What hard? What soft?

Who, how and where you guys using the Copressors? Limiters? For Drums for example? and is it a Hardware or Software? What brands you prefer?
Thanks a-lot!

i use hardware, i cant be bothered trying to turn a knob with a mouse, casue i end up using my eyes instead of my ears, so it ends up sounding like sh****. i normally use the likes of alesis 3630, dbx1066, and behringer composer. i stick one on every track usually, particularly, drum sounds. and bass. then i stick one on the output, of my mixer. i wanna get some tube comps, behringer makes some thts really cheap, so cheap tht they stick a light bulb behind the tube in the compressor to make it look like its glowing.

for outboard stuff... I use a Focusrite compounder, DBX 160VU's, Alesis 3630... and for software... I use an UAD-1 card... the la-2a and the 1176ln and the fairchild... other good one's are voxengo and sonalkiss... waves plugs are alright too... and, generally I hit everything with a little bit of compression, unless it really, really doesn't need it... And the only time i ever use a limiter is for creative/sound shaping reasons, or mostly on the master outs... in that case I'll use waves l2 or l3 or the UAD precision limiter... or the voxengo plug.

StevenMek wrote:generally I hit everything with a little bit of compression, unless it really, really doesn't need it... .

when does it need or not need(im confused about compression)

i get results without one....

Other than that I use my software. soundforge.

I do need to invest in some hardware though, im sure some of my tracks are missing out.

I use hardware just for my kicks and snares to get them as loud as i want them from the start, and plug-ins when mixing down.
I have a Focusrite and the Waves plug-ins. What i like about plug-ins is that they have a lot of presets, so you can learn about compression by looking at the settings of your presets.

hardware all the way

focusrite/presonus > but i just upgraded to Avalon and it takes the cake

there's a lot of quality $500 gear out there > call sweetwater and explain your setup and what you want to accomplish. they'll bend over backwards to help you, call em 10 times in a week and the personal sales guy never gets tired > and with a 30 day 'i don't like it' money back policy you can't go wrong.

i dont use compression on my kicks unless im about to mix everything down down to a stereo track. When i tweak my kicks i just try to get the best sound from filtering or layering. My main reason for not compressing my drum sounds is the fact that im gona do that when it comes to mixing the track anyways so if i do it now to get a banging drum sound and i do it later when it comes to mixing a track, im really sucking the life out of that drum sound alot. Im not gona front i have added compression on some kicks and then added it to the mpc and the shyt sounded nice but it just made me think that my tracks would sound even more better if i just dont compress the drums when going in the mpc and do that later on. Ill have mor meat left over on the sounds. Ill eq my sounds. thats a different story.