Three Compressors at 40 Percent: The Vocal Chain That Sounds Slammed But Is Not

The short answer

Instead of one compressor doing all the work, use three compressors in series with each one blended at around 40 percent wet using its mix knob. The gain reduction meters look violent, but because every stage is only partially blended, you keep transients, control the dynamics, and push the vocal forward without the pumping, sibilance and lifelessness that comes from slamming a single unit. Chris Shaw built this chain on a badly recorded vocal that needed rescuing, and it stayed in his template.

The compressor problem

Everyone hits this wall eventually.

The vocal needs to sit forward and stay put. So you compress it. It sits better. You need more, so you compress harder. Now it is louder and more consistent and also, somehow, worse. The breaths are enormous. The sibilance is trying to remove your eyebrows. The performance has flattened into a wall, and every time the singer leans in, the whole track ducks and swells behind them like the mix is breathing through a straw.

The instinct at this point is to find a better compressor. That is almost never the answer.

The answer is that you asked one device to do four different jobs, and it did all four badly at the same time.

The move: serial, but blended

Chris's lead vocal chain is a Slate channel strip built out of several processors in series. What makes it work is not the plugins. It is the mix knobs at the bottom of every one of them.

Watch the gain reduction meters and it looks like 20dB of compression. It is not. It is three compressors each doing a moderate amount of work, and each one blended at roughly 40 percent wet.

The chain, roughly:

• A Slate Air module, adding top end presence.
• An Audified style compressor, adding a little flavour and grip.
• "The Monster." A 1176 emulation with every ratio button pushed in.

That last one is the star, and also the one that would ruin the vocal instantly if used conventionally. All buttons in on an 1176 is a legendary sound precisely because it is unhinged. At 100 percent wet on a lead vocal you get pumping, exaggerated sibilance, breaths coming up like someone opened a window, and no dynamics left.

At 30 or 40 percent wet, the same processor does something entirely different. It pushes the vocal forward. It adds midrange, presence and focus. It brings up the low level detail, the consonant tails, the ends of phrases, all the information that makes a vocal feel intimate and present. And because the dry signal is still there underneath doing 60 percent of the work, the transients and the natural dynamics survive.

You get the aggression without the carnage. Grit and smack in your face, but nothing sounds blown out.

There is a fourth processor in the strip, an LA-2A emulation, and Chris mostly leaves it off. If more levelling is needed he would rather follow the chain with a Distressor afterwards. Restraint counts as technique.

Why this works better than one compressor

Three reasons, and they are worth understanding rather than just copying.

1. Each stage does less, so each stage sounds better. A compressor working at 3dB of gain reduction is a much better sounding device than the same compressor at 12dB. Three stages of 3dB gets you the same control with a fraction of the artefacts.

2. Blending preserves transients. Every compressor flattens attacks. Blend it back with dry signal and the original attack is still there, unharmed, underneath. This is parallel compression, just applied per stage instead of on a separate bus.

3. You get different characters stacked, not averaged. One unit is adding air. One is adding grip. One is adding midrange density and forward presence. Because none of them is at 100 percent, none dominates. You are layering colours rather than choosing one.

If you want the same principle applied to a drum kit rather than a voice, we covered that in Why Your Kick and Snare Deserve Their Own Parallel Bus. It is the same idea living at a different address.

How to build it in whatever you own

You do not need Slate. Anything with a mix or wet/dry knob works, and most modern compressors have one. If yours does not, use a wrapper plugin with a mix control, or build it on a parallel aux.

1. Start clean. Chris deliberately does not put tape emulation on lead vocals, even though he uses a Studer A800 on nearly everything else. Vocals get clarity. Everything else gets glue.
2. EQ first. A FabFilter Pro-Q instance ahead of the compression, roughing in the tone. Fix the obvious problems before anything reacts to them.
3. Stage one: control. A clean compressor doing gentle levelling. Blend around 40 to 50 percent.
4. Stage two: character. Something with a personality. Blend around 40 percent.
5. Stage three: forward. Your most aggressive option, an 1176 all buttons in style if you have it. Blend around 30 to 40 percent. Solo it at 100 percent once, just so you know what you are blending in. Then turn it back down and never speak of it again.
6. Watch your input gain. Chris notes he tends to hit the input too hard and backs it off. Easy to overdrive the first stage and then spend the rest of the chain trying to fix it.
7. Add air last, with a ceiling. The Air module goes on, and a high cut goes in behind it in case the source has ultrasonic content that gets excited into existence.

Where it came from

This is the part worth holding onto.

Chris did not design this chain from theory. He built it under pressure on a badly recorded vocal from a client, trying to get aggression and control out of something that had neither, dynamics all over the place, and no time.

It is a variation on the Michael Brauer approach of running a voice through multiple parallel compressors with different characters. Chris stumbled into his own version, it worked, it went in the template, and it has been on records ever since.

Almost every technique you admire started as somebody solving an emergency badly and then noticing it sounded good.

The one rule

Judge the blend, never the solo.

Every stage of this chain sounds wrong on its own. The all buttons in 1176 sounds like a mistake. That is not a warning, that is the mechanism. If each processor sounded polite and correct in isolation, blending it would achieve nothing.

Set the mix knobs by listening to the vocal against the track. Not soloed. Never soloed.

FAQ

Is stacking compressors on vocals bad practice? No, as long as each one is doing a small amount of work. Serial compression with several gentle stages is generally cleaner than one compressor doing heavy gain reduction.

What mix percentage should I use on a vocal compressor? Around 30 to 50 percent is a useful starting range. The more aggressive the processor, the lower the blend. An all buttons in 1176 emulation might sit at 30 percent.

How much total gain reduction is too much on a vocal? There is no fixed number, and meters lie once you are blending. Judge by whether the performance still has dynamics and whether breaths and sibilance have become distracting.

Should I use tape emulation on lead vocals? Chris does not, preferring maximum clarity on the voice while using tape across the rest of the session. It is a taste call, not a rule.

Do I need a channel strip plugin to do this? No. Any compressors with mix knobs will work, in any DAW. If a plugin lacks a mix control, run it on a parallel aux instead.

Keep going

• Watch the full series: Chris Shaw: The Mix Template on Puremix.
• Related: Why Your Kick and Snare Deserve Their Own Parallel Bus
• Related: How to EQ Vocals
• Get the full library: Puremix Pro