DAN AGOSTO: Hello gearheads. You’re watching an instructional video from Gearwire.Com, and this is for the Neve 88RS. We’re going to be taking a closer look at the dynamics section, in particular the compressor, and how it is affected or how it affects a drum loops because that’s a fairly popular thing to do these days now, isn’t it?

Let’s listen to this loop track. We’ve heard this before if you’ve watched any of my videos.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP]

It’s from DrumCore. Once again, turn power on. Of course, you know, the opening preset is not all that great. It’s not zeroed. So, let’s just go ahead and open up a drum strip, parallel drum bus.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

Wow! That’s smashing the hell out of it. So, from here, I mean we got some EQ going on. Let’s tame that EQ a little bit. Actually, it doesn’t look that bad. Let me smooth out the Q a little bit, and then let’s start to pull back on the compression.

All right. So, let’s start with the ratio somewhere, I don't know, around 2 or maybe a little less and just start to use it as a riding compressor. Now, as you can see here, both of these knobs are pulled and this knob is a -20 threshold. This lowers the threshold another additional 20 so if I get rid of it, we’re barely going to be hitting the compressor. So, I hit that and we’re in compression land around 10 dB of peak limiting or compression in this case, and we got the fast knob. The ratio knob pulls out to be a bit more fast, and you’d usually want faster attack for drum-type stuff, so let’s listen to it first with the slow ratio and then turn on the fast ratio. Let’s turn up the ratio a bit. Or I’m sorry. This is with the slow attack, and we’re going to listen to it with the fast attack after this.

So as you can hear, if you checked out our videos on the LA-2A and the LA3A that we did on drums, you’ll notice that this sort of has the feeling more of an LA-2A. If we pull the knob, we’re going to get more of that where the snare is lengthened. Same with the kick, you can hear more of the room, sort of making this like a room kit in comparison where if we take it out, it would ba fairly dry kit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

So, that’s really what that is for. So I turn it off. We still hear a lot of the room but this really smooths out those hits. The attacks are fast enough so that you don’t hear it drop or pump when the snare hits.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

You can also affect this using the release setting. I like the auto setting a lot just because it’s easy. But on drums like this, usually you want faster settings. The auto setting is nice because it’s controlled by how far over the threshold your signal is hitting, and we are hitting this very hard. As you can hear, it has that quality to it that we hear a lot in modern loop based music. I’m going to turn the ratio all the way up. Let’s listen to it what it sounds like as a limiter. Let’s totally smash the crap out of it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

Maybe --

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

Sorry about that. Maybe lower the gain and pull out the threshold and then start lowering it more. So now we got that really fast limiting.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING A DRUM LOOP THROUGH THE NEVE 88RS]

All right. So that was a closer look at the Neve 88RS, the dynamic section, particularly the compressor. We’re not really going to take a look that much at the gate section. I mean it’s only really used on multitrack situations so we’re going to leave that out for now. Perhaps we’ll check that out in a future video. So, thanks for checking out this instructional video, and make sure to check back for more here at Gearwire.Com.