Logic Pro 8: Compressing Beats

Video Transcript

"Now I'm going to show you how to compress the overall beat and the reason you do this is so that you can bring it up to radio friendly levels to CD quality levels. It's a first step in mastering it. It's not necessarily a mastering process but it is something that you will end up doing to make your beat more impactful and louder. And so this is the beat played without compression. You can hear a little bit distortion and the reason that is cause some of the signals' too loud. You can see under my master channel, it's hitting red. You never want it to hit red. So two solutions: you can pull it down, it's going to make your beat quieter, nobody wants their music to be quiet on a CD, so what we're going to do, is we're going to add a lemonier, which is basically a form of hard compression. So now that we have this lemoning going on there's no more distortion added cause I've changed the settings within the lemonier to keep everything under -2 decimals, or .2 decimals that is and you know, I've changed the input gained so there's less input going into the compressor and then that way it allows everything to be pulled up and pushed without getting any sort of distortion or any sort of clipping noise, anything bad that is undesirable, so compression of the overall beat is usually a necessity used in mastering to make everything sound better."