I realized last night, that using the actual waveform view may be a better tool to see what your compressor is doing, rather than just a vu. You can see if it pushing the gain down, or cutting it off sooner, etc all based on your ADSR settings on your pedal. I would record multiple tracks of the same riff or note, with tweaks to each setting and then you could look at the waveforms to see the result. You could also use the spectrum analyzer in realtime as a plugin to see what is going on to the incoming signal.
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Maybe you could set it up like he shows in this video? While it is an echo, think you could do the same for the compressor
Good idea. I can actually put one track in my looper and put the compressor after it and do what you are saying. Thanks!! This is better.
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Yeah I was thinking this too. Even better if you have a dry and wet channel
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oooh, geat idea @Paul
with my new Boss LS-2, I think I can do this easily
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Simplest way I can think of overall, is just record the clean dry track with no plugins, set a new track with the compressor as a hardware in the loop. Record enable this track, tweak your settings and then you can A/B the two tracks here the differences and also expand the waveforms to further compare the differences. If you have a quick attack and slow release, you should be able to see it clamp down on the B track, etc. It’s like creating a resample track.
Oscilloscope plugin would work too.
The actual VU might remain about the same under compression. The peak level will be limited but any makeup gain will increase the body of the signal. Compression can, of course, make a track much louder while limiting the peak level to a constant VU. This is one of its most common uses, in extremis with a track or master limiter.
The difference between loudness and levels is an important one to understand, and the waveform view or a scope can help with that a lot.
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Agree, 100%. Most folks aren’t aware of the difference, nor what LUFS are and standards for each streaming service. Ozone has a great learn feature on the limiter that you can get a good setting for the desired LUFS by using it. For most services, would recommend a -12 or -13 for LUFS to keep the best quality.
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@PamPurrs and I mention LUFS in our video class. YouTube looks for -14 as a target that keeps them from messing with your audio.
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-14 is a relatively good target; a little louder or less loud than that won’t kill you. I usually shoot for -14 to -12.
The trick is knowing how to increase or decrease the loudness. And while the master level slider on the mixer will do it, in kind of a brute force way - it’s not the best way in general for the overall tonal balance. For that, it’s compression, limiting, EQ and saturation, and really understanding how those work in a mix across tracks is a long process. The level only plays a part in that.
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You actually want it a little above as @howard says, that way even if the bring it down, it won’t impact the track or clip it. The inverse is not true. If you go below the -14 and they bring it up, you can get clipping on your track.
And you should be leaving your master at unity gain…gain stage across the rest of the tracks. Mixing and Mastering can be very tedious, but when done right, can make or break your track, even on covers that everyone does on here.
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Yep. The master level is really the least important of all the level controls, and you really should only need to make very minor adjustments if any. And then just to save time more than anything - it’s much better to gain stage and manage loudness across the tracks, as @Sully said. Think of mixing as surgery and the master levels as kind of a blunt trauma instrument like a meat tenderizing hammer 
Same is especially true of limiting. you want and need a master limiter, but all the real compression and limiting should be per track. Unless you want to squash the crap out of your dynamic range.
As I understand it under the threshold they leave it alone.
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Not sure that is true for all of them…better to play it safe.
Yeah - in fact it’s a lot more complicated than that. Not all of the services even use integrated LUFS, some (like Apple) use proprietary algorithms - but people target a LUFS-i equivalent.
Compounding this is the fact that integrated LUFS is kind of a flaky measure itself, very sensitive to temporarily dynamic regions of songs. a few seconds of variance can actually change the LUFS integrated value quite a bit.
Going under, if they raise your loudness then one of two things are likely to happen. Either you will have the headroom to absorb the level change if they adjust you up, or your song will be compressed if they do. Obviously if they leave you alone you will be ok, just below the median loudness of other songs on the service.
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At least they publish a guide with the standards for mastering for their platform
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iPod, iPhone, iPad, iLUFS
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Yep. As usual, Apple is doing this right.
Another free sample library released.
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