Compressor On/Off

[Kaaareeegar]

I was searchibg the forum for tips and technicalities of the BB compressor ? What in experience a good practice generally ? I have been keeping the compressor off lately, and i liked it for sometime. But now listening to audio with compressor On feels more natural somehow.

would like to read few preferences of keeping it on or off, and reasons if any to do so.

thanks.

[Suspect Frequencies]

I find the compressor on kills the low
end, particularly on kicks, low toms, 808’s, some bases, etc

I am compressor off 90% of the time and use volume and filter to tame the output of individual samples. I’ll have to revisit the compressor again and experiment with it more.

[Kaaareeegar]

Thanks, yes. I agree on the kills.

Yes, the mixer screen is also fun to work with compressor off.

I guess mostly with comp on, all samples naturally begin to sound similar somehow.

[NoParades]

definitely compressor off all the time here.

I also notice some loss of low end, and if I'm going to run a master compressor at the very end of a signal chain or group of instruments, I need some control over what it is doing. If I was just making big blasty beats with BB (BBBwBB), I would probably leave it on. I have a feeling that I'd also use it more if I was using the individual outs less often and just wanted a singular mix out of a stereo pair maybe? I'd still like some basic control, even just a mix amount or something. I'd much prefer the attention get spent on bringing in some sort of limiter/overdrive/distortion/oompher if there's time to be spent on FX parameters though. I never use the delay or reverb in BB, so freeing up those sends would be nice. Even if the master compressor could be assigned as one of those FX slots, that'd be better than nothing.

[Kaaareeegar]

Interesting. Makes sense though.

I shall try to experiment bit more with compressor on.

[Dan]

The compressor will do a lot less squashing when you turn all of the samples down to -10dB and mix from there.
In fact, everything will always sound better with some dynamic headroom so the limiter can do it's job properly.

[Kaaareeegar]

You mean less squashing when you keep it On ? And mix it from -10db ?

The dynamic headroom works better if kept On ?

I most of the time work with compressor off,
Bring down samples to around -10dB and work from there as required. Reverb and delay only used as required.

Also later i found gain to be important in the mix with BB ? Initially i used to vary it heavily on different presets but now, managed to maintain the gain through most of the presets. I don’t know yet if this is a good practice. Still experimenting.

[NoParades]

The compressor will do a lot less squashing when you turn all of the samples down to -10dB and mix from there.
In fact, everything will always sound better with some dynamic headroom so the limiter can do it's job properly.

I've definitely noticed that starting at the pad/sample level at a lower volume and having a higher mix level has a somewhat higher noise floor than vice versa. Gain staging is always a dance to optimize noise performance, but since I never use the compressor, it hasn't factored much for me. I'll definitely be experimenting with this in the future.