Compression on tension cues?

[Paulie]

For tv drama suspense drones and underscores, is it necessary to add compression to help get overall mixes to "sound" louder and play the whole volume game?

[MattCurious]

The human ear tends to prefer louder tracks (which I gather is some sort of physiological or unconscious psychological response). As a result, two equally good tracks could be distinguished on volume alone. I therefore treat tracks at the master stage to try to make them louder, on the basis "why give someone a reason to turn down a track".

But that doesn't necessarily mean compression - on a track with a fairly limited dynamic range (eg tension underscore) it might just be automating the master out to keep the level near -0db, or using the make-up gain on a compressor or limiter but without the compression or limiting function engaged.

In this context I would only use actual compression (as opposed to the make-up gain on a compressor) to control peaks as an aid to volume processing.

[cosmicdolphin]

My feeling is that the people who may listen to this are probably listening to music all day that is compressed, possibly quite slammed in some cases depending on genre so a tasteful amount at mastering time will make it sound a bit slicker to their ears plus it helps to bring up the more ambient aspects and stop any drum hits jumping out at people.

One of my compressors has a constant gain monitor button, so you can hear the effect it is having on the music without it playing louder and it does add a sense of fullness and glue stuff together. I use a slow release time and a medium to show attack on the tension tend I've made so far.

Mark

[andygabrys]

well two thoughts:

1) its likely that the piece will never play at the same volume as you mixed it when its under picture, as it is UNDERSCORE and therefore has to be under. So under that criteria you don't need to make it loud.
2) if you are reinventing the wheel every time you make a piece, then its slowing you up and creating issues when you want to present a suite of music as a demo (say for a film composer demo) - you don't want to have to go back in and make new versions of quieter cues so everything sounds good as has the same impact.
3) like was mentioned above - production quality is of utmost importance. And cues that are super quiet sometimes don't have the same impact as stuff that has been worked on a little. You don't want your cue to be perceived as deficient straight off. One production company I did some work for turned back my mixes because they weren't as loud or impressive as their refs.

So honestly Paulie - I use almost the same approach on every cue no matter what the genre. Its limited to an apparent or ear volume of about -10 dB RMS. There is some compression (actually two stages on the master chain each taking off 1-2 dB, and some master eq.

So the ball is in your court - but I would research some uber high end music libraries and listen to the catalog pieces in the same genres that you are talking about. Whatever they do, I would do.

[mojobone]

Yup. Compress to taste, as long as you're not losing impact, creating distortion or turning the low end to mush. There's really no single formula, and it's all genre dependent except for maybe pop and that changes from time to time. If your DAW supports locking to SMPTE or video, you might want to try finding some picture with dialog and practice underscoring. (for extra credit, try making your own bad lip read video; see What's Up Tiger Lily for inspiration)

Editing dialog, FX, music and foley all at once is quite a job; with a little practice you can learn how to make it easy for the editor; ML recently did a whole Taxi TV episode on edit points, and we could easily do with another. Once I was being interviewed on the radio (with my band, natch) and the DJ continued cueing up commercials, taking calls, giving away tickets, while interviewing us and editing our conversation at the same time; the segment aired, shortly after we left the building. One of my old friends, a radio DJ cum program director used to complain that there was no art to it anymore, and a trained monkey could do his job, but I've never seen a monkey that fast with an out-dated copy of CoolEdit Pro.

Heavy compression tends to do two things you generally want to avoid; cluttering up the low midrange and collapsing your front-to-back soundstage, (something I work hard to achieve in my mixes) so I compress individual instruments only enough to make them easy to mix, and at the buss stage, only enough for the appropriate amount of glue. If I need it louder without altering the dynamics, I use Sonnox Inflator; a little goes a very long way.