Setting up a Drum Bus

[adam79]

I've been messing around with tracking/mixing the drums. I'm curious how you guys setup your Drum Bus when mixing. At first I was sending the Main Outputs of all the drum tracks to a Stereo Aux. However, I've recently been sending all the drum tracks to the Stereo Aux track via the Sends...leaving each drum track's output to "MON L/R." I activate the FMP feature on each track's send to keep the pan settings on the bus (I hard pan my two overheads left and right 100% and usually leave the close mic'd snare and kick in the center). So instead of just having the drums playing thru the bus the original tracks are also being heard. Is this how a drum buss is usually done? Thanks.

[VRW]

Originally Posted by adam79

So instead of just having the drums playing thru the bus the original tracks are also being heard. Is this how a drum buss is usually done? Thanks.

You can do that of course. I might fatten up the whole drum sound in a way however this is not how a drum bus usually is done. This is more kinda "parallel processing".
Usually you create an AUX stereo track and send all the outputs of all drum tracks, each single track, to this one AUX stereo track (like you had done it before).
You further may create sub Aux tracks (sub busses) where you may sum up multiple channels of certain instruments like Kick, Snare and Toms.
Means, for example, you send Kick In+Kick Out to an Aux track (depending on your original Kick tracks it might be a Mono or a Stereo Aux...live drums mostly come with
Mono Kick tracks whereas some VIs send out there Kick channels in stereo), the output of this -Kick- (Bus) Aux track you then send to another Aux stereo track which will
be the over all Drum Bus. Same with Snare Top+Snare Bottom, Tom 1-? etc.
The output of this final stereo Aux track (Drum Bus) you send to the Master and from this stereo Aux track you usually create a -copy- via Sends (or other routings) to
another stereo Aux track for parallel compression or whatever.
The outputs of these 2 stereo Aux tracks (Drum Bus, Drum Parallel Compression) you then hear at the same time and you may mix it to your liking.
That´s the basic way to mix/route drums. However it´s up to everyone himself to create his own way how to do it finally. If it sounds good it is good.
You should not forget to create groups and VCAs for all your stuff to have more control over and easier access to the whole drum sound while mixing.

Cheers.

[simon.a.billington]

I agree with VRW.

In fact, you don't need to limit to yourself to just Drum Busses, you can group all sorts of instruments together via sanding their outputs through an six, creating other types of submixes.

You could submix all your vocals, for example, all your guitars, or maybe guitars and electric piano, whatever.

Anything you process together, or use the same style of processing on will, therefore, share common characteristics. It's these characteristics that will help create a more cohesive mix.

The main thing to be aware of is if you go all out with eq and compression on your individual tracks, there's a good chance that whatever else you do to them on a submix will over cook it. The same is true for the drum buds and the master buss.

If you are more light-handed with the processing, however, it leaves you some room to do a bit more on the submix. Perhaps add a little of highs, lows and some punch, increase the overall energy and tailor the transients a little more for a more consistent sound.

There's all sorts of things you can do here, as long as you're not too brutal.

NLS is one of my favourite track enhancing plugins. It also comes with a buss version. So you can put it on your tracks and have then feed a buss where you would use the other plugin and they interact in a pretty cool way.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by adam79

I've been messing around with tracking/mixing the drums. I'm curious how you guys setup your Drum Bus when mixing.

I send the tracks to main mix 2-track, group them together and add a VCA master to the kit group