In this article Michael Costa shares how he used the wonderful Powair compressor on an upright bass… oddly with the compressor section completely disabled!

Instead, he relied on the excellent leveller section of POWAIR, which is a much gentler beast. It tracks the incoming loudness of a source and reacts naturally to that. The issue he had with the bass was the tail of the notes, which he felt were falling away from a little quickly and were getting swallowed up by the rest of the mix.

In the mix, he was hearing the attacks of the notes clearly but not enough tail. The leveller perfectly rode the tails up, without affecting the attacks, making the bass appear to have more authority and solidity.

What Is POWAIR?

The POWAIR plugin is in the words of Sound Radix "a smarter, more natural sounding dynamic processor. "
POWAIR is a novel design two-stage leveler/compressor plug-in, designed to control dynamics
and bring a sense of power to vocals, instruments, and mixes. What this means in practice is that it separates out two key uses of compression which in conventional compressors are tied together - the effect of the compressor on timbre and character, and evening out the relative loudness of parts of the performance.

Leveler Section

POWAIR has an innovative and very unusual compressor section but the feature being used here is the Leveler which is a k-weighted perceived loudness (LKFS) auto-leveler and can smoothly ride your tracks and get them to your target level.

POWAIR uses an innovative gain detection and reduction engine, capable of fast gain changes
with minimal distortion and adaptive response to the recorded source signal. The unique
characteristics of POWAIR allow powerful dynamics shaping while maintaining the timbre of the
source material even when pushed to extremes.

To check out POWAIR, head over to the Sound Radix website, where you can download a limited-time trial of the software.