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Thread: How important is vocal compression?

  1. #1
    Forum Member CyberStrat's Avatar
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    How important is vocal compression?

    Our band has been using a Peavey XR8600 head for the last 6 months. I'm looking at new mixers, and the Yamaha mixers have onboard compression.

    Is it important, or can you go without? What does it do exactly?

    We just recently bought a alesis compressor, but it's applied to our whole mix, not individual channels. That seems wrong to me, but thats how the folks at Guitar Center told us how to set it up.

    Cyber

  2. #2
    Forum Member Rickenjangle's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    Compression can help vocalists whose performance styles include using their voices quietly and louder for different timbres. A lot of pro vocalists 'mix' or 'compress' their own voices by backing off the mic a tad bit when singing louder.

    I wouldn't say it's absolutely essential for voices, but it's nice to have a very light compression set on the voice and some hard limiting so that when someone starts singing Grindcore (or "Crust" or whatever) then your system is protected...

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  3. #3
    Forum Member Kap'n's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    Vocal compression is useful, but it's no substitute for good mic technique.
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    Forum Member NeoFauve's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    It all depends who's singing.
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  5. #5
    Forum Member Rickenjangle's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    Yep - sometimes I want to limit the vocals so much that they don't come out of the mains... ;-)

    "I'm gonna find myself a girl
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    And we'll fill in the missing colors
    In each other's paint-by-number dreams..."

  6. #6
    Forum Member chuckocaster's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    Quote Originally Posted by CyberStrat View Post
    That seems wrong to me, but thats how the folks at Guitar Center told us how to set it up.

    Cyber
    and for good reason, it is. i never in the whole time i mixed live sound compressed the stereo mix, you do that in the recording studio. there is a reason people work at guitar center. it's like the saying, those who can't do, teach.

    my band has one of those little yamaha mixers, they are nice, and punchy. with compression a little bit goes a long way. you just want to use a little to smooth it out.
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  7. #7
    Forum Member Rickenjangle's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    We never compress the whole mix at church either - we have 2 stereo compressors - 3 channels for the other vocalists (they never compress me, because I know how to 'work' the mic) and one for the worship leader's acoustic guitar, which can be peaky due to his style of picking. If we were to get another compressor for the whole mix I would probably set it up for hard limiting, more for speaker protection than for compression. Actually, we really need a dual 31-band EQ more.

    "I'm gonna find myself a girl
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    And we'll fill in the missing colors
    In each other's paint-by-number dreams..."

  8. #8
    Forum Member Wilko's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    The GC suggestion is actually a good one because if you run it like a regular effect, it can't do it's job. The dry signal will still peak and won't compress.
    If it's a one channel compressor, you can either do 1 channel pre mixer, or do the whole mix as they suggest.

    On the Yamaha mixers it's a pretty handy feature as a limiter.

    IMHO, there's a lot more to the benefit of compression than just fixing bad mic technique.

  9. #9
    Forum Member CyberStrat's Avatar
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    Re: How important is vocal compression?

    We ending up trying a couple of routing options. We found we like it better not compressing the whole mix. We still get the results for our two vocalists, but let my POD XT live and the limited keyboard go without.

    BTW - A POD sounds terrible with the whole mix compressed. Our drum machine for practice was really poor sounding also.

    Cyber.

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