Parallel Drum Compression, (Rob Chiarelli Final Mix?)

I know it's inexpensive, but If I don't use it, I'd rather buy a nice lunch than throw money away.

Cool, thanks jcoutou.

I'm curious, say you have 8 drum tracks, (I usually have only two), would it work to put a compressor on a bus and blend, getting all the tracks at the same time, or is it better individually?

very helpful info guys, thanks. I didn't even think about not sending overheads and hats, thanks Noah.

The cymbals and hats can get pretty nasty!
Depending on how hard you smash the parallel bus you may have to do some gating as well.
I'm a bit of a squasher myself. A lot of the time my parallel bus has almost no transient. Distressor style. It's adding ambience and length and "bloom" to the drums.
Sometimes 2 parallel busses are needed
1 for punch and 1 for BLOOM!!

Or real drums.

Never heard any particular value for a real multimic'd kits. Shit--you're trying your best to push the bleedy ambeint sustainy bits DOWN....not up....but, give me a sampled kit and it requires parallel crunching almost always because it, by definition isn't a sampled kit--it's a sample set of kit pieces someone then plays together and wonders why it doesn't sound like a kit. Since they all tend to include ambient mics now--apply parallel compression and it gels it into sounding more like a kit being played together.

I'm just saying. Another way to skin the cat is not skin the cat. Love it and feed it.

But, if you have to remove this particular feline's largest organ--because you ARE using sampled kits--use the aux method, so you can NOT send the kick to it at the same level you're sending other kit pieces. But make the sends pre fader so you can manipulate the actual drums' EQ/dynamics etc and not have it reflect in the parallel buss. Not sure how that's going to factor into that LogicX drummer's breakout....but, ideally--you've going to have that stuff rendered to audio before you're doing this kind of mix minutia, right? Yes.

I run each drum through its own track treating superior drummer like a recorded kit. I then double everything sending one to one bus via aux and leaving the other uneffected (and sometimes muted). While SD sounds great coming from the plug I always feel the need to tweak it a bit more especially in instances like fast heavy choruses where I need the snap of the snare to really come out.
It also organizes it in front of me better and is easier (for me) to manage coming through the console.
I also like having an effected bus and a 'raw' bus to play around with parrallel compression with.

Depending on the situation I'll do this through my console instead of the daw.

The elysia is on my 2016 wish list.

Don't use midi automation. You need to use the MIDI note velocity or you're making the snare drum hit hard just quieter in volume--so, literally that will never "lay back" and will sound weird.

Martin
I mean console as in my Soundcraft Ghost but I also mix Superior Drummer within the DAW and the results are pretty similar (we are dealing with a sample software). Depending on the situation i will run each part of the kit i.e.; the snare, the kick, through its own channel and sum them via the Ghost busses (i also work on a Trident). Usually it's if I already have been working with other material this way. I also rarely ever use any of their full kit 'grooves' other than a 'fill' or ' bridge'. I'll use just the kick and hi hat and either fill in the other parts of the kit myself or I have one of my drummer friends do it (and watch them smugly put me to shame with just their fingertips). Obviously given the option a good drummer with a decent kit is vastly superior to superior drummer but thats not always available or what the client wants. Honestly I have yet to find a collection that actually has the beat I have in my head. Fortunately I know some incredible drummers that can.