Presonus Audio electronic ACP88 user manual Compressing bass guitar, Compressing acoustic guitar

BASIC SETUP & APPLIC ATIONS

Compressing bass guitar.

Very similar to compressing vocals, the bass guitar is almost always compressed or limited during recording. Start with the setting described above for vocals. Vary the Compression Ratio, Attack and Release to suite your taste.

Compressing acoustic guitar.

It is sometimes easy to over compress an acoustic guitar because your first impression is that compression sounds awesome on acoustic instruments. If you're adding the acoustic instrument to a mix that already includes a lot of other instruments such as distorted guitar, compressing the life out of your guitar will help you later in the mix. If the guitar is recorded as a solo instrument or part of an acoustic ensemble, you should experiment with less compression because you don't want to severely limit the natural acoustic dynamic range of a good sounding guitar.

Start by using the setup described in the vocal section...

De-essing using an inserted equalizer into the Sidechain. A common annoyance when attempting to place a vocal track in a

mix is that as you boost the higher frequencies of the track to 'breathe life' into the vocal, all of the 'SSS's of the dialogue or lyrics tend to become louder than the rest of the track. A proven method of redusssing thissss problem is to de-ess the track with 'spectral' compression.

Patching a de-esser together is illustrated in the patching diagrams above. If you don't have an external equalizer, you can use a spare channel of your mixer by sending the track to both the spare channel and the original channel. Take the direct out of the spare channel and send it to the Sidechain input of the ACP-88 (signal on the tip of the tip-ring-sleeve connector). Once patched, setup the compressor as a limiter as described above. How this works is that when the Sidechain has an inserted signal, the Compressor generates the Gain reduction from the Sidechain return signal only. Now, if you boost those frequencies associated with sibilance (SSS),

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