Processing Drums

[Toby Gray]

What are some different approaches to mixing down and processing the drum kit for pop to rock material?
I'm curious how folks sub mix and use compression on individual drums and the overall kit.

TIA,
Toby

[dodo]

Wow what a question. I start with the kick,snare hat, toms, then overheads. Some start with overheads. Get all the drums working together. Listen at high and low volume. Add the bass in so it works with the kick. Mute the bass and do a sub mix of the whole kit to a stereo track. Compress the stereo mix 10:1. Now mute the submix and bring up your kit again. Bring up the sub mix from nothing until it adds a nice punch. You shouldn't have to bring it up too much.

Sometimes I'll wait to add the submix until I finish the rythym instruments and lead vocals.

I use compression and EQ on every part of the kit.

[mjames08]

I compress and EQ each peice seperately.. It's very easy to overcompress them..

[Muffler]

I do mainly rock stuff so the approach that has worked for me is starting from the bottom and working my way up.

I start with the the kick. I first gate it pretty hard the I EQ it to pull out that twack sound from the beater hitting the drum head and also roll off excess rumble at the very bottom end. At the end of the chain I then compress it pretty hard. What I am looking for is one word, punch.

I then work on the snare (I have both a top and bottom snare track) and I pretty much repeat what I do for the kick, but looking for 'snap'.

For the toms and I will put a some light compression and the overheads I leave alone.

I will then mix and pan these elements until I have it sounding like I want it.

For panning I will run the kick right up the middle, Overheads are hard left and right. The hat is about 45 to the right, the snare I will put the top about 15 left and the bottom about 15 right. Tom I will pan across left to right making sure I don't step on anything else.

I then create a submix and send it all there and put compression here (most time Wave RCOMP, and sometimes Wave Trueverb depending on how dry things need to be).

[j20056]

btw,
isn't it "bad" to gate kick/snare and toms? I guess my theory is that, despite low pass filters, there's still some element of high frequencies on these tracks, say between 1Khz and 3-5KHz (usually where I set my low pass cutoff frequency). Now, if you gate them, then you will get a boost of these frequencies when the gate opens, and drop again when it closes. So I wonder if the gates all over the place won't perturb how natural the mix sounds? What is the rationale for gating them, precisely to remove all the high-frequency bleed?

[marcusb]

i'm really scared to hear either of your drum sounds ... eeeep!

marcus

[Chris Cavell]

Don't speculate,

In recording, all you can do is try it and see. Even if it doesn't work the way you want for this project, you might come up with some great methods for future jobs. There are all sorts of settings on each gate that you can adjust to make the individual drum mix more naturally with the kit.

I can get it to work, I'm sure everyone who has mentioned gates has tried it and gotten it to work, I'm sure you can too. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

For rock, I use similar methods, although not identical, every engineer is different, to those mentioned earlier. However, I don't go near a gate when tracking drums for jazz, or more acoustic styles. Every rock band strives for a different sound. I've had clients beg me to get a huge roomy sound on the drums, and others who want the "cookie cutter" super punchy sound. Be able to do both.

By the way, gates, in subtle ways, can do a lot more than just auto-muting a track. I'll use them to adjust the natural attack, or even create a false fast attack. I sometimes find the release control more effective at attenuating a ringy drums' problem pitch (as it often occurs most noticeably in the decay of the hit) than an eq. (But I usually use the eq or switch out my mic/preamp combination/position until I get the sound I like best in addition to the gate, or switch out the drum/drummer/"drum tuner guy")

A big problem for most people at first is a mushy low end once you bring in the bass guitar (masking the kick). Hear are my tips for that:

Set up an aux send from the kick to the key input of a compressor on the bass guitar. I set the compressor to react fairly quickly, and everytime the kick hits, it ducks the bass guitar so it can cut through. If you get the settings right, you'll never notice the bass changing volume because of how fast it happens and the distraction of the kick. I also tend to pan the kick stright up and down, and the bass about ten degrees to the right, this way the bass feels dead center to the driver in most cars, and the kick is just imperceptibly off center. This tiny amount of seperation can really help define the two.

Hope this helps a little.

[REtroJECT]

Since gating has come up a number of times, I thought I'd pass on a tip from Jules on the TDM tips board (which he got from someone else...don't remember who).

To ensure that the gate doesn't soften the attack of the snare, make a duplicate copy of the snare track. Nudge the snare copy forward a little bit (meaning slide the track back). Assign the output of the snare copy to an unused bus. On the original snare track, set the gate's key input to be the bus of the snare copy.

This causes the gate to open a little early, allowing the full attack of the snare. You can then gate the crap out of the backend (if you need to) to remove hi-hat bleed or for whatever reason.

I've used this a number of times and been quite pleased with the results, so I thought I'd pass it on.

[Calvin]

Hey man, thanks for the tip, I haven't thought about using that before.