Often the foundations and drive of a track, ensuring that the drums sit nicely in a mix is a skill made easier if you know your FX. Mike Hillier gets treatment in this Pro Tools Tutorial
Mixing drums is one of the most rewarding tasks in music production. A well-recorded drum track can be approached in a number of ways, giving the mix engineer considerable creative freedom and an opportunity to put many different techniques to use.
If you are lucky enough to have a variety of high-quality processors at your disposal, drum mixing is an ideal opportunity to put them all to use, with different EQs and compressors responding very differently to each of the different kit pieces. Even special effects processors can be incredibly handy when it comes to imbibing your drum mixes with a unique sonic quality to help them stand out from the crowd.
Cunning Plans
With so many options available to you it is important to have a good idea of how you want the end result to sound, whether it’s the high clicky kick and low thudding snare of a metal track, the natural jazz kit, a big room rock sound or highly processed sounds to mix with more electronic treatments. With that in mind we usually start by putting an EQ plug-in across each channel, at the very least using it simply to filter out low-frequency rumble from each track. Even the kick drum channel usually doesn’t escape the high-pass filter treatment, although our cut-off point is likely to be much lower, around 30–60Hz depending on the kick to leave the sub-frequencies of the kick itself in the mix.
It can be very tempting to EQ each instrument in isolation. This makes it much easier to hear what differences small changes in EQ are making to each channel as you apply the processing, but it is equally important to understand what is required in terms of the whole mix, so you have to ensure that any tweaks to individual elements aren’t adversely affecting the overall mix. We find that flicking between a number of different solo states is the best way of getting a well-balanced mix. For example, when processing the Kick In channel, listen to the Kick In mic solo’ed, then both the Kick In and Out to see how the Kick In mic is affecting the whole sound of the kick. Then listen to the whole kick with the snare and hat to get an idea of how it balances with these kit pieces, then the whole kit, including room and overhead mics, since these will also have an important part to play in the sound of the kick. Finally, listen to the whole song mix to ensure that changes to the kick aren’t masking other instruments in the mix, such as the bass.
Getting a good drum sound with EQ can sometimes seem to be a counterintuitive process: if a kick drum lacks weight in the low end, rather than dial some in with the EQ, try filtering the sub frequencies a little higher and dial a little more out around 300–500Hz. Despite being fundamentally a low-frequency instrument, the kick drum still has a lot of energy in the high frequencies and it’s important to be sure that the snap of the attack comes through at around 3–5kHz, but you might find it as high as 8kHz on some drums.
On The Squash
Dynamics processing is a key element in drum mixing, with both compression/limiting and expansion/gating forming key elements in a good drum sound. Placing an expander/gate after the EQ on any spot mics will let you shape the envelope of the drum hits, and since the EQ should be filtering out any low-frequency noise you needn’t worry about this energy accidentally triggering the gate. When gating using the DigiRack Expander/Gate Dynamics III plug-in, set the Threshold just below the point at which it triggers with every hit and pay very close attention to the attack, hold and release settings. These three settings can have a massive impact on the sound. Too slow an attack and the gate won’t have fully opened in time to let the attack transient of the hit through – a useful way of deadening a drum sound. Set fast it can add additional click to the sound. Set the hold and release too short and the body and reverb tail will be cut off too soon, creating a dry, up-front drum sound. But set too long and the gate won’t close in time for the next hit or simply let too much bleed through. A low ratio will give a more natural sound, with the gain reduction not taking quite as much out of the signal; higher ratios will act more like a gate, opening and closing the sound.
Compressors impact the envelope of the drum hit, and finding the right compressor for each job is a rewarding task. This time the attack sets the speed at which the compressor begins reducing the gain, so a fast attack and release will squash just the attack transient of a hit, while a slower attack and release will compress the body of the drum hit. If your kit piece needs more body, compress the transient, if it needs more attack, compress the body.
A common trick for getting a ‘big’ drum sound is to compress the room mics. Use the Bomb Factory BF-76 on the room mics. Set the ratio to ‘all buttons in’ by [Shift]-clicking on any of the ratio buttons to really squash the incoming signal, then set a fairly fast attack to catch the front of the hits and a slow release to give a big pumping sound. If you’ve recorded the drums in a small room, try using a large room reverb and compressing this rather than the drum room to get a big, heavy drum sound.
Master Plan
Compression can be applied at various stages through the drum mix, so rather than compress the Kick In and Kick Out separately, you might choose to compress them together on a group buss channel. Conversely, you might choose to compress the Snare Top separately from the Snare Bottom.
Furthermore, you can also apply compression to the overall drum buss. We don’t often recommend compressing heavily at multiple stages like this, especially since the master two-buss mix is likely to get further compressed during mastering, but used subtly it
can be a great way of tying the drum mix together. Try experimenting with a very low ratio – less than 2:1, but with a low threshold, so that the whole mix is compressed a very small amount, tying it together.
Parallel Paths
Another common trick is to apply compression to a parallel send of the channel being compressed. This technique maintains the dynamic of the original channel, enabling you to blend in as much of the parallel compressed sound as you want. Experiment to hear the results.
If you’ve got a well-recorded kit, EQ and dynamics processing might be all you need to get a natural-sounding drum mix, but often, natural-sounding drums aren’t going to push the overall mix forward as required, especially if the rest of the mix is filled with heavily processed guitars, synths, delays and other unnatural sounds. This can vary from using plate reverbs on spot mics to give them a sense of depth to the classic 80s gated reverb sound. A little reverb on the snare channel often helps to bring life to the kit piece, but processing needn’t end with reverb. Distortion-type effects can be used to great effect on drum kits; one of our favourite tricks is bit-reduction-type distortion, which can give drums a grainy digital texture, as if they’d been sampled into an early sampler. Try using some of the AIR effects, such as the AIR Lo Fi effect with the Sample-Rate and Bit-Depth set to emulate 8- or 12-bit samplers.
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