2. Upward compression alternatives

1 Now it’s time to take off the kid gloves and explore a couple of similar approaches that can be achieved with commercial plugins. Technically, we won’t be using real upward compression, but we’ll take what we’ve learned from the principles of upward compression to achieve a similar end result.

2 Let’s process more drums. The first guest to our plugin party is Cytomic’s magnificent compressor The Glue, with its Dry/Wet Mix knob that allows us to do parallel compression without configuring additional channels. It also has a built-in Peak Clipper – let’s start by activating that to prevent our signal from causing digital overshoots.

3 Turn the Mix knob all the way to the Dry side so that all you can hear is the unadulterated drum loop. Now we’ll dial in some ridiculously strong settings. Set the Attack to .01, the Release to 0.1, the Ratio to 10:1, and the Threshold as low as it’ll go (- 40). Let’s even whack the Makeup gain right up to 40dB. Obviously we can’t hear the effect of these settings yet...

4 Now it’s time to gently mix in some of the heavily compressed signal. Start with 1%. It may seem insignificant, but it definitely adds a slight energy and excitement that disappears when you hit bypass. By the time we reach 5% it’s starting to sound like it could be too much, to me – but it’s interesting how dull the loop sounds with compression bypassed.

5 Instead of parallel compression, we could use an envelope shaper. Transient Shaper 2 by Schaack Audio Technologies is one of my favourites. You can literally just push up the Release dial then pick from one of the three release shapes. The process is level-independent, so each single hit is treated separately – there’s no fixed-level dynamic threshold.

6 Both techniques increase the presence of low-level passages, without technically using any upward compression and without harming the peak transients. With each, we get that pressurised – almost agitated – dynamic movement. Check out my Pro Tips above for more ideas on this approach to dynamics.