5 Steps to get your drums slamming (parallel compression)

[jyk]

This dude's a pro. His mixes are quality. His drums always slam in a mix. He has nothing to prove so take the free lesson.

[tommy]

I’ve usually got the kick ad snare on a parallel bus with an SSL style moving 6-8dB, and blend that… Took five minutes to mimic this and I’m shocked how well it works 😂

[zztbvyw]

ok, now this is some quality advice... gonna try it right away

[TimOost]

Awesome! I tried cutting the lows on the crush send before saturation which helped a lot too

[afineyoungSchapT]

Super helpful stuff, I’m working in a different genre but all these ideas apply perfectly. Much appreciated!

[derekfrazier]

How can you say it doesn’t sound good when you haven’t heard it in the final mix? I’ve heard tons of tracks solo’d that sound kind of “bad” but they work in the context of the mix. Yeesh you people are hard critics

[frankeinstein]

Damn I never even thought about sending everything to the parallel bus individually to get more control omg genius

[jorgc]

sounds good but that high ping in the snare would frustrate me lol

[thisaintart]

An alternative (and preferred method imho) is to run the crushed channel’s output into the final drum buss processing, you’ll get a much more glued sound. Not always better but I’m not a huge fan of parallel otherwise.

[ppjmusichub]

Less cymbal and less kick. Thank you for this info.

[M-BLOC]

Sounds great! How would this method translate in LMMS?

[carter]

Doing mid scoop on parallel comp bud is great

[tonugamu]

one proven technique. but always fail me in live mixing because of room size and drums bleeding everywhere. appreciate much to studio/session drummers with their fabulous control.

[christopherharv]

I think I prefer the sound of a medium-fast attack to bring out the room and the snare reverb. And I also turn toms down almost as far as the kick and OH but not quite so far.

[raphaeldelavie]

How much delay does this clipper cause? The one I use has around 25ms so I am looking for an alternative

[GT_israel]

And there is no phase issues after that?

[priyaop]

Compress hard, saturation and clipper are on the drum bus or in a parallel channel?

[GeraldLyn]

Are you sending the crush buss to the drum buss or is it only going to the master

[merdmann]

Would you recommend doing this with real drum tracks, programmed drums / samples, or both?

[chrismueller]

So I use parallel compression but today I realized that I don’t know if I should be sending the Aux that crushing my drums directly to my mix bus or to the master bus? I have a Drum Sum then the Sum goes to my Drum Mix bus. The Sum really a drum routing folder. I have all my mix buss together so when I’m don’t at the track level I can focus mixing at the global level