Flabby drums suck – especially for dance music. Of course your choice of drum sounds is the start to a hitting track but what else can you do? While this trick has to be used in combination with other good practices like smart EQing, sidechain compression, etc. – it can be a tool to help give a extra push in your drum track.
Parallel Compression (also known as New York Compression) is basically two parallel drum busses. One has no compression at all, the second is highly compressed – almost to the point of absurdity. The idea is that you can then blend the busses together to keep the natural transients of the drum track while getting the “umpff” of the compression. If you only compress your drums they might get “louder” but they will lose the dynamics that makes a drum hit. Watch this video for a basic idea…
A great alternative to setting up two busses is that most software compressors have a wet/dry knob. This way you only need one buss and you can simply blend the compression to taste using a knob. Easy – just don’t over do it!
