Are you ready to find out what a seemingly simple compression tool like the GTS-39 is really capable of? Well, we hope so! In this episode, we will take a rather lousy mix of a rock song and turn it into a thunderous and professional sounding piece of music – all with this very plugin.
Here’s the unprocessed recording – listen to the snare, which pops out very unpleasantly, and also the feeble guitars.
Pressing it up
We kick off by placing an instance of GTS-39 on the master bus. If we now look at the VU-meter we see that there’s already a decent amount of compression happening. So, we increase the INPUT just a tiny bit; the peaks should range between 5dB (minimum) and 10dB (maximum). Depending upon the level of your own material you may of course want to adjust this control respectively. Do not forget to set the OUTPUT knob so that there are no peaks over 0dB.
We leave the HOLD knob at its lowest, and the RELEASE knob at its highest setting. In general, HOLD can be very useful when working on single drums, like kicks or snare, for instance, because it lets you tailor the length of the compression exactly to the specific sound – similar to an envelope. A long RELEASE time ensures that everything sounds smooth and consistent, which can be crucial when mastering audio.
After that, we click the drop-down-menu in the lower left corner of the plugin, which says ‘Draft (no oversample)’ in its initial state, and change it to ‘Oversample 8x’. This will consume more CPU than before, but also result in a better sound.
Since we’re working on a full mix with different instruments (rather than one sole, consistent source) we want to treat the lower frequencies differently than the high ones. Therefore we turn up the SIDE-EQ knob all the way up, which enhances the compression on the bass frequencies.
The interface of the plugin should now look something like this:
The result
Before we listen to the final result let us say that we didn’t change the overall volume of the track at all – in fact, the peaks are now even a few decibels lower than before due to the compression. Nevertheless, the perceived volume might be higher, or the sound simply bigger, if you will. That’s because the GTS-39 brought up the guitars in the mix, and made them bolder, while the snare now sits properly in the rest.
You can download the preset for GTS-39 here: GTS39_RockMix_Preset.FXP