Mastering compressor that doesn't take away the air

[TBlake]

I have a singer/songwriter client that records primarily acoustic guitar, bass, and drum songs
and he's been very vocal about mastering compression removing the air from his tracks.
I try to use very gentle settings with 1 db or less of gain reduction and even I'm hearing
what he's talking about. Any suggestions for a mastering compressor that gives compression
without this side effect??

[zeep]

Are you also mixing?

For mastering, you have the amount of gain reduction right. 1dB, and only sometimes reaching 2dB reduction. Did you also turn the compressor sidechain way up to the mids? If not, do that.

Slow attack, releasetime auto or short. Tweak to taste. Play with wet/dry. With any bus compressor you own, try a few. Ssl clones work well. Also try Fircomp. It's free and amazingly transparent.

[TBlake]

Are you also mixing?

For mastering, you have the amount of gain reduction right. 1dB, and only sometimes reaching 2dB reduction. Did you also turn the compressor sidechain way up to the mids? If not, do that.

Slow attack, releasetime auto or short. Tweak to taste. Play with wet/dry. With any bus compressor you own, try a few. Ssl clones work well. Also try Fircomp. It's free and amazingly transparent.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll give them a try.

[Uncle E]

Try a multiband straight into a brickwall maximizer. Skip the bus compressor entirely.

[Daimonicon]

Does the song really need compression? Just because mastering compressor exist doesn’t mean all songs in the world need it 100% all the time. Maybe just some EQ. It all depends. Maybe the song doesn’t need anything more at all.

[The Main Event]

Best mastering compressor out there is free: TDR Kotelnikov. You can even listen to the delta signal to check back if air is removed from the signal. Thank me later

[noiseresearch]

Does the song really need compression? Just because mastering compressor exist doesn’t mean all songs in the world need it 100% all the time. Maybe just some EQ. It all depends. Maybe the song doesn’t need anything more at all.

+1

And Maybe some slight saturation for a gluing effect. But yeah, it depends on what kind of sound you are working on.

Another suggestion: try M/S technique. Just compress the sum or the diff and see what you get out of it.

[DCrown]

Are you also mixing?

For mastering, you have the amount of gain reduction right. 1dB, and only sometimes reaching 2dB reduction. Did you also turn the compressor sidechain way up to the mids? If not, do that.

Slow attack, releasetime auto or short. Tweak to taste. Play with wet/dry. With any bus compressor you own, try a few. Ssl clones work well. Also try Fircomp. It's free and amazingly transparent.

Some weeks ago I watched an interview with Rick Beato and Greg Wells.
I never understood why you would have 1-2 dB gain reduction on master bus only, Mr. Wells often has 6-8dB, the result matters more than matching some old fairytales wisdom

[PieBerger]

Best mastering compressor out there is free: TDR Kotelnikov. You can even listen to the delta signal to check back if air is removed from the signal. Thank me later

One of the best free compressors, period

[Recourt]

Weiss DS1 Mk3

[The Main Event]

Best mastering compressor out there is free: TDR Kotelnikov. You can even listen to the delta signal to check back if air is removed from the signal. Thank me later

One of the best free compressors, period

*one of the best compressors

fixed it for you (removed the word "free")
Its so flexible and versatile, it amazes me. I got to use it more often in mastering because of Panorama Mixing & Mastering Youtube Channel. For those of you who dont know this channel yet, its a gem amongst youtube, surely the best educational content you can find online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ettGdZeUtz4&t=1s

[osiris]

I use Density MKII (Variety of Sound). It just seems to do it all and sounds good.

[Daimonicon]

He asked for advice and not ”what compressor to use”. Sigh!

[jtsterays]

Whats wrong with just EQing it back?

[bmanic]

You can partially counter this by EQing the sidechain and removing 6 to 9dB of the high frequencies with a shelf. Or if your compressor doesn't have external sidechain support then you can use a symmetrical EQ (meaning it cuts and boosts with identical shapes, like FF Pro-Q3) in a pre/post EQ configuration where they do the opposite to one another.

Doing this you can sometimes get less intermodulation stuff going on, especially if you are running a fast peak compressor, which in turn manifests itself as slightly more "air" as there is less added noise and other junk that can cause some masking.

Another option is to use an RMS compressor with SLOW timings.

Also it is possible sometimes to loose some perceived "air" if a plugin has oversampling that causes a very subtle but sometimes noticeable loss in "tiny details". For instance this is what I keep hearing in the FabFilter plugins, though there it sometimes varies depending on the rate of oversampling used. For instance in Pro-L 2 the x16 oversampling sounds slightly less congested than all the other options (I have no idea why), even the x32 times oversampling sounds less airy and almost always "worse" to my ear. Yeah, it _is_ possible that this is in the realm of placebo on my part but I did once do a 100 run ABX test that heavily tilted to it not being placebo (about 80 of 100 correct.. which is statistically significant but doesn't rule out placebo completely).

One last thing that can cause the sense of lack of "air" is simply harmonic distortion caused by the compression action itself. This can sometimes heavily strengthen the 100 to 2000Hz range, making it much more prominent and more forward, thus the ultimate illusion of this is the lack of "air".

The easiest way to counter all of this is to simply add some air back with an EQ post compression.