DOs & DON’Ts Of Dynamics

Don’t: Overcompress recordings. If your recording chain or channel strip includes a compression stage, don’t dial too much of this in as you print audio to your DAW. You can always add more compression at the mix stage, but reducing the effect of too much compression is harder.

Do: Experiment. It seems crazy to have to say this but there are so many myths about compression treatments that rumours are everywhere about the ‘right’ way to compress a sound. There’s no such thing. Use your ears as you tweak parameters and trust your judgement to make the right choices for the individual needs of your track.

Don’t: Load a preset channel strip for your output channel. We tend to want loud mixes but there aren’t any shortcuts. You’ll need to make a signal chain, including compression and level maximising, yourself, rather than hoping your DAW magically has a perfect, default solution.