The #1 Parallel Compression Mistake

are you making this big mistake with parallel compression by the end of this video you'll know why parallel compression might be hurting your mixes rather than helping and my special technique to fix it let's get started hello everyone this is Dylan with musician on a mission here today with another mixing tip for you this one's gonna be going over parallel compression and the mistake that you're probably making right now in your own mixes with it but first I want to let you know that we are giving away for free our compression cheat sheet sweet it's our collection of five different cheat sheets on compression if it's going over stuff like the anatomy of a compressor how to use a compressor on any instrument how to set up mix buss compression just click the link on screen or down in the description below to grab it so in today's video we're gonna talk about one of the most common mistakes that's made with parallel compression it's something that you've made a million times I've made it a million times but the faster that you change your workflow to not make this mistake the better your mixes are gonna sound so for anyone who doesn't know what parallel compression is it's basically the style of compression where you create a copy of a sound and you compress that sound really aggressively and then just mix it in very quietly it's a great alternative to actually compressing something because you can still keep like the dry sound the very natural sound of drums or vocals or electric guitars but you still get to mix in some of that very tonal sound so that really like aggressive and controlled sound that you're getting with your wet channel with your parallel compression channel so it's a great combination of both worlds but it's also one of the hardest things to balance into a mix and that's because the two main ways that people do parallel compression are usually causing more problems than they're solving so let's go over the two incorrect ways that most people usually use parallel so I'm gonna go into this mix and I'm going to go to my vocals my lead vocals I'm gonna solo them out of charming dangerous okay so let's say that I wanted to create some parallel compression to this I wanted to get a little bit more control out of it so I would go over here and create ascend I go and select a bus let's just say 52 why not and I would make sure that the volume on this send is turned up to unity now all of a sudden I have a copy right here so let's just say I'll just grab something simple 1176 a perfect storm of charming dangerous us was not a thing you would like a hurricane swept me up and spit me out of glitter like a Sun you're in a perfect storm of charming dangerous okay cool and so now what we would do is just take this down and subtly mix it in right charming dangerous so that seems simple enough right like what could actually be a problem with that well in almost every single mix you do you are gonna be doing volume automation by the time you get to the end of the mix you're gonna have to have gone in and turned up certain words or certain phrases or turned up certain sections of the song turned down certain sections of the song in order to balance a mix volume automation is nearly essential to making it happen so the problem is that right now we have our send selected to be going post pan you can see if I click on this right now I have post pan selected and that is what is almost always default in all DAWs now what does that actually mean well you can see that there's three options that we have here post pan post fader and pre fader for the sake of this argument post pan and post fader are pretty much the exact same thing it's basically saying hey what do I want to send out a copy of my vocal do I want to send it out before the volume fader after the volume fader or after the pan so if it's post pan that means that whatever I set the pan to and whatever I set the volume fader to is going to affect how loud or how quiet my send is now if I selected pre-fader then what that means is that no matter how loud or how quiet I set my volume fader the amount that's getting sent to this aux channel to my parallel compression is not going to change so I'll show you right now what I'm talking about so with post pan take a look at how loud and how quiet it's getting over here [Music] perfect storm of Charmin dangerous you turn this off for just a moment [Music] dangerous you see how as I turn it up and down you see the volume over here on our parallel compression also go up and down I'm actually gonna name this really quickly now if I selected a pre fader [Music] perfect storm of Charmin dangerous you can see as I turn my original vocals up and down nothing actually changes so that's basically the difference between pre fader and post Pater and post Pam so having it post pan that basically means that if I was to go in and do any kind of automation so if I was to say oh I want this to be you know a lot quieter and I want this to be a lot louder for whatever reason then the amount of gain that's getting sent to our parallel compressor is going to be changing throughout the song and since compressors are entirely dependent on how much gain is being sent into them how much level is being set through the compressor we're gonna have some pretty dramatic changes in the tone of our compressor I mean that's the whole reason that compressors have a threshold knob is we're basically setting it to say okay well when it goes above negative 18 decibels I want to turn the compressor on well if sometimes the level of the instrument is being sent out at negative 15 decibels well you know great it's getting compressed but if you automate the volume down of the original track then you might now be sending only 21 DBS of level which means that the compressor isn't even going working at all this is gonna create some really inconsistent compression sounds your tones are just gonna be all over the place throughout your entire mix so if using a post fader send is one common mistake that people make whenever they're doing parallel compression well what's the other one well it's actually disguised as a solution this is usually what people tell you to do to fix the problem that post-fader sends make and that's to do a pre-fader send now in theory this fixes the problem of the post fader send now there's no more inconsistency in the level that's being sent if we are automating our level up and down as the song goes on this will remain the same which means our compression will remain the same so we're not going to have a inconsistent tone anymore right well not so much unfortunately by fixing a problem we have created a new problem so now if we turn down the volume of our track what happens so okay let's talk about this so this section for whatever reason I'm gonna have sets in negative seven point eight this section is set to one plus two point three whatever and what's gonna happen is that my dry signal is gonna get louder and softer and louder and softer but my parallel compression is gonna sound the same let me show you what I'm talking about [Music] dangerous us was not a thing you were like a hurricane swept me up and spit me out of glitter now it's a little bit difficult to hear just because the signal got so much louder in general but what really happened is we weren't actually necessarily turning volume up and volume down we were just changing the balance of our dry and our wet signal so that means that this particular phrase actually has way more compressed signal in it and this particular phrase has way more dry signal in it we're just changing our balances and that's basically because now that it is being sent out pre-fader and no longer post fader our parallel compression is no longer linked to our original volume level and like I said that solves one problem but we still get inconsistent tone just in a different way now the workaround to this would be to automate the parallel compression channel in the exact same way that we automate our vocals or our drums or whatever but honestly that takes hopeful lot of time it's not easy to go back and forth and basically just do an exact copy of volume automation two times in row maybe even three or four or five if you're using different kinds of parallel compression so how do we solve this issue well not actually with a fancy send trick but with what I call the volume bus it's a really really simple technique that you can do with any of your instruments that you know that you're gonna be doing parallel compression with and I'm going to show you how to do it step-by-step and by the end of this you'll absolutely understand what I'm talking about so right now I have my lead vocals just as an audio file and they're just going straight into the stereo output that's fine right well we're actually going to create a bus that everything is going to flow into so the first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure that we have a pre fader sent on our parallel compression which we already do we basically have our pre fader parallel compression already set up so all of the gain that's getting sent here is totally consistent throughout the entire song now I'm also going to take this off and you'll see why in just a moment so step two to the volume bus is to route your instrument or your instrument bus to a new bus so I'm gonna take my lead vocals away from the stereo output and I'm going to send them to a new aux track using a bus when I say I'm going to send them to a new aux track using a bus I don't actually mean I'm going to use a send a send is something that creates a copy of the track I'm actually just diverting the flow of the audio to another place it's almost like I'm putting a new pipe in the pipeline rather than just creating a totally different flow of audio so right now this vocal is now flowing into buss 53 which you can see is this aux track right here and buss 53 is flowing the stereo output so I'm gonna call this Vox volume now we'll move on to step three and that's to route my parallel compression track to that same bus so I'm gonna go back over here I'm going to click on my parallel compression here we go we go to the output and I'm going to select bus 53 the Vox volume now I'm going to right click and hit create track so here is the beauty of the volume bus I now have both my original vocals and my parallel vocals flowing into this exact same bus so let's see what happens now whenever I turn the volume up and down both the parallel compressed signal and of the dry signal come down and up at the exact same ratio we're not changing the balance we're not making anything too loud or too quiet it's staying exactly the same the whole time but the cool thing about this is that like I'm still doing all of my processing on the original track and I'm doing you know a lot of my effects on the original track but if I wanted to do say a reverb and I wanted my parallel compression to go to that reverb and I want my regular vocal to go to that reverb well all I got to do is go over here and create a new scent on my Vox volume bus and just put a reverb on it and now all of a sudden both my dry and my compressed signal are getting the right amount of reverb and then also I can do all of my automation on this channel if I wanted to go in and do exactly I was talking about before you know maybe turn this phrase down a bit this up a little bit I can do it right here and I'm going to keep the balance of the compression and the regular vocal is exactly the same so they don't so nearing a perfect storm of charming dangerous us was not a thing you would like a hurricane swept me up and so it's simple as that and now your tracks have a consistent balanced tone throughout the entire song and you're never gonna have to worry about copying over automation or accidentally wrecking your compression ever again and one quick bonus tip this is also really helpful for parallel saturation or any parallel distortion like if you're doing anything where you are just changing the tone or changing the dynamics of the original sound and you just want to mix it in parallel use this trick use the volume bus because then you're going to make sure that the balance is exactly where you want it to be for the entire mix so that's gonna about wrap it up for me if you enjoyed this mixing tip please give this video a like and if you really enjoyed it then maybe hit that subscribe button we post tips and tutorials like this all the time on this channel so you're gonna get some great stuff to improve the sound of your songs and before we head out don't forget to grab your free copy of the compression cheat sheet sweet wow that is a tongue twister say that five times fast compression cheat seat compression cheats compression cheat sheet seat goodness anyway make sure to hit the free compression sheet sheetsheet sheet sweet just make sure to download the compression suite you are gonna get five different fantastic cheat sheets that are absolutely gonna help you to compress better especially if you're just learning how to do compression and you don't really understand what all the knobs do it's really going to help you out so this has been Dillon with musician on the mission I hope you all have a great week and remember create regardless [Music]

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 109,073

Rating: 4.868392 out of 5

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, parallel compression, home recording, home studio, compression

Id: d-3nUKIY-f4

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020