A Tale of Four Mixes

I became unnecessarily excited over my newfound ability to create tracks that sound less like ass. But, I have to say that I am still pretty interested in this whole phenomenon of “compression.” This is, indeed, my production blog and I’ve decided that the time has come to take this on. Now, partially, my issue is that I’m using shitty software. I’ve got GarageBand’s patented “Shit Drums” as my backup. They sound wimpy and shitty and they do me no favors. The guitar tone hasn’t helped, but I’m starting to make it towards the promised land with better mixes and so forth. I discovered that GarageBand has a four band compressor today and I thought “what the hell does that do?” So, I started fucking around with it only to discover that, indeed, it compresses stuff. But the problem with compression is that it has no bias. So everything ended up sounding crazy bassy because of the huge bass bias in my song.

This bass bias lead me to a conversation with my recording guru, who goes by the name of Steve Henningsgard and who is not only pretty good at this shit, but in one of the best underground bands in the US today. Anyway, dude gave me some serious tips on all of this stuff which lead me to a final conclusion: the only way to go about this is experimentation. This is what I have done. What compression what basically allows you to do is increase the volume of your whole track by lowering the dynamics of certain things, so I wanted to see this in action. It’s interesting. For example, in the “Fast and Smooth” setting, the vocals get totally screwy. So despite being able to jack up the volume to practically unheard of heights in my stuff, the vocals are pretty crazy weak. Interestingly, the quiet parts are completely unaffected (as should be expected, they’re not too loud).

Below I have juxtaposed all versions for comparison by the patient observer. Frankly any help is appreciated.