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I rarely add parallel effects like compression or distortion and I kind of think I'm missing out on some potential good tricks. One thing I've been thinking about is how to re-mix the wet set signal back in with the dry.

So for example if I have a piano on channel 1, I send that to channel 2 @ 50% - channel 2 is for example a heavy compression chain, now since I use busses before my master can I just send both channel 1 (original) and channel 2 (parallel comp) both to my "orchestra buss", or should I re-buss the channels before then?

I feel like I'm making this more complicated than neccessary but something that kinda worries me is the phase effects of recombining the signals, specifically if I start parallell processing basses.

So any advice from people that regularly do this would be appreciated - what sort of effects do you add in parallel, how do you mix the wet signals back into your mix, and how do you keep the sound clean etc...

Thanks!

Most DAWs should have automatic plugin delay compensation so phasing shouldn't be an issue.

In Reaper, there's a wet/dry knob for any plugin you add. So that's great if you just wanna inject a bit of dry signal back in. For parallel chains of effects I'll route to another track and then usually group them together for final compression and glue.

In Ableton you can just right click an effect and group to put it in an effect rack. Then right click and add another chain for the dry signal. Again, you can throw a compressor or whatever at the end, outside of the effects rack to squish everything back together.

Usual culprits for parallel processing are saturation, modulation effects, fully wet reverb or delay with additional processing before or after, dynamics processors, really anything depending on the circumstances. A lot of times I'll want to EQ an effect's wet signal differently than the dry signal.

With the exception of using sends to route many tracks to, I don't understand why people make a separate track for parallel processing. Isn't it just the same thing as fiddling with the dry/wet?

Not if you want to have 2 parallel chains.