Originally developed by mix engineers from New York, parallel compression (also known as New York compression) is a great technique to use if you want to preserve the dynamics of an audio signal while giving it the body and character of a compressed sound. For example if you want to add some punch to your drums without losing the original dynamics, which is so important to the ‘feel’ of a drum sound, then parallel compression is the right technique to use. To put it simply you are mixing a dry signal with a heavily compressed copy of itself. The dynamics in the dry signal are preserved while the compressed signal adds body and character to the overall sound. It works for any instrument, but on drums and vocals in particular, the added character can really bring a track to life.
If you are using parallel compression on an audio track all you have to do is duplicate the track and treat one as dry and the other as the heavily compressed track. For something like a drum submix its slightly more complicated. Heres a look at a basic drum submix using parallel compression.
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To do this you would create 2 stereo aux tracks. The first aux you would bus whatever drums you want to be involved. In this example I have the aux labeled “Drums”. For me I usually bus all my drums except cymbals because I find they get too washy sounding when compressed hard but thats just me. Do whatever sounds good to you. In this picture I am only showing the auxes, I didn’t include the individual drum tracks as in this example its not really important. Now on the second aux put a compressor with an extreme setting. I labeled this aux “Slam”. Now bus a send from the 1st aux (Drums) to the 2nd aux (Slam). Now adjust the fader of the 2nd aux (Slam) to determine how much compression you’ll hear in the drum mix. Depending on the style of music it may be a lot or it might just be a tiny bit. You’ll see a more detailed look at how I use parallel compression in the “Mixing Secrets Revealed” section of the site.
