Part 9 of 31 – Want a hack to get good compression settings on drums? Turn down your speakers. I mean way down. Then start dialing in the compression.
Anything Can Sound Good Loud
The truth is, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking your drums sound awesome if you mix with them at loud volumes. The trick is to set your compression levels when the drums are super quiet. If you can get them to snap and have punch at low volumes, you’re dialing in the right amount of compression.
Nice little tip. But I have a question: if you apply parallel compression, do you still compress the individual tracks and/or the drum buss?
It just depends 🙂 Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Wow. Compressing like this really made a nice improvement with my drums. Thanks for this
Wow, first of all… not a stupid blog. There are often articles here with great information that have no video. Second, the video is right there embedded in the page!
Personally, I prefer viewing the videos in the blog over YouTube because of the generally constructive comments (I guess today is an exception to that).
His comment was actually a re-post from his own blog. It was him asking why someone would go to his site instead of just coming straight here. A joke. All is good!