Use for adding aggression, warmth, colour and drive to any signal.
So make sure you know what compression is, and how to use it before investing in compressor plugins. It’s an essential tool to have in your music production arsenal, and is also essential to understand. There are many ways to use compression, and you’ll be using it a lot if you are working with any kind of audio. You can use compression to thicken up drums, make vocals more consistent, glue entire mixes together, add punch to recordings, drive, colour, warmth, and in general… give your music character. This makes an audio signal more coherent, and levelled out.įor instance, if you have a vocal take that has high changes in volume, a compressor can be used to make the performance sound more consistent – gluing the high and low points together.Ĭompression has many uses in mixing, and is one of the most used tools for engineers. Compression VSTs work by squashing the highest and lowest amplitude points of your audio signal closer together, reducing the gain and dynamic range.
All of them have free trials, so you can test them all out and see which is best suited to your workflow.Īnd on top of all that, we spent a lot of time to include different price points, and different uses, so there should be a compressor plugin for everyone on this list. This article serves as a reference to discover which compression plugins are better suited to your style. Of course you don’t need every compressor on this list, in fact you only really need a few you know inside and out.