if you are just trying to increase RMS. But, unless it's a metronome, you will have some transients caught in the envelope of the release times.

Parallel compression can also be a crux for lazy/bad engineers or people that generally don't understand compression or select the correct compressor for the material and use it to hide the pumping and breathing. I know you worked with GM some. I've heard him speak several times at AES meetings here in Nashville. Nice guy. I remember he gave a talk on compression once and touched on that, albeit treading a little easier.
 
OK. I texted GM to settle this for my own sanity and here's his reply:

well, they probably don't want to hear this, but if the "compressor" has a true RATIO control, thats exactly the same thing
 
Something to be debated at an AES panel, I guess. I just intuitively don't see the point of it, but other more knowledgeable people can argue this better than I can. What the heck do I know? I've only ever built about 3 compressors that I remember, of which two were not my design.
 
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JTEX said:
OK. I texted GM to settle this for my own sanity and here's his reply:

well, they probably don't want to hear this, but if the "compressor" has a true RATIO control, thats exactly the same thing
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True. But only if you ignore the charterer imparted by the compressor. You know, all the things GM doesn't want in his designs. ;)
 
I was just thinking about that. What I've been saying probably mostly applies to clean compressors close to an ideal "pure gain controller" . If it's a very "colorful" compressor, then you might indeed want to mix it with the unprocessed signal to control the color. But then it's arguably not just a straight gain controller, but an effect, as in, it changes the timbre of the sound. Indeed, George likes transparent things. I swear, you can bypass/unbypass his EQ and you have no idea which is which. It just sounds like the source has always had more bass or less treble or whatever you dialed in.
 
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Let’s take that as truth. After all, the man said it.

Sure, from a functional perspective, it may be pointless. But one thing I’ve noticed is a lot people do not find the functionality of compressors intuitive. I worked as an studio engineer for about 7 years, and I didn’t see much clean blending with compressors. I definitely saw chaining compressors, just like how guitarists use gain staging.

So that said, I think it is not pointless from a user interface perspective. A lot more guitarists understand a clean blend better than the nuances and interplay between the attack, ratio, knee, release, etc
 
Not quite sure what GM meant by "true", but I take it to be a continuously variable Ratio control that does exactly what it says. For instance, if set to 4:1, a 4dB input increase would yield a 1dB output increase (if input is clearly above the threshold, of course). Some compressors only have a fixed ratio or a select few discrete ratios to choose from. In this case, a blend would allow you to freely "dial-a-ratio".
 
JTEX said:
Can someone explain to me what is the point of having a clean blend on a compressor? It seems to me that the same effect can be achieved by properly adjusting the compressor controls, without any blend. You want more clean and less compressed? Just dial in less compression. Play with the threshold and ratio to taste.

It just seems to me that a clean compressor blend is as useless as a wet/dry blend in an EQ. You want a 3dB treble cut? Cut it by 6dB and mix in some dry, until on average it's just a 3dB treble cut 🙄.

Thoughts? What am I missing here?
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I personally don’t understand the benefits either
Thankfully most compressors that have a straight signal mixed, they give you the option to dial it out if you like.
 
Having used compressors in a live setting for decades I’ll attempt a meaningless explanation. Because if works. Typically the classic Dyna Comp model squashes too much of the initial attack. If you boost the level to compensate it gets noisy and sounds too fake. If you dial back the compression it doesn’t do enough. The great work around is to keep the clean attack and have the comp as somewhat of a backfill. I realize this is a less than technical explanation by along shot. If you can point me in a different direction for a LIVE SETTING I’m all ears.

Studio setting is totally opposite. I ‘d eq in proper attack and would relish the isolation of the compressed sound.
 
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