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Hey guys Matthew Weiss here at www.Weiss.Sound.com www.VelcroAudioFiles.com. Alright this tutorials
gonna be really cool. It was inspired by a conversation with another
engineer. Another really great engineer named Jason JJ Boogie Wreckhart.
And we were talking about parallel compression and I sort of mentioned
that traditionally most people think of parallel compression as something
that involves bringing the sustain of the sound forward and making the
sound thicker and more present. But you can actually use parallel compression
in the opposite way as well. You can use it to exaggerate the attack of
something or conversely make it thinner or more transient driven. I'm going
show you show to do both with a snare drum. So let's give a lesson to our
snare here.
Now I have a couple of those preset little things here and I'm gonna throw
them in to the mix and you will hear what they do. The first one is
boosting up the sustain. Here we go. Before. After. Now both of these would
have different places in different contexts. It really depends on what
you're trying to do. Let me break everything down. The one with the release
you notice that the release isn't just filling up the sustain of the snare
it's actually got a rhythm to it. It's going, "schoom," like that.
That's not an accident. I did that on purpose. The way you do that effect
and I'll solo it is you set a very low threshold and you set a very fast
attack and you set a release that you time. So in this case it's 60
milliseconds to do that "schoom" kinda sound. It's just very two-
dimensional, kinda *** sound. You can have a very long release. It
doesn't really bring the sustain it's kinda a more natural sound for a
subtler effect but I kinda like it here because it's like there's a sort of
timing and pulling motion. Schoom. Schoom that kind of a thing.
So I can use that not only to thicken the snare but to create a little bit
of a groove thing going on and if I can kill two birds with one stone them
birds will be dead. I'm really tired just bear with me. The next one is the
attack sound. Yes that is with a compressor. The way I'm doing that is
again with a very low threshold but this time I'm using a longer attack. 33
milliseconds I mean really you can go longer than that. You can go up to 50
milliseconds or even longer but the point is the compressor is reacting too
slowly to catch the initial attack of the snare. But if you set the
threshold low enough so that it will catch the sustain of the snare and you
set the release slow enough so that the sustain doesn't come back up.
In this case it's 250 milliseconds. So that is how you create an isolated
attack sound. Alright so whats cool about this? Either way whether your
bringing up the sustain or bringing up the attack it allows you to A. Have
control over the shape of your sound which can be very useful and B. It
actually allows you to affect the tonality of just the sustain or just the
attack. So let me show you an example I know this is kinda a longer
tutorial but let me show you an example. Going back to the sustain one.
Let's say I really want that shhh noise to come out. What I can do is I can
grab an EQ. Now I have that higher pitch coming out. I can blend that in so
it would sound like this. So you get that rhythmic pull you sort of get an
added extra little bit of dimension to the snare and that can be cool.
Alright, lets say I want the attack to be a lot heavier. Well I'm using a
parallel effect let's throw on a harmonic sort of a thing like some
distortion and let's make it a dark heavy kind of sound. That's pretty
cruddy right? Alright let's bring that in. Now of course I would use these
effect subtlety just to add either weight to the attack or a little extra
groove in the sustain or even both. The skies the limit you can experiment.
A lot of these types of styles of effects really translate well into the
EDM world but they also translate really well into the hip hop world.
Ultimately, the idea is this. You can isolate individual parts of your
sound shape even if it's not a snare drum or anything like that simply by
logician through where the attack lives and how the sustain is happening
setting your compressor to isolate that sound. And then you have a whole
world of options. Alright guys I hope that you learned something and post
comments. Tell me things that you might do to a unique in whatever the
context might be like I got horn stabs and I really want the horn stabs to
be heavy and weighty but I don't want them to be in the way of the mix.
Okay, so I'll set up a parallel compression thing to isolate the attack of
the horn and I'll use some EQ to boost up the low-end so when it hits, it
hits really weighty and then it's done by the time the sustains getting in
so it's not cluttering up the mix. That's a great use for this kind of
technique. Post yours. Thanks.