Mixing Drums 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 about mixing drums with tone and impact.
I love big drum sounds. I want drums that are punchy and cut through a wall of guitars and bass. And most importantly don’t get their tone lost or totally masked when they are competing with the rest of the band.
For an even more depth look into crafting drum sounds pick up a copy of my course the Sound Visualization Method.
Track by track I will take a quick listen to what I’m dealing with for each drum, overhead mic, etc. and make some mental notes on what may be an issue to be dealt with. I’m a big believer in recordings being like a block of stone. Chip away what doesn’t belong and you’ll have a beautiful statue hidden inside.
For every mix I do I place the drum tracks into my mixing template. This has all my favorite plugins and routings for mixing drums. It saves a lot of time. At minimum each drum track will have an eq and compressor.
I like to use as few tracks to get to the end goal as possible, so for tom tracks for example, I cut away everything that isn’t actual tom audio. So let’s say the drummer only plays the toms for a few fills in the song. The rest of the time I cut away the bleed. This is a personal preference.
So right from the start my drum sound is better just because of what I leave out. This is key. You don’t need tons of tracks to get big sounds. In fact lots of tracks can start to make things feel smaller. This is totally opposite of most people’s intuition.
Once I’ve done that cleaning up chore I turn my attention to the kick. This is often where sculpting with eq is necessary to pull a usable tone. Try cutting frequencies in the 300-600 hz range. If you want a metal type kick cut aggressively. Then give a boost in the 1-8 K area. You’ll need to hunt around for just the right spot to find the top end of the kick that gives you that click.
If you’re going for more of a rock kick I suggest trying the top end boost a little lower in the 1K region. Sculpt that 300-600 hz mid range cut to taste. If you have tried for a while and still can’t make the raw kick sound decent you may want to blend in a kick sample or just use the kick sample entirely.
Be careful not to cut away too much of the mids. You still want some energy happening around 200 hz or so. This will help your kick still cut through on little speakers that can’t handle the deep low end of a kick drum. You will still give those listeners the illusion of that low end though.
I have found using a sample on your kick is much less noticeable than on other drums. Play with the blend of the two and you can find some magic. Trigger is my plugin of choice for drum replacement or reinforcement.
This initial round of eq’ing is mostly surgical. Again, chipping away at the stone. Clearing out the bad/undesirable parts of the drum sound that are masking/covering up the good parts. I go into much more detail on this in my course by the way.
Next I’ll be compressing the drum. I have two goals here. First I want to help any inconsistencies in the performance dynamics wise. Under the studio microscope, most performances will need this kind of help to a greater or lesser degree. A big part of this is that when the performance is really consistent it will be easier to make it not get lost in the mix.
The second goal is to compress for tone. This could mean making the drums more punchy. Or perhaps you want the drums to have more sustain. These will require different types of treatments. These are artistic choices.
To even out dynamics I’ll use a fairly quick attack and a fast release. This is going to compress just the initial transient part of the drum hit. For more punchiness, I’d be using a slower attack to let the transient through and just compress the tail or body of the drum sound. I would adjust my release to be returning the compression to zero db by the next hit.
I start with about 3-5 db of compression happening on the louder hits. Experiment here and listen to to what the compression is doing to your track. If it’s too much back it off. For most songs it’s when things start to sound unnatural.
Next time I’ll be diving into getting modern snare tone that cuts through.
Until then…
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