Maria Elisa Ayerbe, three-time Latin Grammy nominee, walks through her serial compression approach on vocals, explaining why she feeds multiple compressors one into the next rather than letting a single plugin carry the full load.
Her principle is to apply very small amounts of gain reduction at each stage, spreading the work across the chain so no single compressor is pushed into artifact territory. She combines full-band, multi-band and parallel stages, using the Waves C4 and iZotope Neutron's multiband compressor to target specific frequency ranges with precision, then finishes with Waves CLA Vocals adding a parallel "spank" on top.
The result is a vocal that sits upfront and controlled without sounding squeezed. When one compressor takes everything, you end up chasing the damage it creates. Distributing the gain reduction keeps the performance feeling open and organic, which matters especially on expressive voices where over-compression kills what made the take worth keeping.