A production tip that i think must be shared...

[The_Laughing_Man]

Haha, Loopy, well, we all change our minds, less we remain rigid and stagnate.
I think my comments about parallell compression were more to do with the context of original discussion.

I have used it myself and do for some types of muysic, and I think it is an appropriate technique for specific uses, I`m just not so sure it`s something that works well with techno. It seems to work better on slower material for some reason. Hip Hop, minimal, Dubstep. Seems better with more spacious material as well.

There are ways around not having a mix control on your plugins.
Running 2 channels of your final tune and only compressing one for example.

It`s definitely worth playing with anyhow.

I`m not saying never use visual reference, it`s just that this article, which seems to be about heavy dance music mix compression, if you read it carefully, doesn`t actually tell you anything.
It assumes you know all about compression, atack, release etc, and just says "use visual plugs to mimic", but if you already know what it assumes you do, then you shouldn`t actually need to reference visually anyway.

As a rule, a good way for setting your compression is to mute everything but the kick.
Watch the gain reduction and tune the release until the meter is hitting back to zero just before the next kick.
Then tune your attack appropriately for whatever effect you are looking for, I prefer a little delay on the attack to allow the nose of the sounds to pass through uncrushed.
Put everything back in the mix and adjust threshold and ratio.
You`ll generally get a nice sucky pump this way, just don`t overdo it.

[loopdon]

Now that's more like it :lol:

Thanks or all the advice given. I just think this place needs some input from time to time.
The tips you give on compression are sound i think. And of course that's something that should be done by ear most
of all. I actually didn't really find the compression aspect of the mentioned article worth a lot. I just found it helpful
whilst balancing the volume of my bassline to the kick. Of course you can do that by ear. But as we all know ears tend to get used to stuff
very quickly. So by constantly (more or less) A/Bing with a well-mixed tune of a similar style first of all by ear
(and in my case with an aditional visual supplementation) i think i can get some nice sounding stuff.