In this free extract from PureMix’s How To Listen: Serial Compression, award-winning engineer, Fab Dupont explains why distortion can be a tell tale sign of an inappropriate compressor release time. This is just one of the reasons why release is probably the third most important parameter on your compressor, after threshold and ratio. Actually it’s the fourth, the most important is Bypass!

In the video Fab illustrates his point with an 1176 on a bass guitar part. Setting the ratio to 20:1 and the attack and release both to their fastest he sets the compressor to catch the loudest notes. As well as being attenuated, they also display a characteristic distortion which disappears when the release time is lengthened.

This is a very audible demonstration of what happens when a release time is set too fast. Each cycle of the low frequency bass note is long enough for the fast attack and release times to treat each cycle as an individual audio event which needs compressing. The solution is to lengthen the release time so that the compressor’s gain reduction doesn’t have time to recover towards zero between each cycle. This is an unusual example and one which can also be counteracted by using a hold control on more modern compressor designs which include one.

How Should You Set A Release Time?

Of course, the usual answer of ‘it depends on the source material’ and ‘if it sounds good it is good’ apply here but, being more prescriptive, if you are using a compressor on percussive material and don’t want to alter the fundamental shape of the sound, either by softening or accentuating the transient, or stamping down on or creating a bloom in the tail of more sustained sounds, then setting the release time as long as you can while still giving time for the gain reduction to recover close to zero is a good rule of thumb. There are of course many reasons to do something other than this but if you don’t know where to start, start here.

For more sustained sounds, longer is often the way to go. There’s nothing wrong with using auto-release on compressors which offer it if you are setting up for material which varies dynamically throughout the performance. It’s not cheating.

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