Hands on: Dynamic trio

Do you feel your recordings lack the professional polish you hear on commercial CDs? If so, then one of the reasons may be that you haven’t quite got to grips with the dynamics processing tools in your sequencer.

By playing around with the dynamics tools, you can add some extra punch to your tracks. At the most basic level, dynamics processing allows you to squeeze the dynamic range of your music by reducing the gap between the loudest and quietest parts of your tracks. This, in turn, will let you increase the volume of the whole track to make it sound more immediate and in your face, without introducing any nasty distortion.

Dynamics processing tools are now built into pretty much every music-making package on the market. While they can be labelled in a variety of names, they all perform similar jobs and fit into three distinct categories: compressors, limiters and noise gates. Let’s take a look at each in more detail.

First up is the compressor, which works by squeezing your music to reduce the difference between the loudest and quietest parts of your tracks. If you can imagine an automatic volume control that reduces the volume during loud parts of the signal, and increases it during quieter sections, then you’re in the right ball park for how a compressor works.

Another popular dynamics tool is the limiter. Rather than changing levels in response to the music passing through it, a limiter sets a ceiling level and prevents the volume levels of your track from going any higher than that ceiling value. A limiter is usually used to keep a tight lid on the maximum audio levels in your tracks.
After the limiter comes the noise gate. In fact, a noise gate can be seen as the direct opposite of a limiter.

When using a noise gate you set a minimum level that the audio must reach if it is to pass through the gate. If the audio doesn’t reach that level, the result is silence. In the old days, noise gates were often used to remove background hiss from recordings.

In this column, we’re going to take a track that currently sounds a bit lifeless and inject some excitement into it using these tools. We’ll be using the dynamics tools built into Cubase, but the settings should be transferable for use with the compressors, limiters and noise gates included with other sequencers and music-making packages.

Dynamics in action
We’re going to use a simple song with just four tracks for guitar, drums, bass and vocals. We’ll first use compression and limiting before employing Cubase’s Auto Gate to create some interesting effects.

Right, let’s start by adding some compression to our drum track. Hit the F3 key to open the main Cubase mixer. Now click the Edit button on the drum channel to open the Channel Strip editor. Compression can be used as a global or insert effect in Cubase. This means it can either be set to work across the entire mix, or inserted just on a specific channel.

Obviously, we’re going to use it here as an insert effect that only works on the drum track, so click in the first insert box and add in the standard Cubase Dynamics Plug-in. The Edit window for the plug-in will pop up. Click on the Compressor button to activate it.

With the compressor now set up for the drum track, you can start fiddling with its controls. The threshold setting lets you set the level at which the compressor will start working on your audio signal. With our drum track we want to leave the more gentle sounds, such as the hi-hat, relatively unprocessed while adding more force to the bass and snare drums. Change the threshold value to -17db. You may need to be a bit more aggressive with the controls, depending on the content of your drum loop.

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