Plugin Tip #3: DMG Audio Compassion (a very compressive ... compressor...)

Okay, so we've had a couple of real nasty fattening, sound destroying, brickwall limiting, sumo wrestling, sausaging plugins to beef up your sound to a level where everyone's ears start bleeding. Time for something more subtle and advanced. 


this article is written under the presumtion that the reader has some basic knowledge about audio compression, its usage and application, for more basic knowledge on these subjects, read the internet (while you can, before ACTA applies ... let's hope it won't), maybe try starting ...  here

DMG AUDIO COMPASSION

This is a real 'under the hood' beauty, in my opinion a most refined piece of coding art. I'm not a coder myself, but I'm guessing it takes well written, insightful code to have a plugin behave this way without souping up all of your cpu And it does behaves very cool without eating away at cpu and memory! A workhorse for all kinds of applications. From vocal compressing right at the input to some very nasty sidechaining effects, and internal parallel compressing to get the SNAP without losing the POW... (and without having to create extra busses per channel)

I'm not gonna go over each and every option, that's what real reviews are for ... I'm just here to tell you it's a great plugin and why I think so. First off, I like the fact that it can go from gentle to heavy, long and short, snappy compression without touching any colour or tone character from the source audio. I say long and short, but i mean really long and reeeaaally short. Its attack time goes down to 0.0ms like a lot of analog compressors can, but goes up to a full second (1000ms), release time ranging from 0.0ms to 5 seconds. Only these two parameters in itself can account for some real weird types compression. The compression ratio ranges up- AND downward from 1 to 1 to 50 to 1, so in actual numbers you can compress from -50:1 to 50:1.

Also, almost every step in the compression phase is finetunable and has some different characterization options. It also contains a dual pass filter (LP & HP, seperately adjustable)

Some creative possibilities

Combining f.e. a very short attack time with a medium short release time at a quite high upward ratio (let's say -10:1) and setting the dry/wet-balance somewhere in the middle can make it work like a parallel transient shaper (but in a serial plugin chain), making all your transients pop out while retaining the volume of everything in between. Good one for drumwork and percussion loops.

Another cool thing which I find specifically intresting with Compassion is the sidechaining. It goes from very gentle ducking over stretched time with long release times, to which you can set the curve too, thus affecting the way the "sucking" effect of sidechaining audio will sound in the end, to very harsh short but extreme volume cutting sometimes creating harsh transients where there were none, but which can be very handy for seperating overlapping sounds in a mix without effectively cutting their audio.

Since it doesn't eat away too much at your cpu and memory, it causes no noticable delay when applying to input channels, so you can actually use it as a pre-daw compressor, as you would with analog hardware when recording external audio. Not that that's so special about this particular compressor, but it does that job very well too. As said before, it's a real workhorse.

The presets that come with it (about 10) are a good starting point to check out different applications and their general settings. But do experiment with all parameters to get a good image of what this plug can do.

So anyhow, this plugin, you can buy from DMG audio for 150 bucks. 

Find it here 

or ... 

you know, the net... still ACTA-less, and buy it if you like it and use it!