Get your phat drums with parallel compression!
I’ve been wanting to write this one up for a while. Parallel compression is one of my favorite tricks for mixing drums. It sounds great and can really add some fat and analog oomph
to your drum tracks. Best of all, even though I use the Waves plugins, the lo-fi requirements of parallel compression (sometimes called New York compression) mean you can use your DAW’s built in compressor or one of the many free compressor plugins available around the net. I hope you enjoy my new article on Phat Drums: New York Style Parallel Compression
November 7th, 2007 at 2:57 am
Hi,
Fantastic post.
Im alittle confused with step 2 when you mentioned solo-ing with cool and uncool DAWs…..When I solo the NYC track, I dont hear anything (i.e. the drums are all muted). is this right?
Also, what are examples of cool and uncool DAWs?
Monkey
November 7th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Ah yes, the cool DAW solo-ing! I haven’t tried this type of routing in all the different DAWs I’ve used. My main DAW is REAPER and it has some very intelligent solo behavior. When you solo a track, no matter what the routing, REAPER will make sure the signal chain is open from beginning to end so you still hear exactly what that track represents. From step 2, when you solo the NYC track in REAPER it will automatically make sure the path from NYC to your output is open (unmuted) as well as making sure the input is unmuted. This means the submix channel will still be audible. If the submix is then fed from other individual tracks REAPER will make sure they’re audible too. This is the way that REAPER handles intelligent solo-ing and is a “cool” DAW. I believe SAWStudio will also do something “like” intelligent solo behavior but its routing options are not quite as straight forward. You would have to bend the rules a bit to get this routing going in SAWStudio. I haven’t yet tried the routing in SONAR, Cubase, Nuendo, Logic, or Pro Fools, err Pro Tools…
After all that, to address your specific problem, if you solo the NYC track and don’t hear anything then you must be using one of the uncool DAWs *wink* No worries, there’s an easy workaround. Just solo the NYC track, the submix, and any tracks feeding the submix. Did you make sure the send from submix to NYC was pre-fader? Then pull the fader on submix down to minimum. This will essentially “mute” submix (even though it is solo’d) so you hear only the NYC mix.
Which DAW are you using and did this technique work for you?