Rock Worship Forums

Compression is necessary to a full and well rounded mix. Period.  First things first, You have got to compress your vocals.  At CF's Alive we have cheap little Tapco Squeez 2 channel compressors but they are excellent at taking the peak out of vocals and making the vocals blend better.  Now, if you have more compressors got to the acoustic guitar next.  It takes the *ick* out of piezo-electric pickups.  It makes the hole thing sound way more full.  Now, to the tricky part, Drums.  A little compression on the kick can make your kick have a lot more boom.  However, it is not really a necessary.  The snare is not something I compress very often UNLESS you have two snare mics.  I like my snare to pop out of the mix.  The rest of the drums you can throw small amounts of compression just to take the attack off of them.

Sidenote:  At Alive we have MACKIE ONYX 24-4 and we have been running all of the drums except the snare through the subgroup 1and2 and then compressing it with the onboard compression and actually it sounds way better.  For our setup it takes the attack of all the drums except the snare making it less distracting.  Now I know this solution is not for everyone (especially those with crappy onboard compression) but for us it is slick trick that is quite effective.

I would like to address the topic of ratios, since it was brought up.  A typical vocal compression ratio is about 3:1, and as a rule can be a good starting point for other instruments as well, but depending on what you're working with, may change.  We often have a violin and cello on our worship team and I've found that, especially for the violin, 3:1 just doesn't cut it.  A violin can be such a dynamic instrument that I've had to roll our ratio closer to 5:1 and lower the threshold quite a bit.  If I don't, you either don't hear the violin amongst the rest of the band when it's being played softly, or it's taking heads off in the first three rows when she starts digging into it.

Keeping the ratio high and the threshold low allows me to boost the gain slightly and level the whole thing out so that there's still some presence in the mix when the violin is being played softly, but it's not painful when it's played hard.  The whole goal with compression is to still keep the music dynamic and well, musical, without having the blasting peaks which tend to distract the audience.

We're basically running a little bit of compression most of the time, same thing with the snare and cello. Our system is set up for this though.  I tend to run the vocal compressors with the threshold set right on the edge for the same reasons, added presence at lower volumes, and controlled yet dynamic peaks. 

My approach to compression and ratios is quite different for live vs. a recording.  I personally believe there is too much compression on most modern albums, robbing the music of some of it's soul, but for live, run with it!  There's a bit more room for error, most of it's on the fly, and your goals are quite different.  Hope this helps.

Ian - Rock Minneapolis

Our church purchased fishman transducers for the cello & violin - non-invasive units that fit in a slot in the bridge and have a 1/4" jack that gets temporarilly mounted..  These passive units run through a high impedence active DI to the board.

As with all transducers, they can be shrill/harsh in the 1-4 kHz range and sound more natural with some EQ there, and maybe some lower mids taken out too.  Compression is a must because it seems as the higher the notes they play, the louder their output is (or they play harder), so a compresser helps even that out.

Speaking of mics, we've tried SM57's and SM81's with strings but never a lapel mic like you are doing.  Mics work as long as they aren't surrounded by high stage volume and can live with less monitor, which is pretty much the opposite of our situation.  The Fishman transducers are great because we've never had feedback from these instruments.

Reverb (like a Hall effect) is nice on strings.

Yeah, compression is definitely a must.  It's also a bit of an art form, although there are general guidelines to using it.  Basically, it's a dynamic squisher - compression lowers the loud peaks in volume on a particular channel, so you can turn the entire channel up without peaking if someone on stage yells, or hits a really loud note or something.  The trick is to reduce the dynamic range enough that you can turn the overall track up and get more volume, but not so much that it sounds "squished" or starts pulsing. 

I've worked with three compressors (and a bunch of protools plug-in compressors, which basically do the same thing, but in the recording world) - Behringer, Sampson, and PreSonus.  I really like the PreSonus 8 channel that we use on Sundays, and the portable system seems to get decent results out of the Sampson Com4.  Do NOT purchase Behringer compressors, they've given us nothing but trouble.  Come to think of it, don't purchase Behringer anything . . .