Hello, Everyone it's @jamesub and today am going to talk about compression vs equalization. You might wonder if you need to equalize your signal first or if you need to compress your signal first? and they are really no right answer to that question because it really depends on what you want to achieve.
To get a better understanding of what I mean, let me explain how they both work
If you are using an equalizer, we can remove or add frequencies of a signal. If we are going to be adding frequencies and boost frequencies with if, we can actually create picks that were not present in the original signal and that is just what that equalizer does. And if we are gone be putting a compressor behind that EQ with those settings, we can actually compress the picks off it again. In this case, it might be wiser to put the EQ after the and that way we will not have to compress that much and we won't also have to gain much on the EQ.
N/B: Applying a lot of gain with an EQ on a specific frequency range can give the sound a larger amplitude.
Compressor after EQ:
This is another situation in which we want to remove or filter-out they very low end of a vocal recording, we might before the compressor so that the compressor doesn't even have to compress on the signal do that low end hence giving it a more dynamic range or we can say that it can be wise to do this before compressing. Especially when there is a lot of unwanted bass content in the signal.This way this low content is not getting compressed, and the signal as a lot more dynamics before entering the compressor.
Another situation where you will want to put the compressor after the EQ is when we are equalizing with a pretty narrow band.
Let's consider a guitar in this example, let we are equalizing a guitar and we have a pretty narrow ball curve EQ around one and a half kilohertz or two kilohertz and we are boosting it quite a lot. There is going to be a couple of notes which are going to really stick-out because 1 and 2 kilohertz are having their fundamental frequencies and a lot of their first harmonics and strongly present harmonics in this frequency region. So there is going to be a couple of notes which are definitely going to stick out, so whenever you hit this few notes you going to see that it picks a lot. In this case, we are going to say that we are going to put the compressor behind the EQ because it's making this couple of notes really loud.
A compressor with a pretty fast attack can be used to grab the pick that it will be generating.
I hope this gives you a better understanding of the signal flow between the EQ AND COMPRESSORS. If you have any questions put them down in the comments session and I get back to you. Again this was @jamesub and I hope you learn something today? and I hope to see you soon.