Note the gorgeous attack on the snare-we don’t want to lose this. Since a waveform is worth 1,000 words, here are some audio examples. Because the dry drum channel’s pre-fader sends to the Compressor and Expander, you can still bring in some dry drum sound if you want…but after using the Expander instead, you may prefer to leave the dry drums out entirely.
This lets you dial in exactly how you want to handle dynamic peaks, and the amount of unprocessed drum overlap with the compressed drums. The audio above the Expander’s threshold is dry, while the audio below the threshold that’s expanded downward gets out of the way of the compressed track. Figure 1: Routing for the Beyond NYC Compression effect. 1 shows a potential answer: Use a parallel track for compression, but instead of a parallel dry track, use a parallel track with an expander. And I want to do it in a way that sounds more natural than a transient shaper, and doesn’t obscure the benefits of the compressed audio.įig. But it’s not the sound I want, because I want to isolate the peaks more before mixing them in with the compressed sound. Of course, that’s not “wrong”-it might be the sound you want. This takes away from the theoretical purpose of New York-style compression. So while you’re mixing the peaks back in, you’re also masking the compressed signal with the dry sound.
Although the goal is to preserve some dynamics, much of the dry signal overlaps with the compressed audio. It doesn’t, which is helpful because there’s a problem with mixing in a dry track. So, let’s bid a fond farewell to New York compression-and take it to the next level. Modern compressors (like Studio One’s) often add a dry/wet mix control, which means you no longer need to set up a separate dry path. Realistically, though, this is kind of old news. The goal is to retain a compressed sound, while using the dry signal to mix some dynamics back in. Go to the web, and you’ll see a zillion YouTube videos and web posts that all say the same thing: a technique called parallel compression (also called New York compression) uses two parallel tracks to blend compressed and dry audio.