BASIC SETUP & APPLICATIONS
19
•
Compressing acoustic guitar.
It is sometimes easy to over compress an acoustic guitar because your first impression
is that compression sounds awesome on acoustic instruments. If you're adding the
acoustic instrument to a mix that already includes a lot of other instruments such as
distorted guitar, compressing the life out of your guitar will help you later in the mix. If the
guitar is recorded as a solo instrument or part of an acoustic ensemble, you should
experiment with less compression because you don't want to severely limit the natural
acoustic dynamic range of a good sounding guitar. Start by using the setup described in
the vocal section...
•
De-essing using an inserted equalizer into the Sidechain.
A common annoyance when attempting to place a vocal track in a mix is that as you
boost the higher frequencies of the track to 'breathe life' into the vocal, all of the 'SSS's
of the dialogue or lyrics tend to become louder than the rest of the track. A proven
method of redu
c
ing this
problem is to de-ess the track with 'spectral' compression.
If you don't have an external equalizer, you can use a spare channel of your mixer by
sending the track to both the spare channel and the original channel. Take the
direct out
of the spare channel and send it to the
Sidechain
input of the ACP-88 (signal on the
tip
of the tip-ring-sleeve connector). Once patched, setup the compressor as a limiter as
described above. How this works is that when the
Sidechain
has an inserted signal, the
Compressor
generates the
Gain reduction
from the
Sidechain
return signal only.
Now, if you
boost
those frequencies associated with sibilance (SSS),
such as
2kHz
to
8kHz
, the
Compressor
will apply the
Gain reduction more
to the sibilance because it is
now '
seeing
' more signal around the frequency of the sibilance. You will need to adjust
the
frequency
of the equalizer to locate your source of sibilance more precisely.
Parametric equalizers are most effective for this type of compression but you can get by
with most any equalizer.
•
Stereo Compressing/Limiting.
The
Linking
feature of your ACP-88 will allow you to have up to
four stereo Linked pairs
of
Compressor/Gates
. As you may have read in the section in Chapter Two on the
Link
function, this is easily achieved by pushing
in
the
Link
button on the
right-hand
channel
thus creating a
Linked Stereo Pair
. The channel on the
left
becomes the
Master
for the
Linked stereo pair
and all functions on the
Right
channel (with the exception of the
Bypass
switch) become inoperative.
Meters
on the
right channel
will behave as before
but have
no
significance since the
Gain reduction
for this channel is being derived from
the
Left
channel.
To avoid confusion, it might be useful to turn the
Compression Ratio
to
1:1
on the
channel with the
Link
button pushed in (the right channel). This will eliminate all
Gain
reduction
and effectively turn off the
Gain reduction meters
. The
Gain reduction
is of
course being derived from the
Master
channel.
The
Link
LED indicates when a signal is being
passed
from the
Linked
channel to the
Master
channel. It will ONLY
light up
when signal is
applied
to the
Linked
channel.
