Parallel compression is a technique in which the clean (uncompressed) signal is mixed with the same duplicated and compressed signal. That is, we have the two signals and we can mix them according to the sound we want to achieve.
By mixing part of the clean signal, you can easily preserve the original dynamics of the sound, even if you are using extreme compression settings.
How to use parallel compression:
Once we have a track with the uncompressed sound, we create an AUX or aux track and send the signal from the clean track to the aux track. In this aux track we can add a compressor.
Once the compression has been applied to the second track, we can level the gain of each of them until we get the desired effect, mixing the two.
Become an expert in compression with the recommended book “ Compression in Music Production” (click on the image to go to the link):
Parallel compression can be useful on all kinds of sources. In addition to percussion, try parallel compression on vocals or any other source that benefits from heavy compression settings.