Pumping Compressor - Music Learning Collective

If you are familiar with electronic dance music, you will almost certainly have heard this effect before. The theory is that the whole mix can be made to sound bigger if it is compressed only when the kick drum triggers it. This emulates how our ears react to loud noises, compressing our hearing to try and protect us from the dangerous levels.

This is achieved by patching a compressor over the main mix and feeding the kick drum into the sidechain input of the compressor.

Bypass the sidechain and set the compressor to heavily compress the track (a ratio of 10:1 should do it) and reduce the threshold until you can hear the effect taking place.
Adjust the attack control so that the compression is applied fairly quickly, but the release so that it fades relatively slowly.

Now switch in the sidechain so that the compressor is no longer reacting to the music itself, but just the kick drum.

Make fine adjustments to the threshold until the music is heard compressing heavily on every kick drum hit. This tends to work best with four to the floor rhythms, but experiment and see what interesting results you can achieve.

Have a think about and research songs that use a Pumping Compression in them (for instance, One More Time by Daft Punk and Call On Me by Eric Prydz). Discuss with your peers.

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Music Production Music Production Terminology Pumping Compressor

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