Long compression attacks fail to compress transients unless a "look-ahead" is used to start compression attack before transients hit. Look-ahead doesn't actually look ahead; it delays the sound to be compressed. I used Pulsar Delay to get a 20ms "look-ahead" with a 20ms attack on the compressor.

For the first 16 bars, this example alternates between look-ahead/non-look-ahead per 2 bars. Every 4 bars the compressor threshold is set to 70%, 60%, 50%, 40%, respectively. I tried to set the make-up gain so that each setting is at about the same perceived volume. Last 8 bars are uncompressed.

Notice that the look-ahead doesn't have the transient at the kick drum.

Before Next, the way to introduce millisecond delay was to use StereoEnhancers: Look-ahead compressor using StereoEnhancer

This new way using Pulsar is much more convenient and doesn't require guessing the delay amount.

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  • the pulsar was made 2 years ago? shit i thought it was made a few months ago

    • no i mean the pulsar. i know when the quasar was made

    • You might be thinking of Quasar, the reverb.

  • This is Genuis!

  • WoW! This is very interesting. You can see the effect of compression on the waveform. In other DAWs there are compressors with attack to 0ms. Eventually you could manipulate the volume of the synthesizer that you want to compress with a 1/128 rise. But the rise in volume also has its dynamic response so you have to go guessing. But it also works.

    Great job And the melody is very good ;-)

  • That is such a good idea, however, to keep everything synced do you have to put a 20ms delay on everything else?

    • Yeah there's a lot of delay management that you'd have to do if you have many channels with different amounts of predelay.

    • Ok just opened it, and you only use it on the master channel, but I guess it would be a pain for individual channels ...

  • wew i misseddis

  • oy that's sick fam

  • Republished

    Forgot the bass candy