I am surprised you said things and not even mention drums.
I only use parallel compression on my kick and snare.
there's other ways to making your sound pop with use of buss effects and layering, and then group compression, to make your musical instrumentation pop.
But i just tend to stick with parallel on the drums, for me that's where i feel the best results are located for that particular technique.
I left out the things I thought were obvious to use them on, I'm currently using it on my Kick, Percussion, Plucks/Piano and Leads I wrote the ones I was unsure of
Another question, am I routing it correctly? EG: I have my percussion bus sending to the parallel compression bus and both of them routed out to stereo out. Should I be routing the parallel compression bus back into the percussion bus?
Edit: I use them on my synth leads for example because I asked Alex Klingle about what he though of one of my tracks and thats what he recommended. He said my leads needed to be more "glued together" and said he uses this on some of his. I immediately noticed that the sound was definitely more focussed and powerful once I did that, I usually have 3 synth layers working together for a strong lead
SOURCE SIGNAL>PARALLEL OUTPUT INTO COMPRESSOR>MASTER OR PRE MASTER
that's the signal path. and this is designed for channel busses, not aux/send returns/effect mixer buss. probably has the same effect, but i've never used them in that way before, and it's basically the same thing.
what you would of done would probably of caused feed back if you were using any other device..... make sure your shit is going out and away from the source signal, other wise rip your ears.
I mean, using parallel compression could glue sounds together, but i'd just use group compression.
With parallel you're adding a certain layer that's subtle and is typically supposed to give some weight or punch underneath the sound.
to me it's like additive EQ, use it on the things you want the most attention towards (i've chosen my drums, and they are special to me).
if you have every thing who has it, then you have nothing at all. it's the scarcity that makes the value and the impact.
