Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - Parallel Compression Release Settings??
View Single Post
Old 8th February 2009   #7
wado1942
Lives for gear
 
wado1942's Avatar
 
Joined: Jan 2009
Location: Boise, Idaho
Posts: 2,087

Quote:
are you guys using it in mastering? with a stereo mix? interesting! never heard of this!
All the time. Funny thing is, I thought I came up with this method myself before I found TONs of people do it. I was using hardware compressors and wanted more control over the sound. At first I tried a single compressor with a parallel unprocessed circuit but it sounded odd to me. So I added in a second identical compressor so I have 2 in the chain side by side. Most of the time, one compressor has the threshold set to max and does nothing other than keep the parallel chain symmetrical. Sometimes I set both compressors to the exact same thing thus giving me in effect a single compressor with a more variable knee. Where the REAL fun comes into play, is when I set one compressor to a low threshold and ratio, then set the other to high ratio, high threshold. It's a bit tricky but I tend to like the high ratio compressor to do as little as possible, just catching little bits of this and that. So you combine an upward compressor with a downward compressor at the same time. That's something I don't normally do but it can sometimes be exactly what the music wants.
wado1942 is offline   Reply With Quote