Obvious examples of compression in recorded music?

[bassbones2]

turn on the radio and listen to whatever comes out.

…..and then compare it to the original and you will hear the “compression” on the radio version.

Ton

 

[Scott Shaw]

Steve Perry's "For The Love Of Strange Medicine". I love the music, but it's so heavily compressed, it sounds horrible.

 

[Bass-ball]

Imagine you're in a studio. You just recorded your clean bassline to a console, and everyone in your band finished their parts up as well. Picture the entire finished song as a waveform: louder parts have larger spikes, while quieter parts have smaller spikes. Your engineer prints this waveform to tape, and every time those larger spikes hit the edges of the tape, they're cut off dramatically. Those instances where the waveforms clip will express themselves as a kind of distortion. That's also compression.

I think this thread has a lot of confusion going on about this very thing. I tried chiming in above but I think went over most people's heads.

Compressing the signal on one's bass is NOT the "loudness wars." The Loudness Wars is exactly what @jschulman mentions in the quote above. It's when an audio engineer allows the full mixdown of all the stems to get clipped at the top and/or bottom of the waveform because the medium of choice has run out of headroom to accommodate pushing the loudness up too far. You can usually hear this clipping effect as a "crackle" or a brief "pop". And it really has nothing to do with bass. I've heard regular six string guitar riffs that were clipped because of a loudness level that was too hot. (Listen carefully to the opening riff of AC/DC's "Rock n Roll Train" - it's clipped, and there's no bass playing).

Using compression on one's bass guitar is an effect, but may or may not have an impact on the 'compression' of the final mixdown, and has nothing to do with the loudness wars. Tony Levin's compression on "Sledgehammer" landed on the So album perfectly, and in terms of loudness and mastering, that album is still dynamic, lush, has tons of headroom in the waveforms, and is NOT a victim of the "loudness wars," and there is no clipping in it. Here's the proof. The early pressings of that album are all showing very little signal compression (green shading with a high number is good/dynamic, red shading with a low number is bad/compressed). Yet Levin's bass was "compressed to hell" in "Sledgehammer." That's because the compression was applied to Tony's signal, but that album as a whole, with all the stems mixed together, was still mastered properly.

Anyway, I've spent over 15 years trying to explain the loudness wars and 'hot remasters' to people and it usually falls on deaf ears. But if anybody in the future stumbles on this, here are a list of rock albums that I know of where I found that the remaster was actually NOT clipped and is superior to the original CD pressings (to me, this is uncommon):

1. The Rush Remasters (the ones from the mid to late 90s), except for Power Windows, which has some clipping in its waveforms. Best to pick up the original CD pressing for that album.
2. Led Zeppelin remasters (the ones from the early 1990s - specifically the crop circles box sets)
3. Dire Straits remasters from the early 00's
4. Camel remasters
5. Pink Floyd's remasters for the Immersion sets, though I haven't tested "The Wall" or the new Animals box sets
6. Steely Dan remasters, except for The Royal Scam, which has some clipping in its waveforms. Best to pick up the original CD pressing for that album.
7. Peter Gabriel remasters, specifically "Us," since the original CD pressing had a very quiet, almost flat dynamic range; the remaster for "Us" is much more open and lush

On a side note, I only know of one album so far where the remaster actually UN-did compression in the original pressing, and that's Steven Wilson's 2016 remaster of "Insurgentes." Wilson himself has written a lot on the problem of the Loudness Wars, so once he obtained the rights back to "Insurgentes," he fixed it.

Most other remaster projects in rock music are worse in terms of their compression. That's why the DR Database was started in the early 2000s. It's also not endemic to rock. I am a smooth jazz guy the last 20 years or so, and some of The Rippingtons albums from around 2000-2010 also had some clipping in them from hot masters and mixdown compression. Brian Culbertson and Jimmy Sommers too.

 

[pbass2]

How would attack and release be set to get this pumping effect?

That could be set any number of ways. The effect comes from another signal triggering the compressor to kick in, most commonly a kick. So when the kick hits, the bass gets more compressed, essentially "ducking" a little under the kick. If you have it set aggressively the overall effect is that pumping sound as the bass is pumping up and down around the kick beats. You've heard it a bizillion times. It's used in dance and modern pop music all the time, not just on bass but keyboards, you-name-it. Hip Hop too. It can get really cool if you have a pretty busy complicated kick part going, with the bass ducking in and out in a way you could never play it (the only other way would be to go through the entire track and automate all those individual level changes). But as I say, you can use it subtly--I've used in pop/rock where a bass compressor is very slightly sidechained to the kick, so the attack of the kick pops out a certain way - it's a really cool technique to try on all manner of things in a mix. You can put sidechain compression on backup vocals with the lead as the trigger. Or do it with two guitars playing two different parts that have space in different places and you get this cool little pumping guitar collage. Nifty stuff.

 

[pbass2]

I think this thread has a lot of confusion going on about this very thing. I tried chiming in above but I think went over most people's heads.

Compressing the signal on one's bass is NOT the "loudness wars." The Loudness Wars is exactly what @jschulman mentions in the quote above. It's when an audio engineer allows the full mixdown of all the stems to get clipped at the top and/or bottom of the waveform because the medium of choice has run out of headroom to accommodate pushing the loudness up too far. You can usually hear this clipping effect as a "crackle" or a brief "pop". And it really has nothing to do with bass. I've heard regular six string guitar riffs that were clipped because of a loudness level that was too hot. (Listen carefully to the opening riff of AC/DC's "Rock n Roll Train" - it's clipped, and there's no bass playing).

Using compression on one's bass guitar is an effect, but may or may not have an impact on the 'compression' of the final mixdown, and has nothing to do with the loudness wars. Tony Levin's compression on "Sledgehammer" landed on the So album perfectly, and in terms of loudness and mastering, that album is still dynamic, lush, has tons of headroom in the waveforms, and is NOT a victim of the "loudness wars," and there is no clipping in it. Here's the proof. The early pressings of that album are all showing very little signal compression (green shading with a high number is good/dynamic, red shading with a low number is bad/compressed). Yet Levin's bass was "compressed to hell" in "Sledgehammer." That's because the compression was applied to Tony's signal, but that album as a whole, with all the stems mixed together, was still mastered properly.

Anyway, I've spent over 15 years trying to explain the loudness wars and 'hot remasters' to people and it usually falls on deaf ears. But if anybody in the future stumbles on this, here are a list of rock albums that I know of where I found that the remaster was actually NOT clipped and is superior to the original CD pressings (to me, this is uncommon):

1. The Rush Remasters (the ones from the mid to late 90s), except for Power Windows, which has some clipping in its waveforms. Best to pick up the original CD pressing for that album.
2. Led Zeppelin remasters (the ones from the early 1990s - specifically the crop circles box sets)
3. Dire Straits remasters from the early 00's
4. Camel remasters
5. Pink Floyd's remasters for the Immersion sets, though I haven't tested "The Wall" or the new Animals box sets
6. Steely Dan remasters, except for The Royal Scam, which has some clipping in its waveforms. Best to pick up the original CD pressing for that album.
7. Peter Gabriel remasters, specifically "Us," since the original CD pressing had a very quiet, almost flat dynamic range; the remaster for "Us" is much more open and lush

On a side note, I only know of one album so far where the remaster actually UN-did compression in the original pressing, and that's Steven Wilson's 2016 remaster of "Insurgentes." Wilson himself has written a lot on the problem of the Loudness Wars, so once he obtained the rights back to "Insurgentes," he fixed it.

Most other remaster projects in rock music are worse in terms of their compression. That's why the DR Database was started in the early 2000s. It's also not endemic to rock. I am a smooth jazz guy the last 20 years or so, and some of The Rippingtons albums from around 2000-2010 also had some clipping in them from hot masters and mixdown compression. Brian Culbertson and Jimmy Sommers too.

It's not just remasters. Plenty of new and recent music falls prey to the feeling that it needs to be mastered super "loud", aka "brickwalled". I have done a good bit of mastering professionally of various genres--rock, dance, hip hop, reggae, punk - and sometimes its challenging convincing the client that the master is "hot enough".
One very interesting thing that streaming has foisted upon us that is actually positive (crazy I know), is that it's really detrimental now for your music to be overly compressed/squashed to smithereens/brickwalled for streaming platforms. The algorithms on the streaming platforms will analyze that track and determine that it doesn't have enough dynamic range, that the LUFS(Loudness Units Full Scale) are too high, and actually, play the track quieter as a result. So, your smashed to the wall rock song that you think sounds loud and competitive, could play after a vintage James Taylor track and actually sound quieter, smaller, and flatter in comparison. Different platforms have different restrictions, for example I think Spotify is -14 LUFS, while Youtube is higher, around -11. So if your master is -4 LUFS (pretty darn smashed) it's gonna get turned down until it hits that -14 max, therefore your whole mix that does not have enough dynamic range has been lowered alot for playback as a result.

 

[bassfran]

Check out The Who's cut, "I Can See For Miles".

 

[CryingBass]

I’m side-chaining this post.

 

[Isaac_James]

The bass in this song has some pretty strong compression on it, which you can clearly hear in the intro.

 

[Phaidrus]

That could be set any number of ways. The effect comes from another signal triggering the compressor to kick in, most commonly a kick. So when the kick hits, the bass gets more compressed, essentially "ducking" a little under the kick. If you have it set aggressively the overall effect is that pumping sound as the bass is pumping up and down around the kick beats. You've heard it a bizillion times. It's used in dance and modern pop music all the time, not just on bass but keyboards, you-name-it. Hip Hop too. It can get really cool if you have a pretty busy complicated kick part going, with the bass ducking in and out in a way you could never play it (the only other way would be to go through the entire track and automate all those individual level changes). But as I say, you can use it subtly--I've used in pop/rock where a bass compressor is very slightly sidechained to the kick, so the attack of the kick pops out a certain way - it's a really cool technique to try on all manner of things in a mix. You can put sidechain compression on backup vocals with the lead as the trigger. Or do it with two guitars playing two different parts that have space in different places and you get this cool little pumping guitar collage. Nifty stuff.

Thanks for the analysis! So do you think a compressor could help a standard passive Pbass, with rounds or flats, simulate that throbbing, fat and solid bass tone as heard in house or other EDM tracks?

 

[silky smoove]

Different platforms have different restrictions, for example I think Spotify is -14 LUFS, while Youtube is higher, around -11.

While this is true academically and according to each streaming service's specifications it unfortunately doesn't really play out as they describe. You can find wildly different playback levels between songs on all streaming services. Some that will even meter well above the stated maximum. I've measured Spotify playback at -6 LUFS on my TC Electronic Clarity-M before. They also claim that they will increase the level of material that's too low and yet I've also found songs in the -20 LUFS range on Spotify as well. It's a good idea, but I think there's some gaming of the system that savvy mastering engineers have figured out.

 

[Bass-ball]

The algorithms on the streaming platforms will analyze that track and determine that it doesn't have enough dynamic range, that the LUFS(Loudness Units Full Scale) are too high, and actually, play the track quieter as a result.

Okay, now I have to ask: did the streamers actually receive a different final master from the label/distributor than the ones used for the CDs? Because that's the only way I can think that they would be able to do that. Even at low volume (or "leveled/flattened" loudness), an overly brickwalled/compressed/clipped AF digital master will still allow the listener to hear the tell-tale "snap-crackle-pop" that the loudness war gave us. It's extant in the final master, afaik. I'm guessing they're still using those same digital masters/remasters when they stream. They might be leveling/lowering/flattening the overall loudness on the software of the client device (our phones, PCs, etc.), but I can't think of a way that would work unless they're not streaming the same digital master from its brickwalled digital CD predecessor.

Yeah, in my post above I should have specified that I was talking about RE-masters that actually WORKED, where they went back and made the album more lush and dynamic without smashing the waveforms all to hell. And yes, I'm aware a lot of stuff is mastered hotly these days right from the get-go. Irritating AF. That first time I fired up a Rippingtons album and notice loudness compression I was furious. Smooth jazz is my genre of choice (There are dozens of us! Dozens, I tell you!), and for the most part, it side-stepped the loudness war entirely, with few exceptions. And it's a genre that makes any speaker system or headphones absolutely soar with clarity and lushness. Great dynamics in that genre, esp. late 80s to late 90s. Brian Bromberg has started releasing some mildly brickwalled albums lately though (not his fault!), but he's the only bass-centric smooth jazzer I listen to who I actually like in that genre to do it. (Other bass smooth jazzers who have some brickwalling in their albums, like Julian Vaughn, I don't really listen to anyway).

Nice to know somebody else has noticed all this, and cares. The loudness war is bunk (that's the kindest word I can use that I think won't get blurred out on this forum lol)

 

[Jack Butler]

Compression(or lack of) aside, that ry/Vishwa is one of my fave unexpected collaborations ever. Haven’t heard it in a few years, thanks for resurfacing it.

Hüsker Dü's recordings were brickwalled before brickwalling was an audio term.

There's nearly no dynamic range whatsoever, there's only either silence or full volume. It makes the music exciting, but also kinda punishing over the long term.

But yes, most things recorded in the past fifty years, and nearly everything recorded in the past thirty years, is compressed. See the Wikipedia article about brickwalling.

Recordings with no compression whatsoever are mostly the domain of the audiophile sector. Check this recording of Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt to get a sense of it, keeping in mind that Youtube has imposed a fair amount of compression on the audio, without regard to the quality of the file uploaded (You will never get HD audio out Youtube). I've compared this side by side with the original CD and it's kinda dull and mushy by comparison, but still way more dynamic than the Hüsker Dü track above.

 

[pbass2]

Okay, now I have to ask: did the streamers actually receive a different final master from the label/distributor than the ones used for the CDs? Because that's the only way I can think that they would be able to do that.

Sure, some mastering engineers now will make different masters for different purposes if hired to do so. But most folks just make the best master they can and go for good proper dynamic range - a master that works for streaming will also be good for CD(unless you're trapped in time still fighting the loudness wars!). As I say, it's one of the rare positive side effects of the streaming revolution - way more impetus to not make a brickwalled piece of music that's exhausting to listen to.
It's also dependent on the style of music too. Some music has way less dynamic range than others, intentionally.
Then there's mastering for vinyl which is another beast entirely...

EDIT: I highly recommend anyone who's curious about all this to check out Mastering the Mix--read their articles, download the Levels demo and play around with it. Throw some of your own music in there, compare it with other releases. A really good tool: https://www.masteringthemix.com/pages/plugins-for-music-producers#lev-sec

 

[BigJohnAZ]

"So" by Peter Gabriel jumps to mind? Tony Levin's bass lines are heavily compressed for effect on that album.
Also anything on Rush's "Moving Pictures". Geddy is very compressed on that album and it sounds fantastic!
Hope this helps,
Brent

That wasn't too bad, but "Vapor Trails" was way over compressed, and they remixed it and toned it down on the compression, even though I still think it's a little bit too much. Rush typically had good dynamics on their Terry Brown recordings.

 

[pbass2]

Thanks for the analysis! So do you think a compressor could help a standard passive Pbass, with rounds or flats, simulate that throbbing, fat and solid bass tone as heard in house or other EDM tracks?

If you could sidechain the compressor to the kick then you'd be there as far as that pumping feel goes, doesn't matter what kinda bass it is--bass guitar, synth. Done all the time in recordings, and yes live as well, but if there was ever a time to leave handling the bass compression to the FOH, this is one of them! (not to say it wouldn't be fun to try it in your own bass signal chain somewhere, I'm sure someone is doing that...).
Think of it like "ducking" as opposed to "pumping"--the kick is hitting the compressor and the bass is ducking down a bit on those transients and then leaping back out in the spaces in between, as the compressor pulls it up. And you get that kick hitting super clear and distinct. It creates that excitement in that music.
As for the tone of the bass, that's a different thing.

 

[pbass2]

While this is true academically and according to each streaming service's specifications it unfortunately doesn't really play out as they describe. You can find wildly different playback levels between songs on all streaming services. Some that will even meter well above the stated maximum. I've measured Spotify playback at -6 LUFS on my TC Electronic Clarity-M before. They also claim that they will increase the level of material that's too low and yet I've also found songs in the -20 LUFS range on Spotify as well. It's a good idea, but I think there's some gaming of the system that savvy mastering engineers have figured out.

I hear ya. The LUFS specs are "guidelines", and yeah, people are still mastering music at -4, -6 LUFS, smashing some things to smithereens, you-name-it. And no algorithm is perfect. Think of how it's analyzing these files, there's actually way more variables and wiggle room than one might think.
Of course, something that's -20 LUFS can still have a peak of 0db so you can't go any higher(actually some of the streamers are lower than 0db--I'd have to look). The algorithm is only bringing the overall gain up or down, not trying to adjust the dynamic range somehow--thank God, 'cause the only way to do that would be....more compression. Now we're talking nightmare scenario...

 

[Killing Floor]

The 24 Hour version is compressed. Listen all they way through and you'll be able to tell.

 

[crazyBassClown]

It's when an audio engineer allows the full mixdown of all the stems to get clipped at the top and/or bottom of the waveform because the medium of choice has run out of headroom to accommodate pushing the loudness up too far.

No, its when they use a compressor/limiter set to not allow any peaks to exist so the signal doesn't clip and they can run it as loud as possible. To hear this in the extreme go have a listen to saint anger by metallica. When everything else drops out the snare jumps up and becomes earsplitting because the whole mix has been compressed so much it's ridiculous.

 

[Bob_Ross]

Limiting is just high ratio compression.

"The difference between a compressor and a limiter is only in the compression ratio used."

Captain Pedantic wants to point out that it's not just the compression ratio that differentiates these two terms; to be genuine "limiting" you need to also have a faster attack time than nearly any practical example of "compression"

There was also a time when the detector's response -- RMS vs Peak -- was considered a factor in whether a gain reduction processor was considered a "Compressor" or a "Limiter" but that's almost certainly an anachronism at this point.

 

[BrentSimons]

That wasn't too bad, but "Vapor Trails" was way over compressed, and they remixed it and toned it down on the compression, even though I still think it's a little bit too much. Rush typically had good dynamics on their Terry Brown recordings.

Try the remixed version of Vapor Trails. You will be pleasantly surprised! It's like a completely different album.

Geddy, Alex and Neil all said that the finished product of Vapor Trails was too "hot". Is that digital clipping or compression?