Mixing drums

[harmonicmint]

Hi guys and gals,
Just wanted to throw a thread in here to start some discussion regarding mixing techniques. I'm always interested in hearing about other methods that were deamed successful. In this post I would like to invite others to share if you wish successful mixing of drums.

To start off... I will share my go to method. My primary instrument is drums so their sound in recordings has always been very important to me.

I play a Roland TD-9 kit as a midi triggering system to sample any given kit in my Steven Slate Platinum library. I lay the entire kit out onto a single stereo track with the Steven Slate software as an instrument insert. The software enables me to adjust parameters of each drum and cymbal.

I then setup an aux buss with a UAD 1176 limiter with fairly aggressive leveling and route about 30% of the signal to it and leave my output on the actual drum track set to main and the aux bus output set to main.

It gives me a good blend between the drum samples and the squashed send. Of course I can tweak on that all day to make the balance appropriate to the program material. Typically I am looking for a very slammin, lively drum sound as the vast majority of what I mix is rock.

How do you prefer to route your kit through Pro Tools?