MultiHub Forum

I'm mixing a dense rock track where the drums, especially the snare, are getting lost in the wall of guitars, and I've been experimenting with parallel compression techniques to add punch and sustain without squashing the transients of the original drum bus. I'm sending the drum bus to an aux channel with a fast-attack compressor hitting pretty hard, but when I blend it back in, it either sounds too obvious and 'pumpy' or doesn't provide the glue I'm looking for. For mix engineers who use parallel compression regularly, what are your go-to compressor types and settings for drums in aggressive music? How do you process the parallel channel itself—do you EQ before or after compression, and do you ever use subtle saturation on that channel to help it cut through a busy mix?

Solid starting point for the parallel drum bus on aggressive rock: use a clean, fast-attack compressor (1176-style, DBX 160, or an SSL bus compressor). Try attack around 8 ms, release around 100–130 ms, ratio 4:1–6:1, knee soft. Blend wet/dry around 25–35%. On the parallel channel, roll off the subbass with a high-pass at 60–80 Hz to avoid pumping from the lower end. If you want more bite, add a touch of high-end lift on the wet path, like a 2–4 dB shelf around 3–5 kHz. Keep the parallel low-end under control so the snare stays present without turning the bus into mud.