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Compressing the electric keyboards

Compressing the electric keyboards - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Bootcamp

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Compressing the electric keyboards

Like guitars, compression on keyboards depends on how wild the dynamic swings are. Sampled acoustic or electric pianos don't have nearly the dynamic swing of a real acoustic instrument, but they still can have quite a lot of peaks, depending upon the way they're played. In this segment I'll show you how to add compression to any electric keyboard to keep it strong and steady in the mix. So we are going to look at this electric piano. It's in stereo, but it's panned a little bit to the right. There is no compression on it. Listen to how it varies in level. (music playing) There was quite a lot of variation there. He is a very good piano player, and that's what piano players do. They play dynamically. But that doesn't always work in the context of making a record. So that's why we use the compression in order to smooth those dynamic variations out a little bit. So let's listen in context with the rest of instruments and hear how some of the notes fall away and you don't hear them, and…

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