Making sounds louder without killing transients with parallel compression

Compression is a great tool to level dynamics and makes things sound louder, but as noted in the previous recipe, in certain situations, you risk losing the transients or first moments of a sound’s attack. For certain instruments, such as percussion, guitars, or pre-mixed beds of music, this can absolutely kill the sound and make it sound dead in comparison. In situations like this, you can use a technique called parallel compression, sometimes also referred to as upward compression. The concept is simple; instead of using a compressor to reduce the peaks of a sound and make up the gain after, you heavily compress a duplicate track (or, in our case, a Send routed to an Aux track) and mix that with the original track. The result is the lowest sounds being brought up without squashing the transients of the original.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need a Pro Tools session with an audio track...