The REAL New York City Compression Trick

Many of you already use the New York City Compression Trick on your drum tracks, but it's possible that you're using just simple parallel compression. There's a lot more to the trick than that though if you want to do it right, and this video from my 101 Mixing Tricks program will show you the trick in all its glory.

Believe me, use this trick and your rhythm section will rock harder than ever before.

There's a lot more killer tricks where this came from covering punchy drums and percussion sounds, great lead and background vocals, killer instruments, and cool balance, panning, EQ, compression and automation tricks. Check it out at 101MixTricks.com.

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The New York Compression Trick

I often asked about the New York Compression Trick, which is just my name for parallel compression. Here's where the term came from, a section out of the first edition of the first book I wrote, The Mixing Engineer's Handbook.
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One of the little tricks that seem to set New York mixers apart from everyone else is something I call the “New York Compression Trick”. It seems like every mixer who’s ever mixed in New York City comes away with this maneuver. Even if you don’t mix in NYC, once you try it you just might find yourself using this trick all the time since it is indeed a useful method to make a rhythm section rock.

Here’s the trick:
1) Buss the drums, and maybe even the bass, to a stereo compressor.

2) Hit the compressor fairly hard, at least 10dB or more if it sounds good.

3) Return the output of the compressor to a pair of fader inputs on the console or two additional channels in you DAW.

4) Add a pretty good amount of high end (6 to 10dB at 10kHz or so) and low end (6 to 10dB at 100Hz or so) to the compressed signal.

5) Now bring the fader levels of the compressor up until it’s tucked just under the present rhythm section mix to where you can just hear it.

The rhythm section will now sound bigger and more controlled without sounding overly compressed.

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