Parallel Compression

Parallel compression is the act of having two signals running alongside each other, one being the raw signal and one being a heavily compressed version.

Sometimes known as New York compression given that's where it originated and was being ubiquitously throughout mixes and productions in New York in the 80's. For a very very VERY quick description of parallel compression it would be accurate to say it allows for the raising in volume of the quieter parts of a track or group of tracks as is often the case with a PC drum kit while maintaining the natural transients thanks to still having the original uncompressed audio.

How to Achieve this

Taking a drum kit for example, we would take all our individual drum kit mics and bus them all to a aux track giving us a "Drum kit" which we can now treat as an individual instrument like below (This is just good practice to do whether or not you want to do some parallel compression)

Note all the outputs on our individually mic'd go to the same internal bus output which then becomes the input of the aux track that's to be our "Kit" instrument i'll go into more detail about the importance of signal path naming conventions in a future blog post.

Now we create another aux track identical to the original kit and name it something super obvious and original like "PC Drums" and this will be for our heavily compressed signal. Below we have a link to a soundcloud example with 3 audio tracks

1. Both Drum tracks blended together

2. Just the uncompressed drums

3. Just the compressed drums

https://soundcloud.com/user-277515017/sets/drum-examples/s-obVPG

First we have to add a compressor as an insert to the "PC Drums" tracks and compress to the extreme (bordering on limiting) in order to bring up the noise floor so that the cymbals and hats are really prevalent like in example 3. Here's a quick example of the compressor used for the examples

A good place to start is put the ratio up really high around 40:1 would be a good place to start to squash the ever living hell out of those transients of the kick and snare. Be sure to add a lot of make up gain in order to hear the cymbals and ambiance from the kit room mic if there was one (although in this example there wasn't one due to it being recorded in a small isolation booth)

Play around with the attack and release times till you find what sounds the best in your opinion, try starting with an attack of around 2-4 milliseconds and then work from there, as for the release time a lengthy release time would be a good start to allow the cymbals to wash. A hard knee is also suggested as we're looking for heavy compression here, subtlety is not our friend.

Once you're done playing about with the controls on your compressor (which takes ages in itself cause being a perfectionist is never quick and/or easy) just adjust the fader and blend the compressed drums to taste.

This example was using drums but the same method can be applied to pretty much anything you feel like, like vocals in order to get some of the breathiness into the vocals without squashing or colouring the actual voice itself.

Thanks for reading my quick how to guide and please try it out yourself and you'll be amazed how much your new mix breathes.