Parallel Compression

We’ve all heard of compression and probably employ it often when tracking, mixing or even incorporating some form of it into our guitar rigs.  There’s a technique that’s easy to implement which can also deliver great results.  It’s called Parallel Compression.  You may have heard of it, maybe not.  Or, maybe you have heard of it but are unclear on how it works.   Here’s a quick rundown of the idea and how to incorporate it.

If you wanted to put some compression on your lead vocal track in a mix, traditionally you’d pop your favorite compression plugin on the track or, if you’re using outboard gear, route the insert on the vocal channel to a hardware compressor.  There’s nothing wrong with that as it obviously works but sometimes it’s nice to be able to leave the original track untouched and dial in just the right amount of a compressed track with it.  Here’s how to do it in a digital audio workstation:

It’s simple really – take a channel of your audio that you want to compress, say the lead vocal.  First, make a clone or duplicate of the vocal track.  This is the track you’ll be working with.  Next, put the compressor plugin on the new cloned track.  Bring up the original vocal and then bring the compressed track up along with it.  From here you can go crazy with compressing the duplicate track and the original remains unaffected.  By bringing the level of the compressed track up or down you can add the feel of the compressed track to the original and it might be just the right recipe for the vocal sound in your mix.  From here, if you route both of the vocal tracks to a buss you can then control the overall vocal of both the compressed and original tracks from one fader.  This technique is also possible using outboard gear by muting the output of the vocal track or using a y-cable to send it to both the compressor and into the mixer untouched.  What it all amounts to is the ability to add in as much or as little of the compressed track as you want while the original retains all its dynamics. 

Lastly, once you’ve tried this approach with vocals, give it a shot on other instruments.  It’s quite effective when you use it on a drum mix.  By grouping drum tracks to a buss and then running a send from that buss to another track that contains the compressor you can control the amount of compressed drums and unaffected drums in the mix and get some really punchy sounds without losing the dynamic feel of the original drum track.  In fact, you can achieve some cool results by doing the same process but using reverb or another effect in place of (or in addition to) a compressor.  Since it’s such an easy technique to use, why not give it a try?  You might like the result.