Plugin Designer SCHOOLS YOU On Parallel Compression

we have four compressors in parallel we analyzed each one and we know what the tone of each one is and what the groove of each one is and that's all interesting information to have but now let's do a little subtractive analysis and find out when we've got a blend of all of these sounds what happens when we take those qualities that we know the compressor brings away [Music] welcome to kush after hours my name is gregory scott tonight's episode is gonna be a fun one we're gonna dive deep into parallel compression on the drums and when i say deep i mean four compressors deep we're gonna have four parallel pathways on a drum buss and find out what each of the four compressors is doing to the tone and the texture and also to the groove and then once we get a little mix going of all these compressors we're going to start taking them away and figuring out what do we lose when we take these out of the mix it's gonna be a fun exercise and we're gonna be digging deep so buckle up here we go okay trying to make this an unmitigated disaster here and i will try not to ramble let's check out the music that we're going to be working with it's funk baby it's nice these sounds are by and large on the raw side there's not a lot of processing happening i got some plugins up but each plugin is doing a very small amount of whatever just kind of feeling the song out at the moment here and setting up a bunch of parallel compressors and thought might be interesting to share with you what i'm up to what i'm thinking why you might want to do this yourself play around with these for rhythm and texture this is our musical turnaround [Music] back into the verse okay so this is interesting i've got four compressors working on the drums you're only hearing one right now but in terms of the music that you're hearing let's just get clear on that really quickly here we've got let me turn off my solo safe so i'm using that for the demo but for now [Music] that's the music that's it and then we got some drums let's talk about what's happening on the drums on the recording side of things real quick let's move through the technical really quickly and get that out of the way so we can get into the sounds but be good for you to understand what's happening in this session even though it's simple there's some trickery this is five microphones on a drum kit this is a kick mic up close snare mic up close in the snare two overheads old ribbon microphones kohl's 40 38 love the sound of those things and there's a hi-hat mic which is a little unusual for me but for the funk here we need a little bit more control over the sizzle and the proximity of those hi-hats in the mix so we can really control this groove and that's an old km84 it's a small diaphragm condenser shoved up on the hi-hats pointed it where my stick hits it for the detail so what's happening with the drums is we have these five microphones four tracks one of my stereo feeding bus one bus one is this creature over here this is our drum bus it's labeled drums it's very simple this is just an eq bus for me i have three eqs in series we're not going to get into what the eqs are doing they're doing very little each one's doing small moves i think the biggest move i've got going on in here is a 3 db lift at 100 hertz everything else is like 1 or 2 db cuts here and there it doesn't really matter i got an imaging plug-in 0.82 so what this is doing and this is basically the same as taking your left and right pan and pulling them in just a little bit the drum bus is feeding another bus bus seven plus seven over here you will notice all these creatures right here are bus seven so the drum bus five microphones into a drum bus that drum bus is itself feeding four buses what that means is that these four buses are working in parallel and i have a compressor on each bus each compressor is set to do a different amount and style and texture of compression and we're going to get really deep into why and what and all of that but for now it's good to know that just we have four compressors running in parallel off of one drum buss they get progressively more aggressive this is just so my brain has an easy time keeping track of the session and this is what they sound like let me solo safe these three here so our music always stays in and we're going to listen to the tight first tight is basically just the dry drums with a little bit of i mean like that you might not even hear the difference with the bypass and that's okay so this i'm going to basically use as my dry drum bus so when i want to blend more of an uncompressed unprocessed sound in this is what i will reach for now i have my punch compressor it's very smack smash and crush that's a long way from that so i'm going to get into how i'm creating these sounds don't spend too much time on that and there's a whole process involved in mixing into these compressors to kind of get these things set up i know what a lot of people love to do is they love to set their faders up on say the drum bus and they get their kick in their snare and then they put their compressor on and they play a lot with the threshold and they bring that down and they attempt to shape and control their compression that way and they'll go over to their output and change the output on the compressor and then add more of the threshold and then back off the output you can do that what i've done here and i will do another video on this particular process is i've mixed into these compressors in other words these compressors were all set up and then i went and i just chose one sometimes i choose two and i will mix my drum faders into the compression i don't adjust the threshold on my compression at all if i want more or less compression on everything i'll grab all the faders and just pull all the drum faders down it's a very different approach i'll have the music going while i'm doing that work the faders that's all i'm going to say on that for now but i recommend you experiment with that but for now i want to get into the parallel compressors here and what these things are doing for the groove and how and why you might want to blend these different ways so let's start off with our tight compression this is subtle i'm gonna bypass this i think a lot of you out there are pretty gonna struggle to listen and even hear what this compressor is doing and that's okay because it's really not doing much of anything it's this subtle list stuff but it's meaningful to me eventually to be meaningful to you but you don't really need to understand what this compressor is doing right now don't worry about it just know that we're going to treat this like our dry bus so if i want more or less of an uncompressed untreated sound even though it has some treatment on it doesn't sound like it does that's what i'll be blending into my drum mix moving on to the punch compression this is the ar1 i've pushed into this compressor pretty aggressively the medium attack five milliseconds and a medium release 170 milliseconds what that gives me the medium attack it lets a little bit more transient punch through and the medium release gives me more of a punchy tight drier sound so this for me is all about defining especially the bottom end of the groove we'll get back to that in a minute close this out let's move on to the smash compression that's different this is the novotron punish that's a 20 to 1 limiter highly aggressive and it's doing 4 to 6 db of reduction that's a pretty good amount but look at my attack is all the way closed this is 100 microseconds is what this is right here and on the release side of things it's 40 milliseconds that's faster than your typical analog compressor can do um there are some that do that but most don't and it's faster than most plug-in emulations will do as well but what i'm really looking for here is just a smashing of the waveform flattening of it okay we'll get into why in a minute just know that that's what's happening there and then crush that's a little on the crazy side this is silica i am grinding the input but i have a really low blend on that like 30 so i'm getting a lot of distortion on this thing on the input but i'm only blending a little bit of that distortion in i'm in fury mode which makes this compressor insanely fast you can see if i just go to the game reduction here this needle is just it's frenetic and that's the sound that i hear of the compression got my side chain pushed a little higher than usual up to 100 hertz and again i'm digging in like crazy with this compressor now you'll notice it's only a two to one ratio but because it's so fast and aggressive because i have so much distortion happening in here it creates a very energized sound we'll get into why we want that in a minute but so those are the four buses that i have in parallel on my drums each one just a single compressor let's get into what these things do for the groove and then we will start mixing them and figure out what's a cool way to manipulate the shape and sound of these drums with these four compressors so i'm now going to attempt to do something that might be a little strange to you i'm going to attempt to show you with my hands what i hear each of these compressors doing to the groove how i hear or feel the groove in my body according to the dynamic manipulation that's been happening with these compressors starting off with the tight compressor this should in theory feel pretty much the way it felt in the room the way i played it as a drummer because we're not really manipulating the dynamics in any meaningful way here just a little tonal tightening on this thing that's how i hear that's the groove of the song it's nice moving on to the punch compressor that's a very different feel [Music] smash i really really am focused on the way that spreads the snare out and just kind of softens because the transients are very soft here compared to punch where they're very hard and knocky we'll get into texture in a few minutes but for now it's on a crush this is all about the visceral high frequency energized kind of snappy dancy part of the groove this really gets the top end happening it's frenetic and that's a great energy to have it's highly distorted highly compressed and moving on from groove let's swing around to tone for a second here listen to the tone of these drums compared to our bass line sound so bright i mean i think the peaks are actually louder on here with the transients so bright and these these move across the spectrum from this mellow dark through to varying shades of brightness so we got a handle on what the groove is for each of these compressors let's let's take a second to acknowledge the tone that they're bringing to the equation so this is kind of how i record it's a natural sound [Music] it's low midi warm soft mellow it's got some punch to it but it's that unprocessed punch rather than the processed punch processed punch this is a hard sound knocky it's skinny this is wider and fatter than my ears this really brings out the knock on the kick drum for me high frequency upper mid click [Music] it's more pillowy smash i love the way it brings out the snap and the brightness of the snare and spreads it a little bit more it's not such a fast raw sound anymore and we're getting some sparkle in the hi-hats now compared to this this also gives me some spit but here's an interesting observation about what smash does smash to my ears takes the drum texture and tone and really marries it with the chickawa that sort of upper mid 2 to 4k rake of the pick on the chickawa guitar [Music] hear that they're almost the same sound when they hit [Music] it's just the kind of thing my brain notes for future use or not moving on to crush it's not just bright i can really hear the stick hitting that hi-hat if i turn it down this kind of turns the groove upside down really it takes it from this bottom low mid warm pillowy thing this also to my ears marries the envelope of the snare to that checkawa [Music] pulls them together so nicely [Music] so that's the textures that we're working with here and we've hit on the groove that all these compressors bring to the table so what do you do with all these things right you've got these colors on your palette as a painter what i start doing is i just start painting i just start pushing colors around and seeing what happens so let's do that let's just start mixing our various flavors here pull these down all the way and just bring them up one of the most fascinating things to me which hopefully we'll discover through this little exercise here is that especially with transient rich sounds like the tight or the punch or really high frequency energized sounds like the hi-hats and crush or the snare and smash just how little you need in a blend to make a meaningful difference so what we'll do is we will build up a little mix it's not going to be the world's greatest mix i'm going to be fast just going to take a minute or two to do it instinctive what i'm going to do is for each channel i'm gonna bring it up just to the threshold of audibility in the mix because what my engineer brain wants to hear is okay when this starts to poke through where and how does it poke through what does it give me so if i'm doing a subtle blend and i need a little bit of just this right kind of a thing i'll know what each of these things does at low volume and then once i hear that i'm going to push it to a reasonable kind of balance to fair and then i'm going to keep going until it's very clearly over mixed because i also want to know as an engineer what happens when this texture and this groove become a little overbearing what does that do to the feeling or the emotion because sometimes in a mix in a moment of a song in a section of the song you kind of want to make something overbearing for a very specific reason because it feels right because it draws the listener in for fill in the blank any number of reasons i like having this information i like knowing like what does a little bit do what does a lot do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] all right let's start blending these things do [Music] i like that all right so that's all i need to do there i would move on as a mixer so that was me mixing a little fast coming up with a blend interesting not where i thought things would land but there we have it so now we've got our four compressors in in parallel it's an interesting feel what i want to do now is i want to play the mix as it is and then take away one at a time each of these compressors so that we can hear what's lost right so we analyzed each one and we know what the tone of each one is and what the groove of each one is and that's all interesting information to have but now let's do a little subtractive analysis and find out when we've got a blend of all of these sounds what happens when we take those qualities that we know the compressor brings away what does it do what do we feel says we're generally going to feel some sort of a loss at least we should if we feel again like oh that's better then our balances are a little wonky so all good information let's find out what happens when we take each of these away one at a time and we'll start with the most high frequency energized one and also the quietest one see what happens interesting so what i hear happening here this is very subtle it's really just an energized hi-hat thing these are so softly blended in but it's really there's a snap on the hi-hat that goes away and i lose just a little bit of the crackling life of the song it's not obtrusive it's not obnoxious but to me it's a meaningful difference because it's a little bit of that like pinging the third eye like hey do you hear this sound it's dancing away pay attention but not to attention i like it it's a little it's brightness is what it is it's a nice brightness smash oh feel that i mean that's most of the volume of the drums right there so for whatever reason i chose smash as sort of the dominant identity of this group crunch what happens that's also a significant chunk of the volume of the sound but really what it is is it's the tone that's really changing for me clarity i can i can just feel that drummer hitting those drums i actually want to back those off just a little we go [Music] nice tight to me this is about the roundness of the sound this kind of a thing happening putting the drums up front [Music] as a drummer i tend to overmix my drums i like it so that's our parallel drum compression in a nutshell we have four compressors in parallel being fed by the drum buss each of these compressors does a different amount and style and texture of compression which in turn affects the groove and then we blend those four to figure out what feels good what gets the drums moving the way that you like what gets them blended with other instruments or popping out the way that you want all these options are available none of this is intended to tell you how you should be doing things or even that you should be doing this it's just colors i love colors and this gives me very different colors and textures to play with when i have an actual song fleshed out i'm probably going to be moving these faders around for different sections so that as we get into that little lift there when the cord starts to modulate and we're lifting for the pre-chorus i might push the crush channel a little bit to get a little bit more energy happening in the high frequencies and to just kind of like wake the listener up like hey hey something's happening and then in all likelihood if i know me i'm going to pull that back down possibly way down maybe even the hi-hat fader down as well because i'm going to bring in a triangle shaker tambourine other high frequency stuff to help push the groove forward and i'm going to need the drums to relax a little bit or maybe not maybe i'll leave it right where it is and just add those things in and just go farther i don't really know point is i have options and i can push and pull these things and just because i've set faders here by no means is this that where they're going to stay as the song unfolds and evolves from section to section i'm going to be moving things around i always do so you got colors which you can move around you have textures and shapes of grooves that you can change the feeling if there's a breakdown in this song i might mute two of these out completely and just have the dry drums come in and push them get more of a dry thud happening in your face lay the hi-hats back have it be all about the backbeat man so many options hopefully all of this was in some way useful and helpful to you a lot of you out there using virtual instruments this is an amazing way parallel compression of parallel distortions like this an amazing way to take otherwise kind of vanilla or static or flat sounds and create just shades colors variety on your palette you can start painting with get to work thanks for hanging out with me my name is gregory scott this has been cush after hours [Music] you

Channel: The House of Kush

Views: 115,835

Keywords:

Id: -AEenzxWZnM

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021