Way back in the day when Moses was mixing in the desert using this technique was how he started the loudness war for fm radio stations to make it louder than their competitors without making the old VU meter not appear to be moving up and making the FCC mad. Advertising industry still does this technique
Hey Colt thanks mate an old dog can learn some new tricks. Just finding your channel. I'm recently getting into this digital mixing in the box thing and I like your approach and attitude in explaining stuff and the mentoring in comments very cool idea. In the 80's us live engineers would get together when we were home and share ideas and new stuff we had learned on tour. I am a 65 year old retired touring/house engineer that has been away from mixing for 10 years or so (caring for family) and am enjoying being able to mix again. Too old to tour I built a studio and have been seeing which live mixing skills will transfer to studio and learning new stuff like parallel compression etc...It's so much fun to experiment and be creative. I've not done any recording yet but have been digitizing all my old soundboard tapes and uploading them and have found Cambridge Music tech and have been mixing some of the tracks they have available for multitrack practice. Anyone interested in commenting on them a link to my soundcloud in on the about page of my channel. I have a pretty thick skin from mixing live for 30 years so I can handle some criticism...we have our days ya know. Cheers
I thought I had an idea of what parallel compression was but you've described in such a fantastic way that really made me grasp the concept. Great video!
First Of All... Love That Intro, ITS A BANGER! Your Have A Great Way Of Not Making A Person Feel Left Out. I Knew About P.C. but You Described It It Ways That Now I Will Have A Much Better Understanding Of It and Your Examples Are TOP Notch. I Mainly Focus On The AKAI'S Ecosphere But I've Watch You Redevelop Your Studio Over The Years and I Have Gained So Much Musical Knowledge From Your Tutorials. Regardless of Platforms and or Genre's Of Music, We All Can Learn A Lot From Each Other Because MUSIC IS MUSIC. I Sincerely Thank You and Keep Up Your Great Works Of Music Making And Video Making Capabilities. YOU'RE AWESOME ! 👍🏽👍🏽😎
when i do par comp i usually do a bus for the drums and then do a send to another aux and use the fader like a mix knob in pro tools like you would a reverb. 🤔
I have used this a lot more on my dangerous 2bus+. Super convenient and fun. Also the technique is one thing but using different style compressors open a whole different sets of fun! Colt you have gift with these video. I get excited to learn before they even start. I’ve always wanted to go to a Sweetwater seminar that is usually held by their staff. You should host one!
You can also set the compressor wet level to less than 100% which means that you're getting a compressed and an uncompressed signal combined together and you can use the knob to choose how much you want the dry signal to be heard.
In the "wall of sound" era the vocal's parallel signal was very heavily compressed to crush the loud bits and given an EQ boost in the upper-mid presence frequencies. Adding that back carefully (because it sounds horrendous by itself) meant the vocal would remain intelligible despite only being fractionally louder than the backing.
Exactly. That’s the most concise way to say what I always want to add on these videos. You can get a snare sounding so fucking good, great in all the best spots, and still natural sounding having a dry uncompressed, a compressed track for the attack / crack (which can be better in certain frequencies than in the body) and a crushed immediate attack snare and usually end up eqing a bit differently for body or room. And then you have control over all of those qualities separately. If you want that hard reverb snare drop… you can just up the verb on the dry, and up the body track and it sounds more natural than just smothering in verb.
Great technique! in reaper I send my track to another track without duplicating the wave. I use mjuc at the maximum of its aggresiveness and then try to level up on the fader the original uncompressed one. When this I get an extra punch in the snare! In the voices I do something similar but for the choruses. You get an extra agressive vibe in the chorus
Cymbals always become washy when you parallel compress the overheads hard - 70-85% dry and only 15-30% wet sometimes can be fine when you absolutely need to add some sustain (to make the softer hits more audible in a dense mix) but more than that makes the drums sound noisy and washy. Generally it's better to parallel compress a bit just kick/snare/maybe toms for more attack and leave overheads without parallel compression at all + leave more parallel compression just for room tracks for more which contain nice-sounding ambience (for more natural-sounding sustain, not artificial sustain of lows from close mics). Just avoiding it on overheads makes the drums sound better in the end 9 out of 10 times regardless of the genre (pop, rock, metal etc. it's all the same, but the blend and eq will be very different of course).
@@adampeters9684 Man, I'm finding myself ditching the room mics completely these days -Not even using the traditional overheads -Just close mics on everything, including the cymbals... I use compression super sparingly these days -especially on drums. I DO use, however, lots of parallel distortion, which I suppose is a form of compression -very aggressive compression, actually, someone told me...
I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing drums out of the water and smashing them w compression on a parallel track and mixing them together, much like the flaming lips (shameless steal)
I’m kind of confused so you open and route the drum channel to, 2 buses 🚌, both bus are routed (output) to the master obviously and both are receiving the drums through input, bus #1 is clean and bus #2 has a compress signal, so then you would play with both faders 🎚 to adjust dry/mix knob, isn’t that same thing as routing your drum channel through a send and compressing the send and just blending it with the drum channel, or am I mistaking the technique, any insight would be helpful im not familiar with pro tools routing or may have not understood the point of that routing, HELP🥺👉👈
Nice! Probably some said this here before but, we can go a bit further and split the smashed version of a track with coques of that and applying low-pass filtro in one and high-pass filter in other. Só you can blend them with a bit more flexibility... And yes, keeping an eye on phase correlatiin
Thanks Colt! Appreciate the 3 ways of doing it. For example, GarageBand is a more basic DAW that doesn’t have busses, so methods 1 or 3 would need to be used!
Nice vid! Correction on Fabfilters % adjustment, its not paralell, its just more or less effect but being all 100% wet. There is another knob where you can dial in more dry unaffected signal under output level
Would it be wise to, say, parallel compress the kick and snare tracks and then parallel compress the whole drum kit afterwards or would that then make the kick and snare sound over compressed? Great video! Always enjoy your content Colt!
I'd say it always depends on the sound you're after. Using bus compression, whether in parallel or not, has a wildly different sound from compressing all the tracks individually. If the sound you're going after benefits from using both absolutely do use both! Personally, I always use compression on the different close mics and on the bus, usually parallel compression but sometimes just light compression with an SSL-style bus compressor. But that's obviously just personal taste. I'd recommend trying everything out and getting comfortable with the "palette" of compression types.
@@yona9798 that makes sense. Definitely using your ears more than your eyes when mixing. One of the things I personally struggle with is finding the focus of a mix and keeping that focus rather than trying to make room for everything and make everything heard.
I used to do the duplicate track thing and then I realized that reaper has the mix knob on *any* plugin panel so I realized how silly it was to do that. Just one reason I like reaper.
Hi Colt - would you advise that prior to the parallel compression, we do a light "consistency compression" on the dry signal or just go ahead and parallel compress without any intial compression?
Is there any difference if in your second example (routing to two different buses) instead you route to one bus and from that bus you route to the other?
Hi Thanks for this good vid! I have a question: At the beginning of your video, all three OH tracks outputs are routed to Bus 1-2 and at the end when you apply Fab C2 to the OH track, its output is MON L/R and the other two (OH Crotch and OH Mono) are still routed to Bus 1-2. So you are processing OH independently from the others right?
hi am john from Zambia have been watching your videos and there are amazing kindly help me how to do you decide on what effect to apply on your vocals is it the same process always or maybe there are other things i can do in my mix
Ive been hearing about using compression in parallel but never knew what meant. Ive always been into live sound and am now working on recording and starting my own studio. This video as many of your videos explain it well. Can you also do parallel for other effects or eqs?
awesome video I was using method 2 for guitars via sending to a bus and than adding compressor then using the fader to blend it in . however I started to hear a fasing sound ? is that due to latency ? if so how would you correct that? I phase switched but did not help as much? thanks for taking the time to put this together best explanation ever !
@@ColtCapperrune The whole video man, its great. I love how you articulate these concepts. If I can I will certainly be in the comments helping where possible.
If I'm using a Neve 1073 dpx with an 1176ln, would you plug it into the insert loop on the Neve or would you set up a separate send in the Apollo and record dry and compressed signal?
I've messed around a lot with parallel compression and have just never understood the hype. It never sounds good to me, and I never find it as usefull as just using full on compression, or level automating things. Really cool video, and great tutorial but just not my thing.
You are skipping the most famous parallel compression technique: "New York Compression". Many use "Parallel Compression" and "New York Compression" synonymously. But, as with AH and pledge/donate, that's false! "New York Compression" is a very specific parallel compression technique. You only parallel compress the kick and snare (toms are optional), but leave out any overheads cymbals or room mics. And here's the kicker (pun. intended), you include the bass guitar. That's how to correctly perform "New York Compression".
Way back in the day when Moses was mixing in the desert using this technique was how he started the loudness war for fm radio stations to make it louder than their competitors without making the old VU meter not appear to be moving up and making the FCC mad. Advertising industry still does this technique
Hey Colt thanks mate an old dog can learn some new tricks. Just finding your channel.
I'm recently getting into this digital mixing in the box thing and I like your approach and attitude in explaining stuff and the mentoring in comments very cool idea. In the 80's us live engineers would get together when we were home and share ideas and new stuff we had learned on tour.
I am a 65 year old retired touring/house engineer that has been away from mixing for 10 years or so (caring for family) and am enjoying being able to mix again. Too old to tour I built a studio and have been seeing which live mixing skills will transfer to studio and learning new stuff like parallel compression etc...It's so much fun to experiment and be creative. I've not done any recording yet but have been digitizing all my old soundboard tapes and uploading them and have found Cambridge Music tech and have been mixing some of the tracks they have available for multitrack practice. Anyone interested in commenting on them a link to my soundcloud in on the about page of my channel.
I have a pretty thick skin from mixing live for 30 years so I can handle some criticism...we have our days ya know.
Cheers
I love you bro. You make the most comprehensive and objective tutorials i have seen in this platform where everyone is spreading misinformation
I know this was about parallel compression but I really like the automation you got going on the toms! That is a neat trick.
I thought I had an idea of what parallel compression was but you've described in such a fantastic way that really made me grasp the concept. Great video!
First Of All... Love That Intro, ITS A BANGER! Your Have A Great Way Of Not Making A Person Feel Left Out. I Knew About P.C. but You Described It It Ways That Now I Will Have A Much Better Understanding Of It and Your Examples Are TOP Notch. I Mainly Focus On The AKAI'S Ecosphere But I've Watch You Redevelop Your Studio Over The Years and I Have Gained So Much Musical Knowledge From Your Tutorials. Regardless of Platforms and or Genre's Of Music, We All Can Learn A Lot From Each Other Because MUSIC IS MUSIC. I Sincerely Thank You and Keep Up Your Great Works Of Music Making And Video Making Capabilities. YOU'RE AWESOME ! 👍🏽👍🏽😎
the illustration example on the begining was appreciated
when i do par comp i usually do a bus for the drums and then do a send to another aux and use the fader like a mix knob in pro tools like you would a reverb. 🤔
I have used this a lot more on my dangerous 2bus+. Super convenient and fun. Also the technique is one thing but using different style compressors open a whole different sets of fun! Colt you have gift with these video. I get excited to learn before they even start. I’ve always wanted to go to a Sweetwater seminar that is usually held by their staff. You should host one!
the intro was epic!
Jesus that shirt is sooooo hard 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 I need it
Colt, I really like where you are heading with this... Please keep it up!!!!!
You can also set the compressor wet level to less than 100% which means that you're getting a compressed and an uncompressed signal combined together and you can use the knob to choose how much you want the dry signal to be heard.
For the first time, I understand parallel compression 😁👌🏽💯
I’m new to Sound Engineering btw 🙏🏽
I never understood parallel compression but you explained this so good that even I understand it now🤗😎.
Thanks Colt! You are a great Teacher. I really learn a lot from your videos and enjoy your content.
Always great going back to P. Comp. Great way to make your performance pop out!
In the "wall of sound" era the vocal's parallel signal was very heavily compressed to crush the loud bits and given an EQ boost in the upper-mid presence frequencies. Adding that back carefully (because it sounds horrendous by itself) meant the vocal would remain intelligible despite only being fractionally louder than the backing.
Thank you for sharing this tip!
Thanks for yet another amazing lesson, the have for certain helped me out alot
I want that tshirt. Ah man. Thanks for the follow up in advance. Would be super duper dope with a big old vintage 8068 on the back.
Cool video. I do 2 para comps. One to enhance the attack. And the other with a fast attack to enhance the body
Exactly. That’s the most concise way to say what I always want to add on these videos. You can get a snare sounding so fucking good, great in all the best spots, and still natural sounding having a dry uncompressed, a compressed track for the attack / crack (which can be better in certain frequencies than in the body) and a crushed immediate attack snare and usually end up eqing a bit differently for body or room. And then you have control over all of those qualities separately. If you want that hard reverb snare drop… you can just up the verb on the dry, and up the body track and it sounds more natural than just smothering in verb.
I’ll have to try this. I’ve been using an aux track with a compressor on it and then sending the audio track to the aux (compressor) track.
Thanks, Colt! Video on serial compression next?
Great technique! in reaper I send my track to another track without duplicating the wave. I use mjuc at the maximum of its aggresiveness and then try to level up on the fader the original uncompressed one. When this I get an extra punch in the snare! In the voices I do something similar but for the choruses. You get an extra agressive vibe in the chorus
Cymbals always become washy when you parallel compress the overheads hard - 70-85% dry and only 15-30% wet sometimes can be fine when you absolutely need to add some sustain (to make the softer hits more audible in a dense mix) but more than that makes the drums sound noisy and washy. Generally it's better to parallel compress a bit just kick/snare/maybe toms for more attack and leave overheads without parallel compression at all + leave more parallel compression just for room tracks for more which contain nice-sounding ambience (for more natural-sounding sustain, not artificial sustain of lows from close mics). Just avoiding it on overheads makes the drums sound better in the end 9 out of 10 times regardless of the genre (pop, rock, metal etc. it's all the same, but the blend and eq will be very different of course).
100% room tracks are perfect for beefing up density of the drums via some parallel chains
@@adampeters9684 Man, I'm finding myself ditching the room mics completely these days -Not even using the traditional overheads -Just close mics on everything, including the cymbals... I use compression super sparingly these days -especially on drums. I DO use, however, lots of parallel distortion, which I suppose is a form of compression -very aggressive compression, actually, someone told me...
I’ve gotten into the habit of blowing drums out of the water and smashing them w compression on a parallel track and mixing them together, much like the flaming lips (shameless steal)
@@ryanfrancis6092 I'm starting to get into busses more -Excited to try some parallel drum stuff. What has been your approach thus far??
I’m kind of confused so you open and route the drum channel to, 2 buses 🚌, both bus are routed (output) to the master obviously and both are receiving the drums through input, bus #1 is clean and bus #2 has a compress signal, so then you would play with both faders 🎚 to adjust dry/mix knob, isn’t that same thing as routing your drum channel through a send and compressing the send and just blending it with the drum channel, or am I mistaking the technique, any insight would be helpful im not familiar with pro tools routing or may have not understood the point of that routing, HELP🥺👉👈
Great in-depth breakdown. Thanks for the clear and practical refresher 👍
Nice!
Probably some said this here before but, we can go a bit further and split the smashed version of a track with coques of that and applying low-pass filtro in one and high-pass filter in other. Só you can blend them with a bit more flexibility...
And yes, keeping an eye on phase correlatiin
Thanks Colt! Appreciate the 3 ways of doing it. For example, GarageBand is a more basic DAW that doesn’t have busses, so methods 1 or 3 would need to be used!
In Reaper you can balance the dry/wet on each plugin (weather the plugin was designed with that feature or not). Reaper is king.
Would you use the same amount of compression and parallel compression, if any at all, on pop/hip hop drums coming from drum kits?
Is there a reason why you did not include the drum room mics into the parallel drum bus compression?
Where did you get that shirt? It's bad ass
Nice vid! Correction on Fabfilters % adjustment, its not paralell, its just more or less effect but being all 100% wet. There is another knob where you can dial in more dry unaffected signal under output level
0:06.. you mean louder with noticeable noisefloor ?
vocals are still my biggest challenge but am sure ill figure it out
Would it be wise to, say, parallel compress the kick and snare tracks and then parallel compress the whole drum kit afterwards or would that then make the kick and snare sound over compressed? Great video! Always enjoy your content Colt!
Most certainly you can do that! I actually touch both the kick and the snare with compression and then do a parallel drum bus
I'd say it always depends on the sound you're after. Using bus compression, whether in parallel or not, has a wildly different sound from compressing all the tracks individually. If the sound you're going after benefits from using both absolutely do use both! Personally, I always use compression on the different close mics and on the bus, usually parallel compression but sometimes just light compression with an SSL-style bus compressor. But that's obviously just personal taste. I'd recommend trying everything out and getting comfortable with the "palette" of compression types.
@@yona9798 that makes sense. Definitely using your ears more than your eyes when mixing. One of the things I personally struggle with is finding the focus of a mix and keeping that focus rather than trying to make room for everything and make everything heard.
Thank you
second lol, Thanks for the awesome video Colt. I've personally never knew this technique and now excited to try it out!
Hope it helps!!
What is the difference in routing the drums to the aux track through a send instead of through the output?
Excelente Colt, felicidades
Lol intro was like suddenly getting punched in the face by the barista
What might be a good level to start mixing on so that I can maintain headroom as well ??
Love it Colt! Thanks!!
I want that shirt!!
I used to do the duplicate track thing and then I realized that reaper has the mix knob on *any* plugin panel so I realized how silly it was to do that. Just one reason I like reaper.
Great video…….. Your content are really informative.. keep up the good work man!
Hi Colt - would you advise that prior to the parallel compression, we do a light "consistency compression" on the dry signal or just go ahead and parallel compress without any intial compression?
Is there any difference if in your second example (routing to two different buses) instead you route to one bus and from that bus you route to the other?
I've always liked parallel compression on acoustic guitar - especially thin, "plinky" sounding ones.
I want that shirt
Great breakdown !
Would you typically parallel compress the snare as in version 1 and keep it when you do version 2, as you did here?
Hi Thanks for this good vid! I have a question: At the beginning of your video, all three OH tracks outputs are routed to Bus 1-2 and at the end when you apply Fab C2 to the OH track, its output is MON L/R and the other two (OH Crotch and OH Mono) are still routed to Bus 1-2. So you are processing OH independently from the others right?
hi am john from Zambia have been watching your videos and there are amazing kindly help me how to do you decide on what effect to apply on your vocals is it the same process always or maybe there are other things i can do in my mix
Ive been hearing about using compression in parallel but never knew what meant. Ive always been into live sound and am now working on recording and starting my own studio. This video as many of your videos explain it well. Can you also do parallel for other effects or eqs?
awesome video I was using method 2 for guitars via sending to a bus and than adding compressor then using the fader to blend it in . however I started to hear a fasing sound ? is that due to latency ? if so how would you correct that? I phase switched but did not help as much? thanks for taking the time to put this together best explanation ever !
HAHA that intro ROCKS!!
Lol thanks!
@@ColtCapperrune The whole video man, its great. I love how you articulate these concepts. If I can I will certainly be in the comments helping where possible.
Colt, where can I get this cool t-shirt?
Great video... Love your t-shirt how do I get one like that.
Thanks for sharing 👍🏻
what's your opinion on squashing the crap out of your parallel compression for rap vocals.
the intro says it all
If I'm using a Neve 1073 dpx with an 1176ln, would you plug it into the insert loop on the Neve or would you set up a separate send in the Apollo and record dry and compressed signal?
I need that shirt my guy
Where did you get your t-shirt from?
What do u think about using sends to aux/bus s for parallel compression
🤔 how much does avid charge per buss channel?
Parallel compensation 😁
Thanks bro 😎
Sweetwater needs to come to the uk 😭😭
Thomann basically is Sweetwater EU edition :)
Wait, but where can I buy that sick ass shirt?!?!
thats what im lookin for man thanks!
Hey Colt who built your AML 52F50’s? Trace Audio?
Yup!! They did a great job
He said 'sound' examples :D
Basically controlling the wild sound in a focused container
my son has be table tapping since he saw u tapping on the table in the beginning of the video..
Thank you!
Yes. Compress the overheads. Hard. Do it. Get a Grammy. 😈
I've messed around a lot with parallel compression and have just never understood the hype. It never sounds good to me, and I never find it as usefull as just using full on compression, or level automating things. Really cool video, and great tutorial but just not my thing.
15 min ago, woah, that's real in time)
Thanks for watching!
You are skipping the most famous parallel compression technique: "New York Compression". Many use "Parallel Compression" and "New York Compression" synonymously. But, as with AH and pledge/donate, that's false! "New York Compression" is a very specific parallel compression technique. You only parallel compress the kick and snare (toms are optional), but leave out any overheads cymbals or room mics. And here's the kicker (pun. intended), you include the bass guitar. That's how to correctly perform "New York Compression".
Fast release for parallel compression lol.
❤🔥
🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
Make me your assistant.
me want T shirt :)
Stop using the word secret. Secret they are not.
First.
Appreciate you!
@@ColtCapperrune love the tutorials bro the have helped me alot