Try it right now

A real compressor, running in this page

Not a video of one. Not a picture of one. The engine underneath is the same one I teach on, and this is my own kick straight off my rig, dry, on repeat. Drop the threshold and watch the needle fall. Then hit bypass and hear what you just did.

The compressor, live Drag them or scroll them. Double click, or Option click, puts one back where it started.
The one I teach on
Kick my own recording, dry

The kick, snare, bass and groove are mine, straight off my rig and uncompressed. The vocal is not mine: it is a live performance someone else captured on a live mic, lightly processed on the way in. Nothing here has been compressed, which is the part that matters, because it means you are hearing this compressor do the whole job rather than finish what a tracking chain already started. One sound at a time on repeat, because a full mix hides the mechanism. The picture shows the compressor's raw output against the untouched hit, with the part it removed shaded between them, and your ears get the two level matched so the A/B is a fair fight. The compressor is real, but it is an archetype, not a model of any specific unit. It teaches the behaviour. Your compressor supplies the colour.

Feed-forward and predictable: the knobs do exactly what they say. The bus-glue archetype, like an SSL-style bus compressor. The other three families behave differently at the same settings, which is the whole lesson. Press one and hear it.

Yours to turn. Every one of them.

Threshold -26.0 dB How loud before it reacts
Ratio 4.0:1 How hard it pushes back
Attack 30 ms How fast it grabs
Release 250 ms How long it holds on
SC High-Pass off What the detector ignores
Mix 100% How much of it you hear
Level matching is on, so flipping this is a fair fight for your ears. The picture always shows the raw output, before any makeup gain.
The full Compressor Lab: five sounds, four compressor families, six live knobs, the waveform picture and the gain reduction meter
The Blueprint Send me the Blueprint

The lab is free and stays free. The email is for the method.

The Headphone Mixing Blueprint is the calibration method I teach before anything else, because no mix decision survives monitoring you cannot trust. It is the thing I would hand you first, and one email is the whole price.

  1. 01 The headphone method, written out.How to trust what you are hearing before you touch a fader.
  2. 02 An EQ lab.Hear the move instead of reading about it.
  3. 03 A saturation lab.Four flavours, on my own recordings.
  4. 04 A bus compression lab.On a whole mix, not a one shot, with the sidechain high-pass and a parallel slam you can actually work.

And the compressor above, which is already yours.

One email with the Blueprint and the three labs inside it. Leave whenever you want.

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