Compressing our Vicar!

Hi, a couple of months into using the Qu 16 at our church and it is starting to make more sense, lots of compliments about how much better the sound is. My current challenge is our female vicar whose voice naturally tails off towards the end of sentences. If I push her channel to compensate she sounds too loud much of the time. I know I can use compression to iron out peaks but can I use it to do the opposite and if so what would be some starting point settings to experiment? Thank you.

I would start with my compressions settings somewhere like this: ratio 4:1 with a soft knee, attack time 5-10ms, release time 60ms. I would set the threshold to give you 3-5db of gain reduction during her “normal” speaking (not the softer parts). Make up gain isn’t technically required, but it is very helpful to bring the “post compressor” volume back up to a “pre-compression” level. This means if you are getting a pretty consistent 4db in compression, you would add 4db of makeup gain. This way you can insert/remove the compressor from the signal chain (to test how it is sounding) without causing a big change in the overall audio volume.

You need to play with those settings to see what sounds best however. Every person is going to be different, so there is no “universal” setting we can give you.

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Really helpful. Thanks and will try these out.

The most obvious and best first step (I think) would be to make her aware of the problem :man_shrugging:t3:

Giga

Thanks and absolutely right. We’ve had a chat about it.

As Sic0048 has mentioned, compression with make up gain is your friend here.
The only thing I would suggest differently is the attack setting. I would set the attack to around a setting more like 3.2ms. A little quicker but by no means super fast. You can obviously play with this but may find at 10ms that the start of consonants are a little too punchy prior to compression and any lower than about 3ms it will clamp down those early sounds a little too much. You need to find the right feel here.

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Excellent, many thanks. Will get the chance to assess this on Sunday.

Thanks for the advice. Tried those settings today and a definite improvement, sense a combination of vicar being more aware plus the compression. Now onto the next thing on my list!