About compression in the recording process

Recently, a friend of mine who is a well-respected engineer in Nashville published a link to a sample track from an album he is producing.  When I checked it out on soundcloud, here is what I saw.

What you are looking at here is a graphical representation of the dynamics of the song.  Pretend that there is a horizontal line that goes right through the middle of this graph.  The further away from that line you see black (and the closer to the upper and lower boundaries), the louder the song gets.

A quick look at a chart like this tells you how dynamically diverse a song is.  In this case, it is not dynamically diverse at all.  Basically, it is very close to peak volume for the entire song.  You might think this is true because the song is bombastic and huge but you would be wrong.  It is just a vocalist with a guitar and a little percussion.

The next question you might ask is whether the artist does not believe in dynamics.  That would be a fair question but the answer might surprise you; it is actually hard to tell without listening.  What you are more likely seeing here is a result of the recording process, specifically something called compression.

Compression is a process where a recording’s volume is standardized.  Softer sections are boosted and louder sections are reduced.  Depending on how much compression is used, a recording may almost completely lose its dynamic range.

In my opinion, it is a travesty, but compression is now heavily used on all commercial recordings.  If you compare today’s recordings to those of maybe 70 years ago, you will see a huge difference.

That being said, the general wisdom in the recording industry is that compression is a necessary evil.  That is partly due to how people listen to music these days.  If they actively listened (sat in front of set of speakers and did nothing but listen to the music), compression might not be necessary.

But listening to music is mainly a passive activity today.  People have music on in the car or in the background while doing other things and they keep the volume fairly low.  Music without compression does not work so well in those settings; essentially people would be fiddling with the volume controls all the time, turning it down during loud sections to keep it from interfering with other tasks and turning it up during soft sections to be able to hear it at all.

Let’s not pretend though that compression does not take away some of the power from music.  Dynamics are extremely important for providing emotional content to music.  Heavy compression basically takes that opportunity away from the artist.

And that leads me to my philosophy on this issue.  I end up debating this subject with the engineers I work with because I am always pushing for less compression.  I see the value of it but I am not willing to let my music get squashed into a narrow dynamic range.  There has to be some kind of happy medium.

Here is a chart of one of my recorded songs “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.”  Note that you can see the dynamics here.  In fact, it is easy to visually see how the song builds dynamically.  But on the other hand, you can also see that the dynamics are somewhat controlled by compression.

Some of you may record already or want to record some day and I just wanted to pass on my thoughts on this one of many decisions you have to make.  Don’t assume that the people you work with will share your vision for how you want your music to sound and the impact it should have.  Especially if you use mainstream engineers who produce pop music, you may struggle to retain dynamics in your music.  That being said, that may be a fight that is worth the effort.