Well, as promised in my last tirade about the use of compressors in
mixing live audio, I will attempt and describe the most common set of
adjustments available on your average audio compressor/limiter. Though,
some compressor designers  throw-in a few more controls to make it even
more interesting (ie “knee” adjustment, side-chain filters, etc.), the following
are the most common.

Threshold [...]

In Noise Gates – Part 1 we discussed some of the various uses of the noise gate in live audio mixing. In this installment we’ll look a little closer at the various noise-gate controls and their respective functions.
The most common parameters found on the typical noise-gate are Threshold, Ratio (sometimes [...]

What’s a noise gate…and how do I use it ?
In an earlier tech note that I called “Stage Mud”, I casually mentioned the use of noise- gates to help in taming, what I call, stage-mud. I’ve had many people ask me about what noise-gates are used for, and how to adjust them. [...]

This topic is yet another very important facet of audio production that could use some clarification, particularly in the world of church audio production (where many of the hard-working soldiers in the trenches are volunteers). To illustrate this, and hopefully clear up some of the misunderstanding, I’ll use and an email inquiry I received [...]

Here’s yet another area that I feel is neglected by many a sound engineer. Back in the dark ages of audio, audio mixing-boards generally consisted of a small number of individual channels, with a single master output control. As audio consoles grew in size, so did the challenge of mixing. At some point, someone [...]

This installment of audio tips has a similar theme to the last one, in that we will continue to deal with methods for cleaning up unwanted artifacts in the mix. We previously dealt with the use of high pass filters to clean up unwanted audio clutter and cloudiness. In this case, we’ll examine ways to [...]

This installment concerns the use of high pass filters in the mixing process. I have found this to be one of those mixing basics that is often misunderstood and neglected, yet one of the most important tools found on the mixing console. For those new to audio engineering (and some not-so-new), the high pass filter [...]