just discovered parallel compression is the SHIT

[gabriel g.]

Parallel compression is my dirty secret to get heavily triggered (or programmed, part programmed) drums a "feeling". if you use a 1176 or something similar you realy get the drums to bounce.
I love the attack on the cymbals. It realy gives me that "live" feeling.

I always do something similar to vocals. I´ll send the dry track to an aux and use the reverb and delay on that one and then compress it to hell.
The main vocal group gets also compressed to hell and back.

Dont like it on guitars and bass....

 

[TheDriller]

What I've been doing lately is having a buss set up with an instance of Ferric TDS and some sort of compressor on it,
then sending pretty much everything to it in parallel.

 

[musickey]

interestingly i never found this technique usable on single channels, like kick snare etc. but when i finally tried it on full busses it really dawned on me.

of course using parallel comp on e.g. just the kick will have similar benefits, like fatter sound etc...however, it will also sound more sterile and "fake" imho.
when using it on the full drum bus though, you send the whole kit to the comp which really glues it together, and when you blend that back in you're not only getting more punch but also a more coherent sounding kit imho.
settings wise i think i had like slowest attack, auto release, 10:1 ratio and threshold set for like 15db GR on the ssl comp. using a faster attack for some reason turned it into mud real fast, i guess because you loose all the transient clarity by stepping on it hard.

i might post a sample of that mix tomorrow or something...

I do pretty much the same thing. I exclude cymbal groups though. I picked up one of those ART VLAII and it kicks ass for this application.