Last week we looked at dynamics processors, in particular compressors. This week we will add some new tools, and consider how we can apply dynamics processing to groups of sounds.

 
Dynamics processors

Transient shaping – shape the Attack (the transient) and Release (the tail) of a sound. Particularly effective with drums to make them more pokey or tighter.

Noise gate – used to cut background sounds. The gate will only open when the signal goes over the threshold, so only the loud parts of a track pass through the gate. Very effective on live drums to remove the noisy background in between hits.

Saturation – using Overdrive and similar plugins will limit your sounds and also create harmonic distortion. This effectively makes things sounds thicker and fatter.

Limiting – stops signal going over 0db and clipping the channel. However be careful as running into a Limiter too hot will still cause distortion.

Clipping – some compressors have built-in Distortion. This enables you to clip the signal and squeeze it up to appear louder without leaving spiky transients.

 
Applications of compression

Buss compression
Using a compressor on a buss group will help to hold all the sounds together by reducing their dynamics and shaping their transients as a group rather than individually. For example – compressing layers of vocals to avoid sudden peaks; compressing all of your drums as a group to avoid peaks and also potentially make your drums pump. This is why people refer to buss compression as ‘glue’, sticking groups of sounds together.

To use this technique you simply need to route all your drums/vox/etc directly into a Bus track instead of going straight to the stereo output. Then when you apply plugins to this Bus they affect all of the incoming audio at the same time. Now a compressor will respond to your entire drum mix. You can setup the compressor to emphasise transients, to reduce dynamic range, to cut off any peaks…. all of the normal uses of compression but applied to your whole drum mix, processing it all together.

This also means you can apply Saturation or Limiting (or even both) at the end of your chain, which will cut off any peaks and recover some headroom. Then you can push your drums up so they appear louder in the mix without using up all of your headroom. My absolute favourite tool for this is Camel Phat at the end of the drum chain to give the drums an extra squeeze.

 
Parallel compression
This technique involves mixing a heavily compressed signal back into the original dry signal. Most commonly used on drums (for extra impact and energy) and vocals (solid signal with the impression of dynamic range).
Set up an auxiliary channel and use aux sends to choose which signals are routed to the compressor. You can then apply aggressive compression to your signal (no dynamics on vocals/exaggerated pumping drums) and use the aux fader to mix this signal with your dry signal. I normally set up a final bus to group the dry and parallel signals together for a final bit of control.

When writing DnB I use parallel compression on my drums in a variety of ways, depending on the style of track.
For minimal or techy tracks I will push the compressor on the parallel chain to emphasise transients (hard compression, Attack/Release set to let the drums poke before they are compressed), I will then double the effect by using an Enveloper to cut the tails and push the initial attack. When you mix this back into your original drum mix you end with a very tight and snappy sound, spiky drums.
For liquid I will often go in a completely different direction, and use the parallel compression to bring out the shuffles of my breakbeats by having a very short attack then timing the release to let the shuffles jump out. Using the Soft Clipping feature in the Logic compressor will squeeze the drums more and result in the shuffles appearing to pop out of the drum mix. This can then be mixed with the dry signal to achieve a swinging or pumping effect.

This first screenshot shows how the two drum busses are mixed into a final drum bus. This Drum Master channel makes it very easy to adjust the volume of the drums in relation to the rest of your mixdown.

The Parallel is compressed aggressively, with a fast attack and release to ensure all transients have a POP. The Enveloper is pushing the first 10-20ms of the transients to bring out more poke, which is then clipped with the Overdrive.

The Drum Mix is compressed gently, a little squeeze after letting the first 50-60ms punch. Then the UAD plugins are a Tube Amp for saturation, a Neve EQ which is bringing up the bass of the kick with a low-shelf, and finally, Overdrive to catch peaks and squeeze a bit more.

On the Drum Master there is EQ on the whole drum mix, in this instance to push the mids, and finally Limiting to push up the perceived volume while avoiding any peaks.The result is the brick wall of drums you will see below.

In this second screenshot, you see the effect that each stage of processing has on the audio. The end result is thick fat drums that are controlled by the Limiter.