- Hey, it's Will from EDM Tips.
Welcome back to the channel.
And today, I'm want to show you a more advanced
mixing technique called parallel processing.
It's one of those techniques that can make a real difference
to your music and get it sounding really big,
really fat, and professional.
And I'm gonna show you two examples
of parallel processing.
One on drums and two on vocals.
So this is what we're gonna start with
before the parallel processing.
(EDM music with female vocals)
And this is a result we have
after using the parallel processing techniques
I'm gonna share with you today.
(EDM music with female vocals)
Now, before we continue, if you are new to this channel,
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Okay.
Without further ado, let's hop into the door
and get this done.
Now I'm using Ableton Live 11 today,
but it really doesn't matter which door you are using.
You could be using FL Studio, Logic Pro,
you can do parallel processing in any door.
So first, I'm gonna explain what parallel processing is.
So if you've got a signal running through a channel,
as per usual, so in this instance, we've got the drums.
(upbeat electronic drums)
Parallel processing is where you take a duplicate
of that signal, and then process it separately
from that original signal.
And this allows you to do things like
maintain the transience of the original signal,
whilst crunching up or compressing that parallel signal,
allowing you to get the full fatness
of a compressed drum kit,
whilst maintaining the transience of the original drums.
Let me give you an example.
Now, there are two ways that you can create
a parallel channel for processing.
One is to create another audio bus,
and then to route the channel
you want to parallel compress into that.
The other, and my preferred technique, is to create
an auxiliary channel, which gives more flexibility,
which is why I prefer to do it that way.
So in this example, we have our drums.
(upbeat electronic drums)
They sound good. They sound nice and fat.
But what if we just want a little bit more of energy
out of them, make it sound a little bit more cohesive
and gelled together?
Well, if we open up our return channels here,
you can see I've created one and I've called it "para com"
for parallel compression.
And to create an auxiliary channel in Ableton,
you go up to create, insert return track,
which is another name for auxiliary channel,
and you can see here that this is auxiliary channel C.
So if you go back to our drums,
we could just feed some of that channel
in to the parallel channel.
So let's just have a look at what happens.
And this is just doubling up the sound.
(upbeat electronic drums)
So this is off. (upbeat electronic drums)
So now we have the exact same signal
that's been doubled up over here.
And all it's done is increased the volume,
which isn't much use.
So if we now put a compressor on this channel,
we can now compress it really heavily,
way too heavily that we would like to
on our normal drum channel.
And let's have a listen to that.
(upbeat electronic drums)
That's with no compression.
And this is was heavy compression.
(upbeat electronic drums)
You can see this ratio here on this threshold here.
See that's way too much for a normal drum loop.
But what you can do is now just feed in the certain degree
of the drums and the kick,
and let's feed some of those drums into that
parallel compression channel, and see what happens.
(upbeat electronic drums)
Kick as well. (upbeat electronic drums)
And it's very subtle effect,
but this can make such a difference to the overall energy
of your track, as we'll see at the end of this tutorial.
So this is with the parallel channel off.
(upbeat electronic drums)
And this is with it on. (upbeat electronic drums)
And you'll hear it's brought up the details in the drums
without crushing the life out of the original drums.
And you see here, you could even put an EQ on
after the compressor, if you wanted to take out the low end.
(upbeat electronic drums)
And you could even add some other coloration to these drums
as well, like a bit of saturation as well.
The options are pretty much limitless at this point.
Now I want to show you the second example,
which is parallel processing for vocals.
So again, in this example with the vocals,
I'm going to use a return channel, or an auxiliary channel,
as my parallel processing channel, rather than an audio bus.
And there are a few other reasons
why I'm doing this for the vocals,
which just gives it so much more flexibility,
and I'm gonna show you that as well.
So here we've got our vocals.
(powerful female vocals)
You can see here, I've actually got this being sent
to four different send channels.
So let's turn these ones on,
and then let's listen to the difference it makes.
(powerful female vocals)
And what we're doing is doubling up this channel
and applying different processing on each
of these different parallel channels, or auxiliary channels.
The first of which is compression.
So this, much like the drum example, means that I can just
compress the vocals a bit more.
(powerful female vocals)
Just to bring them out in the mix
without completely killing the transience
on the original vocals.
So we already understand that
'cause we looked at it in the drums example.
Second thing I'm doing is a very popular way to use
parallel processing for vocals, which is to have reverb.
So we've got reverb on an auxiliary channel,
but because it's sent to an auxiliary channel,
we've got it 100% wet.
And then we can feed as much of the dry signal
into this to create the vocal reverb.
(powerful female vocals)
The other beauty of parallel processing with vocals
is that you can add things like sidechain compression
from the dry vocals, which just docks them
and makes the lead vocals pop through the mix a bit more.
So this is what that sidechain compressor off.
(powerful female vocals)
The vocals get a bit washed out in all that reverb,
so we can just choose the sidechain mode
to take audio from the dry vocals
and then add a little bit of compression.
(powerful female vocals)
Now this is what's happening. (powerful female vocals)
When she's singing, the dry vocals are just
docking the volume of that reverb a little bit
so that the dry vocals pop through a bit more.
And the last channel I've got is a delay for the vocals.
And again, I'm doing exactly the same technique.
We've got a delay unit set to 100% wet,
and then a little bit of sidechain compression
from those dry vocals. (powerful female vocals)
But this last channel,
I've got something a bit more creative going on.
I've loaded up Soundtoys Little AlterBoy,
which is a format shifter and pitch shifter.
And I've added this free Ozone Imager plugin
just to spread it out and create some more stereo width.
And then a little bit of EQ.
And this just adds so much more body and weight
to these vocals. (powerful female vocals)
So this is off. (powerful female vocals)
So all of the parallel press processing on for the vocals,
it sounds like this. (powerful female vocals)
Super full, super policy per professional sounding,
and with everything on, in the whole mix,
we will give you an example of the difference
that the parallel processing makes.
Now, I haven't actually just done this mix.
I may have messed it up a bit,
but let's have a little bit of a listen
to see what the difference is.
So this is without the parallel processing.
(EDM music with female vocals)
And this is with it. Ready? (EDM music with female vocals)
It's bigger. It's punchier. It's more polished.
It's more professional sounding.
And that is the power of parallel processing.
If you want to seriously improve your mixing techniques,
you can download my free mixing guide
below this video as well.
And if you're new to this channel,
please consider subscribing.
It really, really helps me out.
(EDM music with female vocals)