You could think of the LSC as the compressors brain! It is controlled by a signal passing through a part of the compressor called a ‘level sensing circuit’ (LSC), which tells the compressor how it should act. In the simplified diagram below we can see the basic signal flow through a compressor.Ī compressor is simply an amplifier that reduces the volume of anything that passes above a user defined level (known as the ‘threshold’). However in order to unlock these techniques we’re going to have to understand the signal flow first.
In the previous tutorial ‘ Compression and EQ Techniques for Mixing Vocals’ I discussed some of the standard features of the compressor, a device used to reduce the difference between the louder and quieter parts of a signal (dynamic range), now were going to dig a little deeper and learn about a circuit found in compressors called the ‘side-chain’. Side-chain roughing is a technique used by the world’s top mixing engineers to achieve dynamic changes to a recording
