Parallel Compression
I was trolling some production/recording forums and saw that a number of people are interested in parallel compression (aka New York-style compression). This topic is a lot like side-chain compression: lots of people know how to put it into their mix, but not a lot of people know what its about or what it exactly does.
Parallel compression is mixing a dry (uncompressed) signal with a wet (compressed) signal to achieve a blend. This is most commonly used with drums where an engineer will have two sub-groups of their drums: one without any compression, and one with. This technique is used to get the heavy compressed drum sound without sacrificing any of your natural transients.
So how do you accomplish this? I’ll show you how, in Reaper of course.
1. Open up your session and create a new track that we’ll call CompBuss. Insert an instance of ReaComp.
2. On your CompBuss track, go to the I/O and set it to recieve all of your drum tracks.
This is what your buss track's I/O should look like.
3. Adjust the settings on your compressor. ReaComp has some pretty decent presets. Try using “NY Drum Buss.” To really get the full effect, you should be compressing this buss pretty hard.
4. Now, play your track. Mix in the compressed buss to your liking, and bam! You’ve just used parallel compression.
It’s not that hard, but this technique can really make your drums hit a little harder. This can be done in any DAW, so don’t be afraid to try it in Logic, Pro Tools, or whatever other DAW you may use.
And don’t forget to send us an email!
Loading ...
Hey, I’d like to know if instead of using the “bus receives”, using in each individual tracks like, kick, snare and toms, and inserting a send to the “bus comp” would create the same effect? Because that’s how I actually use, but I am pretty new to Reaper, and I know that’s the way I do in other DAWs.
Thanks
The buss sends/buss receives are Reaper’s way of bussing. For example, in Pro Tools or Logic, you would create an aux track then assign all the tracks you want to go to your aux via a buss (like buss 1&2).
In Reaper, you set up an aux track and in the I/O set it to receive the tracks you want to go to it, thus automatically creating the sends.
Reaper is slightly different from the rest, for sure. Hopefully this makes sense. if not, let me know how you would do this in your DAW of choice and I’ll see if I can explain myself a little better.
Hey ben, yes I understood that now. I wasn’t sure if in Reaper it worked out the same. Let me try to explain. Imagine I create a track, that will serve as purpose of an aux, my doubt was, will it work the same if you, A: Pick the tracks and create sends to that aux. B: Create Receives on the aux track from those same tracks.
But I tried it now and realized it is the same thing, when you create a receive it will automatically create the sends on the affected tracks. I know how all this techniques work, I just wasn’t sure about the routing method in Reaper as it seems a bit different from others, maybe much more versatile as it seems :)
Thanks