[slidesingerParticipant]

Parallel compression with a Qu-16. Here’s how I did it on vocals to ‘fatten’ them and give them a little more cut through the instrument mix which includes a four piece horn section.

First the layout:
Vocals are on channels 1-4
Horns are on channels 5-8
Keys on 9
Bass on 10
Drums on 11-15
Guitar on 16

As you can see, the band bought a mixer that is really too small for them, plus no groups. This makes things a little problematic, but not impossible.

First, a little sensible compression on the drums. Not parallel compression here because they already cut through the mix fine. Just enough to give the kick a little extra punch and the snare a little snap.
No compression at all on hat or toms and no overheads (I wish I had room for them, but again, not a great purchase choice for this band. You always want spare channels, so keep that in mind when sizing your board.)

A little light compression on the P-Bass and careful not to muddy the EQ on this one either. You want plenty of highs on a P-bass, so cut out starting around 400hz and under the vocal space to make a little more room, then bring back up in the 4k range. The idea here is just to limit the bass from stepping on other material. So 3-6db of cut or even less on the EQ and 2:1 compression or less.

Now the parallel compression on the vocals: I used a stereo mix out (5/6) and set up the heavy compression piece on that mix buss, then patched it back into stereo input 1 with an xlr-f to TRS cable. I did the same thing to the horns, only less of it. Plus a DCA each for horns and vocals for the uncompressed mix)

The final result is good clean, punchy drums and bass. Keys and guitar in their own space (did very little to them, although because the keys plays horn lines, I put them in the same mix buss with the horn compression, since they come half from the horn buss/DCA and half from the rhythm DCA) Then we have that nice fat horn section (I added a few milliseconds of delay to the compressed mix using the buss delay but not to the uncompressed mix, which only has a little reverb.) The vocals float on top of all this tapestry like cream.

For the external patching part of this, I made short right angle xlr-f to right angle TRS patch cables so that they can stay plugged in when the rack is sealed up at the end of the night.

[Author]

Posts