1. Upward compression in action

1 In this tutorial, we’re going to explore upward compression: what it means, what it is, how it sounds, and what it’s useful for. I’ll be using Steinberg’s Groove Agent SE 4 (that comes with Cubase 8.5) to produce some funky drumming to compress, but you can follow along using the Tutorial Files provided if you don’t have Groove Agent.

2 The waveform reveals that the main kick and snare peaks are quite pronounced. Traditional downward compression or limiting would work well to tame these, and you could even use some makeup gain to effectively bring up the level of the quieter passages between the main hits.

3 Last month we explored what can be achieved building a mixdown using only freely available plugins. Melda’s MCompressor is free and very flexible. From the default state, we can easily start to tighten up our drum loop by simply reducing the Threshold – although it does cause the transients to ‘pop’.

4 To be safe, let’s put MeldaProduction’s MLimiter (also free) after the MCompressor, with Even Harmonics set to 0% and the Threshold set to -1dB. This is more like saturation than limiting, but it definitely prevents the sound from hard clipping. Now we’re free to get more heavy-handed with compression, without having to worry about going into the red.

5 Reset MCompressor. Currently, audio that passes the threshold (the red vertical line) is compressed where the diagonal line changes direction (as in step 3). Check the Custom Shape box to enable compression curve editing. You can get the compression to lift up the quieter bits of the signal by making the curve look something like this.

6 I really like this approach for violent, high-pressure dynamic effects that turn tame acoustic drums into something more like what you’d hear on a dirty dance track. In general, upward compression tends to be used for bringing up low-level detail in sounds without just squashing loud peaks. See my Pro Tips for further benefits of upward compression.