I’ve put a lot of
effort into creating and editing a recording of solo mandolin — played
quite slowly — and although I like the final result a lot, on
consideration the tone is too trebly and cold, almost like a photograph
with too sharp a resolution. A friend mentioned he thought I could
perhaps ‘warm it up’ using compression, perhaps of a type designed for
vocals. Can you give me some guidance on how best I might do this? Of
course, I realise I can use EQ, but would specifically be interested in
any thoughts on how compression/limiting could be used on an existing
take to get a warmer result. I’ve used Logic and the recording is clear,
undistorted, and free from ambient sound.
Simon Evans via email
SOS
contributor Mike Senior replies:
There are ways to warm up a mandolin
sound subjectively using compression, although none of them are likely
to make as big an impact as EQ. Fast compression may be able to take
some of the edge off a mandolin’s apparent tone, for instance, assuming
the processing can duck the picking transients independently of the
note-sustain elements. There are two main challenges in setting that up.
Firstly you need to have a compressor that will react sufficiently
quickly to the front edges of the pick transients, so something with
a fast attack time makes sense. Not all of Logic’s built-in compressor
models are well-suited to this application, so be sure to compare them
when configuring this effect; instinctively I’d head for the Class A or
FET models, but it’s always going to be a bit ‘suck it and see’. The
second difficulty will be getting the compressor not to interfere with
the rest of the sound. The release-time setting will be crucial here: it
needs to be fast enough to avoid pumping artifacts, but not so fast
that it starts distorting anything in conjunction with the attack
setting. Automating this compressor’s threshold level may be necessary
if there are lots of dynamic changes in the track, for similar reasons.
Applying some high-pass filtering to the compressor’s side-chain (open
the Logic Compressor plug-in’s advanced settings to access side-chain
EQ, and select the ‘HP’ mode) may help too, because the picking
transients will be richer in HF energy than the mandolin’s basic tone.
The
Advanced Settings panel in Logic’s built-in Compressor plug-in contains
side-chain equalisation facilities that can be very useful if you’re
trying to sensitise (or desensitise!) the compressor to a mandolin’s
picking transients.
Another way to apparently warm up a mandolin is
to take the opposite approach: emphasise its sustain character directly
while leaving the pick spikes alone. In a normal insert-processing
scheme, I’d use a fast-release, low-threshold, low-ratio (1.2:1 to
1.5:1) setting to squish the overall dynamic range. Beyond deciding on
the amount of gain reduction, my biggest concern here would be choosing
an attack time that avoided any unwanted loss of picking definition. In
this case, shelving a bit of the high end out of the compression
side-chain might make a certain amount of sense if you can’t get the
extra sustain you want without an unacceptable impact on the picking
transients.
Alternatively, you might consider
switching over to a parallel processing setup, whereby you feed
a compressor as a send effect, and then set it to more aggressively
smooth out all the transients. The resulting ‘sustain-only’ signal can
then be added to the unprocessed signal to taste, as long as you’ve got
your plug-in delay compensation active to prevent processing delays from
causing destructive phase-cancellation. Using an analogue-modelled
compressor in this role might also play further into your hands here, as
analogue compressors do sometimes dull the high end of the signal
significantly if they’re driven reasonably hard, giving you, in effect,
a kind of free EQ.
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