Back with yet ANOTHER tutorial on compression! You may wonder why I’ve done so many of these. Well, its because its important and because people like compression. In this case, I’ll be showing you how to set up a parallel compression scenarion inside Live 7. Its very basic, so lets get going.

1. First, you’ll want to drop/draw some kind of loop. I just made a very basic 4/4 kick/snare pattern with Impulse.

2. Next drag an Audio Effect Rack onto your track. Make sure you can see the chain by clicking the Show/Hide button.

3. Now, drop a Compressor in the area where you see “Drop Audio Effects Here” (underneath the Chain and Hide buttons). Now we have our first Chain which will be our compressed drum signal. Turn the Ratio up and the Threshold down to really slam the drums. I set mine at 8.00 ratio and turned the Threshold down to -28dB. Your drums should be pumping.

4. Now right click in the Audio Effect Rack below the first Compressor and hit “Create Chain.” What you’ve done there is create a seperate chain for your unprocessed drums.

5. All that’s left to do is mix the levels between your compressed and uncompressed drums. You can always try throwing on various FX on the first chain to bring out your drums. Try a Saturator or even the Vinyl Distortion. That way it will be painfully obvious which one is processed and which one isn’t.

This is how my Audio Effect Rack looked by the time I was done. Adjust the levels and try soloing each chain so you can really hear the difference.

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