Compander

I stumbled on to this when coming up with a way to bring extremely quiet signals back up to audible levels and included it in my Delta project. I didn’t know there was a name for such a thing until Jens/JAX released its Compander.

https://youtu.be/ZRP5uI9mbzQ

the idea here is you take a signals input and processed output, and apply an envelope follower to both. You divide the input envelope by the output envelope, and multiply the output signal by the divided envelope control signal. This will approximately maintain the dynamics of the input signal, applied to the output signal. In most cases, you have to apply some smoothing (decay or attack) to both the envelopes.

this template has no processors, but it provides a playground for experimenting with a Compander-type effect. Place any processors in between the two amps in the rack. The compressor here is totally optional, and can be used for taming a signal before driving it into any kind of their effect. You could also crank up the input amp before driving another sound.

controlling the envelopes is not entirely intuitive, but think about the two signals interact. If the input envelope is higher than the output envelope, youll get greater amplification (longer attack on the output than the input will amplify just the transients). If the input envelope is lower than the output envelope, you’ll get reduced amplification (longer decay on the output than the input will reduce the volume after a transient). In this way, the effect is an interesting dynamics processor on its own and allows you to play with transients and the sustain part of the sound.

I’m still experimenting and tweaking, figuring out how to make things more intuitive. Interested how you would all improve on this!


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