Denver Recording Studio

At Colorado Creative music recording studios we work daily with artist of all types and genres of music. In my opinion it is when the tracking or actual recording of audio has been completed that much of the really creative work starts. One of the most commonly used and misused effects in mixing and recording is compression. In many studios when all is said and done compression will have been applied to most if not all tracks recorded in some way or another. Today I would like to share a trick known as the New York compression. This is a little known compression trick used primarily with drum tracks that began gaining popularity amongst engineers in the New York studios. Recently at Colorado Creative Music we had a session that was a large band project involving a lot of time and energy to complete. Well if your a musician that does or has ever played in a group you know well that your only as strong as your weakest link. In this particular case the drummer was a little less than adequately rehearsed. This meant finding a way to tighten up the tracks after the fact and the New York compression works great in just such a scenario. So, heres how it works. You will want to start by taking your drum tracks you’ve just recorded and creating the best possible pre-mix of them. Do all of your preliminary EQ work for each track and well volume and panning adjustments for each track as well. Once you have accomplished this you will want to create a new stereo audio track in your DAW program ie…Protools, Logic, Cubase etc… Now, set the input for your new track to any available stereo bus in you system. Next you will set up an AUX send on each of your drum tracks routed to the input of your newly created audio track. When you are certain that you have achieved a drum mix that you are happy with you can go ahead and record the drum tracks into your new aux track, this will have to happen in real time just like you are recording any other track. At this point you should have your original trax as well as your newly created drum tracks. Your half way there! next week ill finish up by giving you the process for re-inserting your copied track in a manner that adds the thickness and power to your drum tracks.