Compression?

[mentalstrike]

Hopefully this is the right place for this:

I mostly make dance tunes (hardstyle, if you know what that is). And, from what I can tell, compression is really important in this. However, my "skill" with compression goes about as far as putting a FabFilter Pro-C on my master channel to make the overall levels stay under 0 db. I've looked on this site, and I haven't seen anything for compression (mostly the theory/application of it, I'm not looking for a specific "This is how you compressors" tutorial type thing), so I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. This is one of the few things I'm a bit scared to use my Google-fu on, because if I end up with something completely wrong, I will have no idea how to fix it.

Edit:

Found a nice little overall look of compressing in one of Zircon's tutorials (didn't see it at first, because it didn't have anything about "compression" in the title), but I'm looking for something a bit more in-depth.

[dannthr]

Hopefully this is the right place for this:

I mostly make dance tunes (hardstyle, if you know what that is). And, from what I can tell, compression is really important in this. However, my "skill" with compression goes about as far as putting a FabFilter Pro-C on my master channel to make the overall levels stay under 0 db. I've looked on this site, and I haven't seen anything for compression (mostly the theory/application of it, I'm not looking for a specific "This is how you compressors" tutorial type thing), so I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. This is one of the few things I'm a bit scared to use my Google-fu on, because if I end up with something completely wrong, I will have no idea how to fix it.

Edit:

Found a nice little overall look of compressing in one of Zircon's tutorials (didn't see it at first, because it didn't have anything about "compression" in the title), but I'm looking for something a bit more in-depth.

There are lots of ways to go about compressing a signal.

Two other popular and powerful when well used styles of compression are Parallel Compression (which usually is only effective on drums and lead vox) and Side-Chain Compression. You say you make dance music, well, if you side-chained your bass to your kick, you could compress your bass only when your kick has signal--getting the bass out of the way of the kick and giving your track a lot more head-room overall.

[eilios]

There are plenty of ways you can use compressers in dance music! As just a more advanced limiter, as a sidechainer, as an effect(when done extremely!), or more!

[mentalstrike]

Well, with my hardstyle, I actually sidechain the tail end of the kick to the punch of the kick (cause I built the sound using multiple instruments and samples), so that you get a nice punch that doesn't change pitch, and then the tail of the kick comes in, and can be pitched without frequencies clashing.

But thank you, this let's me know that I'm on the right track, at least (and, to be honest, it reminded me that I was using the compressor part of a limiter for sidechaining. I had forgotten)