This might be popular among the mixing engineers, I write about technique of making the sound of drums.
It’s called “New York Compression”.
Simply say, mix together original sound and compressed sound.
Also called as parallel compression.
When you want the drum more upfront.
Since the contour of the drums is unclear, you would compress and tightened it.
Although now it sounds good if it sounds only itself, but it locates too behind with other tracks and instruments.
If you bring the fader up until it finely reveal. It would too loud.
This technique is in that situation.
I write most usual and easy way.
1.Send the signal from a drum track or mostly a drum bus. You should send much amount boldly. And this signal will be compressed strongly.
2.On the sent bus track, move the ratio strong (like around 12:1) and set the attack time very fast.
3. Bring the sent track fader gradually and mix with original drum track.
4. Take a balance between these 2tracks.
There are 2 important things.
Firstly, you decide the volume with only by original track.
And during the process, you have to keep the loudness you decided.
The balance the sound comes most ahead in the same loudness.
And one more,
After you decided the amount of send, you don’t change that.
Because the plugin you use is compressor then the sounds would change if the input amount changes.
Use the attack of original signal
By doing this, you can add the compressed body of the sound to the original sound which have fine attack.
Also frequently using EQ here, and bring up high and low. Seems like wrapping the original.
This is like adding attack of middle of the original signal to the compressed sound.
It will fit with high probability when you need more punch in the drum.
This also might be because amount of information of sounds increase.
Recent creating sensation plug-in iZotope Neutron has the faders to make the rate of passing through original signal.
It shows that the existence of parallel compression as a matter of course.
Why is SEND better ?
Of course, you can copy the tracks and compress it, then mix them, but I don’t recommend.
Most of the cases DRUM is not a track, but a bus including many element, Bass Drum, Snare, Toms…
So if you copy all of them, it will be so complicated.