#CLA 2A DUPLICATION SERIAL#
Serial compression is a really useful way to create natural-sounding compression when working with an audio source that has a lot of dynamic range, for example, a vocal or live piano.
But what if we run compressors in serial, that is, one after the other? Spoiler alert: it sounds good. We’re all familiar with parallel compression – running an unaffected signal alongside a compressed one gives us a parallel configuration.
Here’s the compressed audio with no internal compression: It’s got an internal sidechain control that will let us compress frequencies above 1kHz. We place a copy of CLA-2A on the loop’s audio channel. It’s got a bright top-end and could use some added character: Step 1 Let’s use the internal sidechain capabilities of Waves’ CLA-2A, a model of the Teletronix LA-2A Leveling Amplifier, to compress just the highs in a drum loop. Internal sidechaining is useful when you want to affect part of a signal but not the whole thing, such as on a drum bus. This is essentially what a de-esser is: a compressor with an internal sidechain that limits the action of the compressor to the band of frequencies responsible for sibilants in the human voice. This focuses where the compressor works onto a chosen range of frequencies. However, there’s another kind of sidechaining, one that uses an internal signal.Īn internal sidechain is essentially an equalizer circuit inside the compressor. When we talk about sidechain compression, what we really mean is external sidechain compression, or using a signal from outside the compressor to affect the way it works. Our first technique involves internal sidechaining.