Compressing my Hip-Hop drums sounds BAD

Alright cool man thanks for the help and advice you and band coach. Last thing, how do you feel about parallel compression on all the drums? I like it personally.
 
Well imagine parallel compression. You split the signal, compress the living hell out of it and mix it back with the uncompressed one.. Right? So now imagine you could put whatever you want on that split signal really. Distortion/saturation, delay, eq. Anything goes and you can just mix that back in with the unprocessed signal. That's what parallel processing is. Splitting the signal in 2 and process them in parallel rather than in series which would be one effect after another in the signal path.

I hardly ever use gates as such. I've heard people put a reverb on their kicks and stuff and then out a gate after it to get rid of the reverb tail, but to be honest I never really found a use for it. That's not to say you couldn't do it.. If I do use gates I use it in a sidechain fashion where I have a rhythmic element triggering the gate on for example a pad or a sustained lead sound or whatever. Since I don't normally work with recordings that has all kinds of weird noises picked up from microphones that's all I really use it for.
 
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Sounds pretty legit. Thanks for the help bro. Last thing how do you feel about putting gates on your drums for hip-hop? I kind of feel like it takes away the dirtiness but I was using it for a while but i feel like taking that off my kick/snare/bass drum along with the compressor has actually made my mix a lot better so far.
 
Specifically for hip hop I can't say..I don't do hip hop, but drums are drums. How do you use gates then?
 
StanleySteamer said:
Hey guys, I am working on a track and throughout the track I have been trying to figure out why my kick has this such high end punchy ness, but no low end at all.
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StanleySteamer said:
Then I send them all for parallel compression.
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Parallel compression is giving you both sub and higher frequency signals, try just doing sub compression. Works the same way but without the high end punch.
Also, use a multiband compressor to tone the punch down and drive the sub/mids up.
 
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MilDlrDime said:
Parallel compression is giving you both sub and higher frequency signals, try just doing sub compression. Works the same way but without the high end punch.
Also, use a multiband compressor to tone the punch down and drive the sub/mids up.
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There are soooo many things you could do to get a better timbre out of your bass drums I seriously don't think fancy schmancy multiband compression is the way to go. Actually, compression hardly ever give you the type of sound you want unless you're really happy with your timbre to begin with.

Just look at how many threads and discussions there are about people who have tried compression and just can't understand why it doesn't sound the way they want to.

If you really need to multiband compress your bass drum, odds are you haven't done a good enough job arranging, designing, choosing the right sample. And also many times its the relationship between the other sounds in the mix that might make you think your bass drum in this scenario is not good enough.
 
Wallengard said:
Actually, compression hardly ever give you the type of sound you want unless you're really happy with your timbre to begin with.
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This!

Much truth! I can't tell you how long it took me to realize this on my own. And I think parallel compression works better for synths that have harmonic content chillin all over the place. In this case of percussion, (kick drums specifically), the greatest weapon of choice to get the sound you want is layering. As has been said, stacking an 808 with a high-passed kick might be your best option to get that low end power you want. (Without sacrificing the good higher stuff). Compressing pulls power away from the low end since that's where most of a kick's energy lives.

Also, on the topic of gating, it can def make your mix tighter because you clean up little pieces of space for all your other sounds. But as it is true with anything else, don't overdo it because it can easily start to sound unnatural.
 
Wallengard said:
There are soooo many things you could do to get a better timbre out of your bass drums I seriously don't think fancy schmancy multiband compression is the way to go. Actually, compression hardly ever give you the type of sound you want unless you're really happy with your timbre to begin with.

Just look at how many threads and discussions there are about people who have tried compression and just can't understand why it doesn't sound the way they want to.

If you really need to multiband compress your bass drum, odds are you haven't done a good enough job arranging, designing, choosing the right sample. And also many times its the relationship between the other sounds in the mix that might make you think your bass drum in this scenario is not good enough.
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I almost never use multiband compression on my bass drum but if he's complaining about the high end and punch then it would be an excellent choice to have control of each band so he can push down what he wants and boost what he wants, even if he's not compressing and just using the volume levels to even out the way he wants it.
 
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All I'm saying is.. If you think you need to use multiband compression on your single bass drum sample, I think you should take a step back and ask yourself what the hell went wrong.
 
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