Compression and drums go together like … well, insert your favorite saying here. Classic downward compression adds energy, vibe, movement, and glue to beats, pushing drum hits forward and making softer sounds, like ride cymbals, swell in volume between drum hits. Drum Butter’s Compress gives you that in spades, and it also offers upward and multiband compression for a multitude of options.
Compress type buttons
The six different options represent tried and true compressor characteristics, all optimized for use with drums.
Punch - VCA-style compression with timings tuned for maximum impact. Choose Punch when to add more attack to your drums. Punch works well on kicks, snares, and other percussive elements you need to poke through a dense mix.
Glue - VCA bus compression for the classic mix-bus sound. This is the go-to compressor model that can literally be used on everything. Use it on the drum bus or master bus for that classic glue compression.
Smack - FET-style compression with fast attack/release and upfront saturation. Use Smack when you need something to be in-your-face or to completely crush pesky transients. It works great on drum-rooms, vocals (!), and anything in need of some pure energy. Tip: use it with an excessive Compression-setting and blend it in with the dry signal using the Mix-knob.
Warm - Custom style compression with slower attack, soft knee, and variable ratio. Dialing in more compression increases the ratio, as well as lowering the threshold. With a slightly slower attack it's nice to use when you want impact without choking the body of your drums.
Gentle - Optical-style compression with slow and smooth leveling. This model is soft and mellow at lower compression settings, but can quickly turn into an angry beast when dialing it up, thanks to its tube-like saturation. It's excellent at leveling duties while still adding a ton of analog heft.
OTT - Multi-band upward/downward compression based on the famous OverTheTop-preset. This is a modern classic for electronic music. Tip: use it late in the signal chain, after reverb and delays, at a 15-30% Mix setting to get the popular EDM sound on drums and synths.
Down/Up
To explain this, we’ll need to establish some basics here. Applying compression to a sound means reducing its dynamic range. In other words, you’re making the difference smaller between the softest and loudest parts. There are two ways to achieve that: You can turn down the loudest parts, or you can turn up the softest parts. You can, of course, also do both simultaneously and squeeze the sound from both ends.
The most common compressor is the downward type. It reacts to the loudest parts of the audio and pushes them down. This typically changes the envelope of loud sounds like kick and snare hits, while affecting softer sounds less, depending on how hard you drive the compressor.
The much less-used — some would say underused — option is an upward compressor. This raises the softer sounds, but leaves the louder sounds less affected. This can be used subtly to bring forward the small details of a drum beat, or aggressively to blow soft sounds completely out of proportion.
The Down/Up slider in DB-30’s Compress lets you not only choose between upwards or downwards compression, but you can also use it to apply both methods simultaneously or any combination of the two. Each process is graphically and numerically represented by the vertical meters below the Up/Down slider.
Mix
Use the Mix knob to set the relative level of the compressed and uncompressed sounds.
Blending the compressed and uncompressed audio is what’s referred to as parallel compression. One good way to use it is to slam the audio hard with the compressor and then dial back in some of the uncompressed sound.
Bands
Compression can be single-band, meaning it affects the entire frequency range of the incoming audio in a single process. Or it can be multi-band, meaning you essentially have four separate compressors, each working on its own isolated frequency band, unaffected by the others. Single-band compression means that everything affects everything else, typically resulting in a more obvious effect. Multi-band compression is typically more transparent; for example, loud kick drum hits will not make a ride cymbal duck in volume.
The DB-30 compressor has both types, and you can use the Bands slider to seamlessly blend between them.