Hi could some of you lot explain your approach to parallel compression in cubase 6.
im confused as to where the eq should be?
for example with acoustic guitars i might have two tracks seperate takes in mono one panned Left and one panned Right i would eq each one and then send them to a group stereo track and add compression to that.
would this be right? or should the stereo track have an eq after the compressor?
drums i have superior drummer i have it set to mutiple out puts and then output them all to a stereo group then have that send to another stereo group with compression…where should eq be on each seperate track for each drum part before the compressor? this is how i do it.
i would love to here some other users ways of doing this in cubase.
recently i have been leaving some tracks with no compression at all to keeps some dynamics their with some good results too.i think sometimes when near all tracks have comp on them the rythmical dynamics kind of dies and the song seems quite flat.
i have been working hard on my new songs tracking wise so i can realy explore diffrent aproaches to
compression,eq,panning ect i have always tried to rush my songs and get them out as quick as i can.
hopefuly the more i learn and experiment the better.
by this do you mean a couple of compressors each part/track and less threshold each compressor?
leaving some tracks with no compression is a good idea: it helps keep dynamics as you say.Also the source is important to consider. If its sampled instruents such as strings and especially drums recorded to analog tape or “analog feel” digital ,then its already compressed. The staging I do is 2 compressors in series with different settings, especially on the master bus
There are so many variables that nothing is definite!
Compression can be used to bring “energy” out of the sound or it can totally flatten it… depending!
Nothing wrong with 20dB of gain reduction on some parts, whilst others can have none!!!
Hmm I think there is minimal or none compression on the samples of the superior drummer 2 kits.
After all that is the point of the plugin, to bring you the best unprocessed sounds avaliable + the tools to reshape them as you see fit with the very good sonalksis efx that comes with it.
Haven’t noticed any “squashyness” on any of the s2 cymbals myself.
Almost the contrary so I often use a compressor subtly on my oh and/or room group to tame the loudest crash cymbals 2 to 4 db in relation to the rest of the kit.
I’m with OnkelKim on this one. SD2 sounds like what’s coming in through the wall into a mixer in the control room: raw drums, like it or not, but it would be completely counter productive for Toontrack to bake FX processing into the samples. BTW it’s a freakin’ awesome plugin and you can get amazing drum sounds out of it with the right processing. Sometimes I almost take a peek behind my screen to see if somebody sneaked in a drumset !
Absolutely, there is none better for drums. And I know because I bought into BFD too which is also great but nothing compared to the interface, effects and sounds/kits supplied by ToonTrack
Over the years I’ve bought a lot of software but some plugins/instruments just stand out and are worth many times the asked price for me.
For me (in no particular order) these are:
Superior/Ez drummer
Trilogy/Trillian
Lounge Lizard
Ni’s B4
Amplitube 2/3
Kuassa “amps”
Waves Ren eq and comp (old as hell but still somwhat of an industry standard)
Softubes licenced Tube-Tech CL1B compressor
Redline Reverb.
And the cream of the crop when it comes to plugins for me: PsP vintagewarmer
With these + hypersonic2/halionsonic1.5 I can make all the music that falls into my mind on a good or bad day.
You’ve certainly got better tuned ears than I do, but I wonder about what sort of processing might be on the
S2 drums. I agree that the cymbals aren’t squashy, but when compared with Superior 1, which was said to be
totally raw files, to my ears S2 sounds much, much better right out of the box. I actually abandoned S1 because it took
too much work to get them to sound good - and still I wasn’t satisfied with the result. I wound up going back
to EZ drummer.
With S2, I’ll work the entire song with no added processing (except maybe some added punch on the kick)
straight out of the plugin - and when I’m done I’m often tempted to render a final mix as it is. It sounds -that- good to me. True, I do go to multitrack then and process the drums individually and get a better result, but it sounds
pretty damn good straight up - which makes me wonder why they sound so much more usable than they did in S1.
Hi there Lenny, so good to hear from you.
My short answer here about why S2 they sound better than S1 right out of the box would be:
better drums
better tuning of them
better drummer playing them
better studio rooms
24 instead of 16 bit
insane eye for detail in in every nuance of every drum piece when sampled.
The avatar kit alone… wow… must be the best sampled kit in history
detail detail detail…
I never used S1 myself but I think these things added up makes for the better general sound of S2 vs S1
Just to clarify, in referencing vst’s that are already compressed ,I;m not talking about any of the “real drum” vsts. I don’t have much experience with these apart from EZ Drummer, but the ones I’ve heard don’t seem to have much compression at all. I mean instruments like Stylus for example and many of the basses in Trilian. In general I’m saying the source should be considered before throwing on compression
!
