Is compression in post necessary on solo acoustic fingerstyle recordings?
 

Most seem to say no. Opinions?

Necessary ? No.
Might any given individual want to use it and see if they like it ? Yes

In digital in mixing nothing is written in stone until you render/print it

Necessary? Absolutely not. Useful? Absolutely. It just depends on the type of sound you are going for. I think if the main outlet for it is going to be online streaming, youtube, etc, you are far better off using compression in the mastering stage. Look at it this way - those mediums are going to do it for you if you don't via the compression algorithms. Might as well do it while you have some control over how it's going to sound.

In my opinion, it's going to depend on the dynamic range of the piece (some compressors also have a desirable sonic element to them). The more distance between the quietest parts and the loudest parts, the more likely some compression will become desirable. You don't want the listener to have to turn the volume up for quiet parts and then have to reach for the volume knob again when the louder parts kick in.

If one is dead set against using compression, volume automation can achieve the same objective.

In the end, anything the mixer does is a matter of personal choice. There are no requirements. The end goal is to give the listener the best experience possible and compression is one of the tools we sometimes use to get there.

Personally don't use compression on acoustic guitar. I prefer the dynamic range. Also plucked instrument recordings like those of the guitar have a lot of transients taking place and compression can rob them of some of that if the compressor settings not carefully figured out.

Nothing is necessary, but some degree of compression is frequently used. If you have a track professionally mastered, it will very likely get some degree of compression on it. You do have to be very careful with instrumental guitar, it's easy to hear overdone compression. It seems you can compress the heck out of vocals and barely notice, but even a small amount tends to leap out at you on acoustic guitar - or maybe it's just what I'm more sensitive to. That's one reason, if you have something mastered, to make sure to choose an engineer who's familiar with your genre. You don't want someone to treat your fingerstyle recording like a heavy metal track (unless you do...).

I tend to use limiting and multi-band compression these days, but it's largely used to set the volume to CD level, so that I see virtually no movement on the compression indicator. You have to go by ear, because I do get some compression, even if the meters say it's not happening. But if I can see compression on the meters, it's almost certainly too much.

It’s not “necessary,” but you may like it. You’re making art, so follow your muse. I tend to agree with others here in terms of going pretty light, but sometimes I wonder if that’s because I’m middle aged and grew up marinating in the Windham Hill aesthetic. I think that close, stereo mic’d, but otherwise classical approach to recording solo acoustic guitar was a revelation in the 80’s. But what’s that acoustic guitar label now? “candy rat” or something like that? To me that approach sounds like a younger generation chiming in with a more compressed, sort of pop influenced style of acoustic guitar production. It’s not always my thing, but it can be exciting, and clearly a lot of people dig it.. One of my favorite solo guitar albums is Earl Klugh’s Naked Guitar, which is a pretty compressed single microphone recording in a small room.. What it lacks in dynamics it make up in presence and immediacy.. That said, I agree with Jim about the value of volume automation to get a lot of that too. Oh, and I've been playing around with parallel compression lately -that's a fun option too for getting some of the lower level stuff more present without being too obvious :)

Perhaps a small history lesson might be useful: At the start of digital recording, people simply had no idea what to do with the expanded dynamic range it offered. There were experimental albums released trying out the characteristics of the medium using no compression and no EQ because digital had such a flat response that it wasn't needed. One such was from a band that figured heavily at the beginning: "Flim & the BBs." Their first album was recorded on an experimental 3M digital recording prototype. It was only the second album ever recorded digitally. Their next album was recorded with similar techniques on a Mitsubishi X-80 system.

So, what were the results of their efforts? The Flim & the BBs album demonstrated that without any compression, close-mic'd dynamic sources such as drums would display lots of initial dynamics but very little body or basic tone. The drums were all impact with no body. Due to initial dynamics the entire CDs were at a very low level compared to most. Unless you were listening at foreground volume on a wide-range stereo system, detail was lost behind all the initial attacks. Pretty good, I suppose, if all you are interested in is the initial attack of notes. In the industry, however, these initial experiments demonstrated that some limiting and compression were needed if a recording were to be pleasing and listenable at any other than a loud, foreground volume setting.

Without dynamic management, your album will also be lower in average volume than most around it. Those unrestrained transients have to go somewhere, and it is on top of your average volume.

Bob

There's a plugin called Physion, made by Eventide, that lets you split sound into its transient and tonal parts. You can then pull down the volume of the transients without effecting the volume of the tonal part. I wonder if that could be an alternative to compression on fingerstyle tracks. I've never seen nor heard of it being used that way but Bob's post made me wonder if it could.

I had my CD mastered by a professional engineer. He added a little compression at the end of the process. It made all the difference. Made the solo guitar sound "fuller". Was very pleased with the end result.

+1! This was also my process (tiny amount of compression) with my CD (mixed/mastered) and I totally agree. "Fuller", "deeper"....just....."more" and it makes a difference.

Info from Ed Gerhard
 

Like the sound he gets.
https://virtuerecords.com/acoustic-g...ed-six-string/

Luna. One of the most amazing acoustic guitar oriented albums ever. If I had to pick one favorite guitar tone this would be at the top of my list. Enchanting sound. There's something about how the high end and clarity "emerge" out of the roundness that gets me every time. Sometimes Tony McManus approaches that kinda sound but even he can't quite get there. Good stuff.

I'm going to rock the boat a little and answer: Absolutely, yes!


There are ways to compress that are very obvious and other ways that are not so noticeable. You may not want the former, but that doesn't mean you don't want (or need) compression.


Plus, if you release anything, you will need to compete with loudness standards. and you'll never get close to any of the loudness standards without compression/limiting.

Unless what you're releasing is going to cd or is club music, there is no need to engage in the search for loudness. The popular online streaming services all normalize to whatever level they've chosen (usually somewhere around -14 LUFS) and your music won't be louder or softer than anyone else's because of that.

When I master something for a client, the first thing I always ask them is whether the tracks are ever going to be released on cd. If the answer is no, I explain to them what the online services are going to do with their music if I master it to cd levels. For cds, I shoot for the -9 to -8 LUFS range. But the louder you push the master, the more dynamic range is sacrificed. There are some people who master to -7 and even -6 but I think that's mostly club music where no one gives a rat's hind quarters about dynamic range. If the client isn't going to cd with the tracks, I explain that I''ll master to the -13 to -12 range and that's still a little louder than anyone will hear it on a streaming service.

For the most part, streaming has killed the loudness wars.