Mixing Toms and Overheads with Dead Soul Revival
If you’ve been following my “first single release” journey for my new band deadsoulrevival.com you know I’ve been examining how we recorded, mixed, and promoted our upcoming release. Today let’s talk some more about mixing toms and overheads with tone and impact.
For an even more depth look into crafting drum sounds pick up a copy of my course “The Sound Visualization Method.”
Toms are the first thing I’d like to talk about in this post. With toms the first thing I’m going to be doing is high passing, i.e. rolling off the really low frequencies. This is where I really like an eq with a spectrum analyzer built it in.
I can see at a glance where most of the energy is coming from on each drum. This helps out in sculpting the low end of the drum. So usually I’m rolling off to just below where the main low end is happening for that particular drum. This requires careful listening because you don’t want to inadvertently take away power.
The next thing I’ll be doing is cutting out some masking frequencies to see if I can make the drum sound open up. By this I mean I’m looking for muddy sound that is masking the pure tone of the drum. Hunt around in the 300-600 hz range for this mud.
Then I’m going to boost on the top generally at 5k and 7k. Those can help make the toms cut through. Don’t go overboard though. You still want the lows and highs to be balanced.
I compress toms in a very similar way to snare. Check out my last post for details on compression.
Next up is overheads. Depending on the song I may be focusing on the kit as a whole or just the cymbals. So far on this record I’ve been using the overheads as primarily cymbal mics. Because of this choice, I’m carving away a lot of the low end and a little of the mids.
I’m not boosting any high end. I’m primarily finding frequencies that are popping out and slightly dipping them with narrow bandwidth curves. This is giving me a more even response.
Generally speaking I’m not looking for more highs from the cymbals, there is plenty of that! If anything I may insert a de-esser to soften the very top end of the cymbals. Mostly what is up in that tip top range of frequencies is going to be cymbals so it’s not like it’s competing for sonic space up there. Again tread lightly.
People traditionally talk about the overheads gluing the kit together a bit. This is definitely the case. If you mute them and just listen to the direct mics it does not sound natural. This is why I would suggest bringing up your overheads so the cymbals seem balanced and then further refine your eq if you feel like your drum tones are getting effected in a negative way.
It’s easy to make your cymbals too loud, if anything I’d suggest having them a little lower than you might initially choose. Once a track is compressed and limited those highs can start jumping out.
Speaking of which, I like to use light parallel compression on my overheads. This is when you have a compressor with a mix knob or duplicate your track and put a compressor on the second track. This can help tighten up the dynamics in a more natural way. Feather in the compressed signal until you just start to hear it.
Next time I’ll be talking about room mics and putting the finishing touches on your drum bus.
Until then…
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