Transcription
[Applause] Hey, and welcome to Middle Farm Studios. This is the studio where we recorded the modern and massive drum sample library, and today we're here to look at a mix of a short track that I've done using that sample library. We can be going through it step-by-step and looking at all sorts of different techniques that I use for mixing songs in general, as well as how I use Modern and Massive and how I think you can get the most out of it.
The track that we're gonna be looking at today is a short, kind of alternative commercial rock song that we've written, and our good friend Robin Adams put down some amazing vocals on there as well. So we're gonna be looking at this track; it's called "For Today," and looking at every aspect of the mix.
So, as you can see in the session I've got here, an instance of Modern and Massive up and running. This is the exact setup that I use to create the audio files that I'm going to use within the mix of the track. So you can see here, it's the default cue drum Co kit, and I'm also using the VK copper snare drum, which is the last one on the drop-down menu there. I've got it set up so that we can actually monitor what the dry sound out of Modern and Massive was that I used, that I bounced through to audio. And I'm not using any of the turbo functionality or anything like that; I'm just using the raw sound. So I've got the kick drum. So let's just take a listen to these raw sounds in the context of an actual beat. This is what it would sound like. And we're gonna aim to end up with an actual drum sound, once mixed, that sounds more like this. Cool.
So perhaps the best place for us to start would actually be at the master bus, which might be a little bit counterintuitive. So the way that I approach mixing is to use what's called a top-down approach, which is to actually do some processing across the master channel or through a bus that's very far down the through the recording signal chain, that then kind of retroactively applies to me hue moves across everything that's running through it. So it's a little bit like getting a little bit of the mastering process done while you're mixing and actually before you dive into listening to any of the individual tracks.
The EQ, I think, is one of the most important things that I apply here. And here I'm, I'm using this a Slate Digital Virtual Mix Rack with a couple of instances of two different EQs. So I'm using the Neve style EQ to give a bit of a top-end lift. So this is, it's kind of like a 5k-ish boost of about -2 dB. I'm also boosting a bit low end as well, and I'm also high-passing here about 35 Hertz. So those on their own are gonna give me a little bit more bison presence element mix as well as a bit more low-end. And then I'm using this Custom Series II EQ to give quite a healthy amount of boost. I guess it's like four and a half dB at 12k. And this is a really nice, silky-sounding top-end boost to me. This is the kind of stuff that you just tend to get when you send tracks off for mastering. So it's really, for me, it makes a lot of sense just to do it at this stage and to always be listening to my sounds running through this. I also have put a little bit of a 60 Hertz bump in on here. That's a bit of a more recent thing I've been doing just to generate a little bit more low-end, but it's not necessary. And then finally, I'm using a bit of a trim because the next thing that comes in the signal chain is a compressor.
So here I'm using another Slate Digital plugin; this is the FG Gray, which is based on a famous SSL style buss compressor. And the way that I set this is a little bit different to what a lot of people do. A lot of people use their buss compression to get a little bit of extra smack out of the sounds that are running through, like a little bit of extra attack. I kind of do the opposite. I use a very fast attack and really time here. I'm using a point three millisecond attack and the fastest release, a four-to-one ratio. And what this does essentially is it just clamps down every time there's a snare hit. The idea here is that you can get the snare to cut through really loud above the rest of the instruments, but it's actually being controlled in level by this, by this compression here, so that it doesn't end up kind of jabbing you in the eardrum. So it just ends to be what happens if you have to mix us now really loud on top of the rest of the music. So this is a pretty crucial part of my, my mix. I also like very much that this compressor has a high-pass filter function, which doesn't affect the actual audio that you hear, but it affects the audio that the compressor is reacting to. And what you can do with that is prevent the kick from setting off too much compression because if you've got a loud bass-heavy kick drum, you're gonna get so much compression on there, it's going to make the whole mix pump way too much for my liking. So by filtering off that low-end at this stage, I'm able to focus the compression more onto the snare. I'll just show you actually how much this is doing. I'll, I'll play the entire mix through the, through the instrumental bus so that you can just see how much gain reduction you're getting. I typically aim for about 3 or 4 dB on the snare hits and about just about 1 dB on kick. It depends; sometimes I want a bit more kick pumped for effect, and I might actually set the high-pass filter accordingly a bit lower down so that you actually get a lot more of that kick pumping effect. And then other mixes, especially some clients, don't hear any of that, and I might push the high-pass filter way up so there's literally nothing happening when the kick hits; it's just getting triggered by the snare. So here we go. Is it Alexa for you to hear and see? [Applause] [Music] I was to play that exact same thing but without this. In fact, I'll start without and then I'll put it on; you'll hear the difference. You should notice the snare suddenly, it's very blocky sounding without it, and it gets way too loud on top of the mix. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
So the really important thing here is because all of the instrumental channels are going through this, they're all getting affected by the compressor. So although the compressor is taking 4 dB off the snare, I'm saying it's actually taking 4 dB off everything. So the relative relationship with the snare, the rest of your mix, is kept constant. That's a really crucial part because otherwise you, there'd be no point in doing this at all; you just mix the snare drum quieter. So essentially, we're able to maintain a greater separation of snare drum to the music, but without there being a huge dynamic spike every time. So you know, it kind of rounds out my top-down mixing. I do, however, over here on the actual master bus, have an instance of the Slate Digital Tape Machine, which I use set to the half-track mode, and apart from that, pretty much just straight up. And this adds a nice bit of extra low-end girth. Again, some clients don't want to hear that, but typically I'd say 99% of clients that I work with are totally cool with that being on there. And when I send my tracks off for mastering, and I leave it on there too, and never had any complaints. It's quite a subtle change; it's nothing that's really distorting the mix. And then finally, this is something that I would remove if I was going to send it off for mastering. This is an instance of FabFilter Pro-L Limiter, which I'm using to get my mix up to a kind of commercial-ish following that's a little bit less than what you get from a pro master. But this does two things: one, it means that when clients hear what I do, it doesn't sound was softer and volume, but also there's a certain effect you get when you limit and clip your mix where you reduce the, the transient impact. Again, the snare drum will sound very pokey after the treatment that I put it through, and the limiting or clipping that gets applied during the master stage tames that down and ends up with a nice fat snare sound. So for me to be able to judge that right, so that when I can send my mix off to mastering and know that I'm going to get something back that sounds good, it's really helpful for me to mix through this kind of limiting or clipping on the master bus the whole time, so I can make all of my decisions based around that.
To dive into the way that I set the mixer and Modern and Massive in order to be able to get the sounds that I want out and into audio, let's take a look. I'm doing things; I'm kind of creating an idealized setup that you couldn't get in real life because what I'm able to do in this program is adjust the relative levels of the various instruments into the room tracks. Now, when you record live drums, you're kind of stuck with cymbals and snare and kick and toms all at their actual levels, and cymbals tend to really dominate in room mics. I lost the time, and if you want to compress them, you end up with loads of extra cymbal in your mix, which I don't, isn't really the best thing. However, what you can do in the virtual domain, such as with Modern Massive, is actually control the amount of cymbals that goes into your room tracks. So you'll see over here, I'm actually not putting any symbol into the room farm microphone. So the room farm microphone is going to be essentially just shells, and especially the further you get away from a drum kit when you record it, the more the cymbals tend to carry and you lose the beef off the actual shells. So that's why it's super cool to, to use that specific technique on the room farm microphone where the shells need all the help they can get. Then I have the room closed set, so you've kind of got about, I don't know, I guess you've got a few dB less cymbals and you would normally have, and I'm kind of just comparing the fader here, which is set pretty much the same on snare and toms, and then you can see the symbols have been pulled down a lot. The snare, I've trimmed down the snare bottom mic a little bit because I typically don't use very much of that in the mix. Something interesting is I've decided just to roll with a single pair of overheads. When we recorded Modern and Massive actually in the room that's right next to me at this moment, we used two pairs of overhead microphones. So we did a pair of large diaphragm condenser and a pair of small diaphragm condensers, which are kind of a much more high-fire brilliance sound, and I've decided just to roll with the small diaphragm condenser sound for this mix. And I've basically muted the large diaphragm condenser channel one on all of the, and all the instruments at kick, toms, and cymbals; none of them have the large diaphragm condenser in there, and they're all bounced through at unity level. So you're getting that kind of as-recorded relative volumes of those kit pieces coming through the overheads. And then I've just kind of trimmed the, like, the spot mics on the hats and the town close mics to be something that's usable, gives me loads of getting to work with through in the mixed stage. And once I've gone through and exported all of that out, what you end up with is these blue pieces of audio here. So you've got, I've got my kik channel; I summed the kick in and kicks up together for the purposes of this mix. Then you've got the snare top and bottom separators. Essentially, from there on out, every, every channel separators. So you've got your toms separate, hats, ride, overheads, room mono, room close, and room fire. You could, if you want to get really fancy, and for example, bounce just shells on each of the room tracks and just symbols on each of the room tracks to be able to have control after the fact of the relative levels of those instruments there instead of having to kind of preset them within the mixer and then print them through to audio.
And just to chat for a second about why you would even want to print to audio instead of simply running the MIDI, it's for a few reasons. I think, you know, for example, archival; you want to always be able to reopen a session and have the sounds there, and you never know if something gets messed up in your system; it's much better to have it as pure audio there than programs. Other reasons could be, I think a big one for me is just mindset. I think what I'm mixing, I don't want to be making what I'd call engineering decisions. When you have the ability of opening up a virtual instrument and being able to try, you know, flick through all the snare drums again or adjust all the levels within there, I feel like sometimes you get a bit further away from the process of actually making what you've already got sound good. So I like it just as a kind of exercise for my own sanity to print things down into audio in order to just work with exactly what I've got in the mix, as though these jobs have been recorded perhaps in by a client and sent to me instead of it being something which I did myself.
So to take a look at the actual MIDI which I programmed for this, it's kind of a, I guess like an alternative/commercial rock song. So we've got quite nice sparse open beats. You can see a few things which I've done. I think one of the first things which I want to mention is you'll see that I haven't really programmed anything through the song at full velocity. Now, if you're not familiar with Logic, you'd know if it was a full velocity because you'd see that hit go bright red like that; the color becomes more intense and read the heavier the hit is, going all the way down to this kind of purple here and anything in between. So as you look through all of my programming here, you can see while some hits are venturing into the orange-e red, none of them are programmed at full velocity. And the reason for that is because it's very rare that a drummer is going to be able to execute a hit absolutely full strength while they're playing; it's just not something that's very feasible. I mean, you could do it, but then the other argument would be it doesn't sound that good necessarily. Sometimes if you hit the drums too hard, you just get loads of attack and actually choke the tone out of them. So while we don't go to ridiculous lengths when we sample the drums for GGD, you capture the very highest velocities that might be used, and that's just not really appropriate for most of the time. So here you can see I've programmed the bass drum at around that hit there; she's a heavier one is about 111, 104. So you know, the kind of hundred-to-110 range I'd say is a really usable velocity range for the bass drums in Modern and Massive, where it's still a powerful hit, but it's not choking the drum. And I find that it's actually easier to boost up a bit of extra high end from a slightly softer velocity and get a more rounded sound that's less kind of pokey and peaky, pokey and picky than it is to start with a really high-intensity hit that's all attack and try and generate the necessary low-end out there. Snare drum-wise, you can see the back beats are programmed at about one hundred and twelve. We've got our ghost notes coming in at about 35. The cymbals, I'm doing some heavier accents on the downbeats and then shifting to this kind of alternating between here 104 and 88, so a bit of a swing there to kind of, to recreate the Moeller technique that you would see drummers using this kind of tempo. You can see as it gets to the softer verse section of the song, I've dropped the velocities down in general to get a softer sound there. I think it's really important to make sure you adjust the velocities to suit the sections because it's hard to mix drums that have been hit really hard to make them sound soft and vibey. So I think it's a lot better to start with the actual kind of dynamics that the performance would have, and from there you can find actually you don't need to change a whole lot about your drum mix to get the sounds to not be super pokey and to make sure that the sounds are coherent with the vibe of the section that you're working on. So just to play some examples, and actually here we're going to be, we're going to be monitoring the drums which I printed down to audio, but it's gonna be looking at the MIDI here. I'll give you a little bit of a demonstration of this. [Music] That's the kind of main part of the beat, and hopefully you can hear there's a natural kind of sway to the symbols; it's not just this super rigid kind of, kind of sound; it's got a bit more of that wash that sounds a lot more realistic. You don't really get drummers playing the way a lot of people program symbols for this kind of part. And then to show you the softer section, we've got, actually this is something interesting; the high hats here, I'm alternating between kind of varying the velocities quite a lot between 44-ish up to about 91. So, so when we sampled these high hats, they actually become hits more with the tip of the stick; the lighter the velocity gets. So if you do kind of alternate between a higher velocity and a lower velocity, it very accurately recreates what a real drummer would do. So it's really important if you, if you're programming drums like this, if you're programming a part like this or high hats like this where you've got long stretches of constant eighth notes, you'll find there's a lot of mileage to be, to be had by varying the velocities and alternating between a hard velocity and a soft one to get that kind of, that realistic feel. And you'll finally don't even really need to move to other articulations of the high hats to be able to get that. So here's a little demonstration. [Music] Same deal over here on the ride; you can see I'm alternating the velocities quite hard. Over here we move on to the ride bell to build us into the fill that's gonna take us through to the court Corsa.
With an overview of how to set up Modern and Massive as well as my top-down mixing, sure we move on to actually focusing on how I go about mixing these drums. Something else that I've done here to build in a bit of extra human element is I have actually used Logic's humanization feature, which kind of randomly moves the hits around within a certain tolerance. It's set to a very small amount of randomness, but you can see here, for example, the two crashes, the hi-hat pedaled hi-hat, and the bass drum all for slightly different times. This could be a lot more exaggerated, you know, for a drummer to play this tight; that would be a really great drummer that's then been edited, but that's kind of the sound that I like in my drums. It's worth experimenting with the humanization in terms of the placement of the hits in order to see what kind of more human effects you can get. As a general rule, however, feel that it's more important to build in some element of human dynamics and perhaps even desirable inconsistency that comes from a human playing an instrument in terms of the dynamics to adjusting the velocities that you use than it is to humanize the plane to humanize the timing aspect. The timing stuff is cool too, but I think that you'll get a lot more realistic results with drums that are programmed exactly to the grid but have a decent amount of human even flow in terms of the dynamics than you would get if you were to program those same drums with very consistent velocities throughout but with a bit of timing variation built in. I think you'd find the second, the latter would actually sound less realistic. So that's my two cents; you might find for your purposes that that isn't the case. So as I move on to mixing the drums, you're gonna see me using this plugin a lot. This is a really exciting new venture for us; this is a plugin called Smash-and-Grab that we've developed, and essentially it's based around the concept of having an all-in-one compressor for every type of compression that I use on
Drums regularly, so you can see over here on this dial that we've got settings for snare, kick, toms, room, overheads, and parallel. And essentially, as you switch that knob around to each setting, the behind-the-scenes stuff happening within the compressor changes quite dramatically. You've got some fairly different things happening underneath the hood to generate exactly the kinds of compression that I love on each of those instruments within the drum kit mix.
Further to that, we have this great big switch here that goes between smash-and-grab mode. And you'll notice is a big GUI change at the same time. Smash is a mode which is derived from your kind of typical FET style compressor. So this is a really fast-acting compressor that's typically used, for example, on drum rooms or for parallel compression on drums where you want to get a really pumpy kind of explosive sound with minimal transient attack. So that's why we're calling it smash—that's kind of destroying your transients in a pleasant way. Grab does the exact opposite; it's going to enhance the attack portion of your drums in the kinds of ways that would suit each of these various applications you turn the drum type dial.
In addition to the drum type dial, we've got a few things to mess with. We've got, for example, this normal and extreme setting which, when you toggle an extreme, will give you a much more exaggerated compression character without changing any of the other controls. And again, this is all optimized to each of the different drums and changes as you select a different drum type on the dial. There we also have a little bit of EQ; we've got a beef and air control. The beef is going to give you a low-end boost pre-compression, which can be really good for triggering more of that kind of woody smack, for example, on a snare drum. If you can boost more low-end into the compression, you can generate a different kind of less harsh-sounding compression character. And then there's the air control, which can give you a really nice glossy, airy boost post-compression. Now, the actual frequency points behind the beef controls again change depending on the drum type that you select. So, so essentially, this plugin could be thought of as basically twelve different compressors if you count smash-and-grab plus each of the drum types on top of that.
We've also got a saturation mode with three different kinds of saturation. You've got a soft clipping, hard clipping, and a kind of tape emulation, which is all there to replicate some of the kind of clipping nature that you get from and the nonlinear characteristics that you get from hardware units such as the ones that we modeled here for the G GD compressor. So essentially, smash-and-grab is a really flexible compressor for use on drums and, actually, as we'll see later in the maze, it's not even limited to just being used on drums. It's really kind of based on my tastes in drums, but but actually, I think there's plenty of different things that people can adjust here to get exactly the results that they want for their particular sounds.
So let's take a look at how I approached mixing the kick drum for this particular song. There's three elements to the mix chain here: I've got an EQ, compressor, and then some additional saturation. Let's start by looking at the EQ. But what I want to do first is actually show you the raw sound of the kick drum as it was printed out of modern and massive. So here's how it sounds just straight from the program [Music]. After I apply the EQ moves which I went for, this is what it sounds like [Music].
So, as you can see, just looking visually at this EQ graph here, I've gone for entirely what's called subtractive EQ. Now, there's no right or wrong ways to do things, but just some people gravitate more towards enhancing the characters that they like in what they hear, and other people gravitate towards reducing the sounds that they dislike. I kind of—I mean, there's no hard and fast rule; people kind of change which way they do it all the time, and within a mix you might think of different instruments in different ways, and you might use a combination of boosting or cussing on any one instrument too. But for this particular mix, I thought actually that's to as much as possible with subtractive EQ because that's the way I've been going with my own mixes recently, and I've been really pleased with the results.
So the main points which I'm looking at is the kick drum has quite a lot of extra low-end when you hear in its raw form. Now, like I say, you could boost in loads of extra top-end to compensate for that, but I think it's a bit more effective actually to cut low-end. So here I'm cutting like maybe 8 DB about 110 Hertz. Then I'm cutting some other kind of boxy mid-range around 300 Hertz, which is going to focus the low-end into a kind of smaller space and give us a more just focused and tight. There's still big low-end, and then cutting a little bit of the kind of one-and-a-half K mark that's gonna give you a bit more clack. Now, on smaller kick drums, it can actually be really nice to enhance this frequency area, but the particular kick drum that we recorded here is a beautiful 24-inch bass drum made out of steel, and it's got loads of those frequencies in it to begin with. So actually, if anything, it can can have a bit of that tamed. And then finally, I'm cutting a little bit of the kick here parts of the sound with a 7 K cut and also a low-pass filter at 13 K. Now, this is partly genre-specific; if I was working in metal, I probably leave more of those frequencies in. However, for something that's a bit more rock and with slower kick drum patterns, I'm allowing there to be not quite as much top-end air as I might otherwise keep in a kick drum sound for heavier styles.
Apart from that, I'm also high-passing the bass drum at very low 21 Hertz, which probably doing next to nothing actually. So let's just take a listen once more to before and after. I'll pop it off and then back on again, so you can see if anything it gets really scooped. You can hear the mid-range drop away, but this is going to really suit us very well in the mix.
Moving on from the EQ, I'm gonna move on to compression, and what I've got here is I'm understandably using the kick mode in smash and grab. I'm using in grab mode because what I want to try and do here is get slightly exaggerated attack that's gonna give this kick drum a lot more impact. I'm using a tiny bit of the beef to add a tiny bit of extra low-end to the to the kick drum having just cuts in. But something that's really important is I'm not using this on full mix. So if you compress a bass drum in grab mode like this or with any slow attack fast release compression, you're gonna find that you actually reduce the amount of low-end resonance of the drum. Maybe the impact, the drums still gonna have loads of low-end, but that low and isn't gonna hang around for very long; it's gonna be a very short burst of bass frequencies, and that BAPS isn't gonna give you the nice bloom of low-end that you want under your bass drum. This is where the mix knob can come in handy because essentially by blending in some of the dry signal you get back some of that low-end bloom, and if you judge it just right you end up with kind of a nice balance of the squishy enhanced attack of the kick drum through the compression mixed with the original kind of bloom that you're getting from the non-compressed bass drums.
So what I'm gonna do now is gonna play you the raw bass drum, then engage the compressor with the mix 100%, which is I mentioned is gonna cut a little bit of low-end at the same time as exaggerating the attack, then I'll roll back the mix knob to the kind of area where I think it sounds good and gives you back a bit of the low-end that you might want [Music]. So hopefully you can hear what I'm hearing, which is that we're getting a little bit of more exaggerated attack on the bass drum; it's that kind of nice squishy character. I don't know how better to describe it than that that for me I really like. I guess wet would be another word for it, but at the same time, yeah, it's doing the bass frequencies ringing on nicely, which is gonna give us a nice big sound under the mix.
Finally, I'm using a little bit of tape saturation courtesy of Slate Digital Tape. This time I'm set to the 15 IPPs mode and the half-track tape, and this gives you a natural low-end bump. And I find that the 50 nips in comparison with the 30 tips speed also gives you a bit of a kind of upper mid-range emphasis and cuts a little bit of top-end. And then for me, it just gives you a slightly more angry sound, which I really like. This is a plugin that I use basically on every mix on my kick drum. So first I'll start with the bypassed [Music]. I'm actually pushing it a little bit, and you'll hear on the harder hits you just get that little kind of saturation coming through. I wouldn't do this on a metal mix or a mix that I wanted to sound quite clean, but again for this kind of rock vibe, I think it's just about perfect. So so what I'll do now is I'll show you how the bass drum sounds with no processing, and then I'll wipe the processing on, and you can hear the before and after [Music] [Music].
So you can hear it's a lot more appropriate; you can hear more of the beater attack and the low-end. It's just nowhere near as overbearing; it's not setting off that master buss compression in the kind of way that's gonna lead to too much pumping in the mix as it was sounding before I applied the plugins.
So moving on to snare drum, there's a few different things that I'm doing here. So I'm gonna start with the snare top microphone. The first thing which I'm gonna do actually is I'm gonna distort it a little bit because this snare top signal that we recorded in modern a massive has loads of attack too, which I love, but for this particular style I want a bit of a kind of fatter sound. And by distorting the transient, I'm gonna just kill the bird that instant pop, the Yi on the front end of the note. For this, I'm going to use a model of a Neve 1073 preamp which Slate Digital we've created, and we're gonna push the drive up until you're seeing that red light coming on. Today we're talking about something really subtle here, but it's just enough to just knock off a little bit of a harshness of the attack.
Next up, I found a couple of the frequencies that ringing on in the snare drum that I don't particularly like. There's kind of an awkward mid-range ring to it; it's got a short sound, the snare drum, but still I felt like it could be tamed a little bit by finding these specific notch frequencies and custom them. So I sure what I'll do while I'm playing it back as I'll turn these into boost so you can specifically hear why I was why I was cutting, and then I'll turn them back into cuts again, and you can hear how much cleaner the snare sound becomes. So starting with a 290 Hertz boost [Music]. So you can see that's that's neatened up that kind of lower fundamental tone that's ringing through. Then we'll check out this 415 Hertz one, which for me is a bit it's kind of wheezy frequency, although it doesn't sound er doesn't sound all that pleasant to my ears. Now, I'm not trying to completely eliminate these sounds; I'm just trying to reduce them somewhat so that they're not so overbearing once you hear them in the context of the mix. So that's what I've done to the snare top.
Listening to the snare bottom channel here, I thought it's nice just to cut a little bit of the kind of I don't even know what to describe this 6k region as, but there's just something a little bit of ratty sounding in there, I guess. So again, I'll play the snare bottom signal with that turned off, and then engage it just makes it sound a little bit more neutral and transparent to my ears, and for me that's the sound now that I can blend a little bit louder with the snare top mic to get the sound I like. Now that's the extent of the processing that I've done on the top and bottom channels separately. What I then do is I send them through a bus where I processed both the top and the bottom together to arrive at my final snare sound.
So when you're working with live Trax drums, often what you have to do is gate the snare drum and close mics quite heavily because you get so much cymbal and particularly hi-hat coming through there. And with the amount of processing that you typically have to do to a snare closed mic signal, you end up exaggerating some really horrible frequencies in that bleed from the from the other kit pieces, and the end result can be really awkward sounding. So while we don't necessarily need to do that here now, there is a little bit of bleed printed into these channels by choice because is one of the things which you can do with in modern and massive, and I feel it does help get a little bit of extra realism. It's not printed at the actual volume that you tip we get bleed-through an alive track; it's a lot softer than that. So why would I want to gate this signal? The main reason would be actually because I want to shorten the length of the snare sound in the close mics, and you really to get the kind of snare sound that I want it's all about having quite a short blast coming from the close mics, and then all of the body will get filled in through the overheads to the reverbs and especially the room mics, and that's what's going to give the snare a lovely decay that's going to keep it at the front of the mix. So too much resonance and snare clothes micro-fine can be a little bit difficult to control; it tends to contains exactly those kinds of overtones that I was notching out a second ago when I was working on the snare top mic.
So here I've got a gate; I guess you'd actually call this an expander because I'm not cutting to silence between the hits and cussing 13 DB between it, and this gate is fabulous by the way; it's made by an fab filter, and it's called Pro G, and I've got it set with quite a fast release time of 200 milliseconds or so and just fastest attack me hold and and a little bit of look at here, just a tiny bit, half a millisecond or so, just so that the front end of the note doesn't get clipped off. So let's take a little listen to what that does to us now channel. So as you can hear, that's a pretty drastic difference; that really tightens up the snare drum sound and cuts a lot of the bleed out. The next part of our signal chain is going to be some EQ, and very similarly to the bass drum, what we've done here is focused almost exclusively on subtractive EQ. When I'm—you cueing a snare drum, and I used this EQ typically FabFilter Pro-Q 2 because it has a great visualization feature when the when the track is playing; you can see the kind of mountain range of frequencies that that are being registered by the snare drum, and what I essentially do is I try and paint that that spectrum of frequencies into a slightly smiley face graph. This sounds so abstract and not related to audio, but just through years of analyzing my favorite snare drum sounds, I've found it something they all have in common is they have the similar kind of shape when registered on a frequency response graph. So I want to see a healthy bump around the fundamental frequency, which is typically between I guess 180 for quite a low to you and snare all the way up to like 250 or or higher for a IOT and snare. I want to see quite a healthy amount there, and I want to see a bit of a reduction through the mid-range, typically looking at the kind of 400 Hertz area, maybe 3 to 5, let's say let's bracket 3 to 500 Hertz as a potential range for kind of awkward mud in your in your snare drum sound. And then I find that typically between about eight hundred to one and a half K there's quite a lot of harsh frequencies there as well as some higher overtones that can sound just a bit clunky and unpleasant in the mix. Then finally, I tend to find that kind of around the three to four K region there can be quite a harsh stick attack. How much that you leave in is very much down to personal taste; it's also what's suitable for the genre, and for me also a big part of how much you leave in there is going to come down to the compression that you use and how much compression that you use on your snare drum because if you exaggerate the attack portion of the snare drum a lot and you leave a lot of those kind of 3/4 K frequencies in, you're gonna get a very harsh snare sound. However, if you don't compress a snare or a bat if you compress the snare with a very fast attack to actually cut the transient information out, you can leave a little bit more of those frequencies in without them jabbing you in the ear as much.
So let's just take a look at the graph that's made by this snare drum post EQ, and hopefully you'll see what I mean about this kind of low-frequency bump, bit of a kind of scoop, smiley face back up to a similar peak on the top-end. Note that I'm also high-passing about 80 Hertz and low-passing about 15 K, and actually using this low passes it's slightly resonant; it's actually boosting a little bit frequencies just below it to give us a little bit of extra air in to us now sound. So I'll hit play, and you can actually see what it looks like on this graph [Music]. So this particular snare actually has probably a bit more low-end than I typically leave in my snare drums, but I'm cool with it for rock; perhaps that's appropriate for metal; it might sound a little bit muddy, especially on really fast stuff, but on this I don't mind there being a deeper kind of character to the snare drum. But despite there being quite a large peak over to the left-hand side here, I think you would still have noticed that you've got this kind of gradual smiley-face character going on through the rest of the frequency range. So that's my snare drum EQ for this particular mix.
The final piece of the puzzle on the close mic is another instance of a smash-and-grab compressor. Here I've got it set to snap and actually driving the input and output section a little bit, which is going to generate a bit of extra saturation because this compressor does have some elements of analog modeling in it, including you know input and output saturation. So by driving the input a bit harder again, we take a little bit of the peak off the drum, which for me is gonna get us closer to that kind of fat rock sound. I'm using a little bit of the air control over here, only one point eight DB, but it's quite powerful; that's gonna bring it a little bit more sizzle in our snare drum sound. I'm using the tape style saturation; I think I'm even giving it just a tiny bit of saturation on the knob bit there, and the aim here is to balance the extra attack and aggression that we're getting through the compression character with the saturation character that we get from the compressor and essentially to generate a very hard transient and then soften it a little bit through saturation. Typically for this kind of thing, I'm I'm compressing quite hard; I'll expect to see the needle hitting about minus 10 DB on on backbeat hits anyway. Let's hit play and see what it does [Music]. So if anything, I actually just increased the amount of compression there a little bit; you could hear as I turn the threshold way down the snare just becomes a blip basically; it's not that unlike gating a snow dome actually when you push it that hard. So there's also a balance to be struck between the noise gate if you're using one as I am on this mix and the compressor, and you don't want to gate really hard and then compress really hard because there'll be nothing but a very short bit at the front of your snare, and we do want to retain a little bit of body there. So that's my snare compression here. However, while that a hue compression and gating that I just applied to the snare drum was on that snare drum closed channel, there's a couple more steps and one of
them, which affects all of the drums in my drum mix, but particularly the snare drum, is a technique called parallel compression. Which is, I'm sending my various drum channels—once I've put them through my desired mix—to a compressor which is kept aside from the main part of the signal; it's in parallel with it. So what I'm doing is I'm sending a signal from each of the close mic and overheads and room buses to a separate compressor, which is kept in parallel; it's not in the main signal chain. It's an insert into the signal chain that then gets blended in underneath the main mix. And what I'm aiming to achieve here is I'm actually trying to get a very thick—that's what I'm actually trying to get here—an extremely compressed kind of pumping compression with very little transient information left in it. And having that in parallel with the main mix is going to essentially kind of fill out the spaces between the hits. As the hit subsides, you're going to get this compressor releasing; you're gonna hear all sorts of the kind of kitten noise; you're gonna hear the room lights coming up; you're gonna hear the resonance of the drums all expanding up to fill that space that's left. If I put this directly onto the drum chain signal—if it was in series with the rest of the drum processing—it would be way too extreme. However, being able to keep things in parallel in this form is going to allow us to keep control of it.
Now, I don't send equal amounts of every kit aspect to this parallel compression; what I do send more than anything is snare drum, and for that reason it gets affected the most. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bypass the parallel compression and play the snare drum, and then put it back on again. Over here, you'll see the settings that I'm using. I'm using this smash mode; I'm using on the specific parallel drum type; I'm saturating quite heavily; I'm using quite a high ratio; and I'm not really touching the beef and air controls. I'm using a lot of threshold to just completely crush the mix here. So here's the snare drum on its own, and then I'm gonna pop on the bus, which is this one down here, that's 21. So you can hear that it's a gigantic difference. It's probably more than I do on most of my mixes, though; for anything, I'm exaggerating it a little bit here so that you can hear it very clearly. But the sound of this parallel compression is going to greatly increase the length of the snare drum in the mix, and it's just a crucial part of my drum mix in general. We're gonna come back to parallel compression a little bit later, and I'll show you how it sounds with the whole mix running through it in context—so feel like that's where you really hear it the most.
Finally, I have a bit of reverb, and again I'm using something a little bit different to my normal; I'm using this great reverb from Valhalla DSP; it's called Room, and I'm also running it through a bit of compression—any hue—to give a slightly more explosive character and also cut a lot of low-end. You can see over here on the hue I'm high-passing it—well, I wasn't, but now I'm going to high-pass it—all the way up further, reducing low-end around 220 Hertz, boosting in a little bit of kind of 1k-ish for a bit more aggression, and also a little bit of top-end sheltie. So here's what the snare with the reverb and parallel compression sounds like. [Music]
It's worth mentioning that with drum reverb, I'm not really looking for a realistic space. One of the reasons that we choose to record drums in amazing-sounding acoustic spaces, such as the Middle Farm live room next to me now, where we recorded Modern and Massive, is because that kind of realistic ambience, I don't think can really be substituted for anything else; it's just it's absolutely necessary if you want great realistic room ambience to just do it the hard way and actually record in a room of that type. So you know, in Modern and Massive, we have this fantastic-sounding live room at our disposal. So what I'm trying to achieve with this reverb sound actually is just a kind of slightly dingy, zingy, industrial-sounding verb that it's not really realistic, but it's something that's gonna give a bit of extra length and also width to the snare sound, because it's quite a wide stereo effect; you can kind of hear the snare tail disappearing off to the sides, and that's a really desirable sound as far as I'm concerned.
So moving on to toms, and with a guest toms being one of the least-hit pieces on a kit—at least for this kind of music anyway—there's actually not even that many instances to choose from to dive in and look into mixing them. Let's look at this little fill that comes between the verse and the chorus that uses the rack tom and the second floor tom, and we'll use this as kind of the basis for seeing how I process toms. So I'll just play the fill for a second just to get us situated. So with toms, I'm kind of looking for a similar thing that I look for in bass drum and snare, which again is this kind of big smiley face EQ curve, as in that's what I looked to see on a frequency analyzer post-EQ. So typically when you see a tom un-EQ'd—and these are the hue settings here that I used on the rack tom—you're gonna get a lot of note clustered around the fundamental tone of the drum; then you get a lot of mud kind of immediately above it in the frequency range; you're probably gonna get some mid-range that kinda has that kind of gulpy back-of-the-mouth cleaner—I don't have a best describe over the map—but that kind of really boxy mid-range character that sits a bit higher up, and you're kind of 700 to 1k range; and then you're probably going to find that you have to bring out a bit of extra attack and sometimes shape where the attack is focused. The Cue drum Co kit that we used here in the Modern and Massive session had coated drum heads on it, which kind of instantly shifts the presence peak down a little bit from a clear head. A clear head tends to have like quite a plasticy-sounding kind of airiness to it, while a coated head tends to sound well-rolled off. And you can kind of see up here that I'm cutting a bit of 5k, which I guess it would be where you get the presence peak on a coated head, and instead then boosting in a bit of like 10k, which is—I mean, I'm not saying this is this is a hard and fast rule—but trying to give it a bit more of that kind of clear head vibe. I think that coated head sound great, and I think it's an entirely a great choice for this song here; I just wanted to bring out a little bit more clarity up there.
So you can see here my moves are: I've got a high-pass filter; I've got cut kind of on where I could perceive the tone of the drum—like the actual note—just because it's such an overwhelming amount of frequency centered around there; I still want to hear the note; it just needs to be controlled a little bit. Then I've got a bit of a cuts—of quite a large cut here—10 DB at 350 Hertz; that's that mud region I'm talking about; about 8 DB around 1k, as I mentioned; that's kind of your boxy kind of just just ugly-sounding frequencies to have on toms. So let's just take a little listen to the rack tom. I'm going to keep it soloed here, and you can see how the frequency response is going to look through the frequency analyzer of the plug-in. [Music] So you can see that initial impulse of top-end almost kind of balances out in level with the fundamental tone over to the left-hand side of the frequency analyzer, but it does die off a lot more quickly, and that's kind of what you expect with a tom; it's that note that stays ringing on. With this being a 13-inch tom, it's got quite a deep note to it; so even though technically it's a rack tom, you know it's starting to approach the realm of a floor tom in terms of tone. Anyway, I use a very similar principle on the floor toms—on all kinds of toms really—but the frequency points are going to have to move. I mean, typically that—always—the fundamental tone is gonna move down on the lower-tuned tom; so typically as you go to a bigger—to your bigger size—tom, and then generally your kind of mid-range mud cut and your kind of boxiness cut are going to move down a little bit as the drum increases in diameter. But the presence peak aspect is really dependent on a lot of factors, like the microphone positioning—and well, I mean, all of these things are depending on the microphone positioning—but just don't be afraid to use quite different-looking EQ curves on the different toms of the same kit. If the resulting frequency landscape looks very similar, you'll find that the drums all tie together nicely—something that I always want to hear in my mixes. When drummers use the kick drum in between the toms—when you hear really fast fills between the hands and feet—I want them to kind of—I want the toms to have a tone to them, but I love that effect of the attack sounding quite similar on the toms and the bass drum, so that when they're played in quick succession, you get just this really consistent-sounding attack between those instruments. So this is where, again, the frequency analyzer really comes into its own, because you can—you can really dial in where the attack is, which you can do by ear; it's just a lot more difficult to do consistently between instruments like that, and you can just get fills that really sound very consistent between all the drums, and that's—so—so kind of like a really thrilling sound when you're hearing a drummer playing a really fast fill, and it just sounds like almost like they're playing an entire kit of kick drums, but some of them have like much more sustained toms. So that's kind of my ethos to toms. Let's just take a little cursory look at the hues which I've applied to the floor toms. You can see a similar deal here on this one; I think I've probably used the high-pass filter to tame down some of that low-end bump; plus, of course, the low-end—the fundamental tone of this 16-inch tom—is gonna be really quite far down, and probably the microphone's not quite as efficient at picking it up as it is on the rack tom, so there might not need as much cutting of low-end there. But similarly, 250 Hertz, I'm cutting 700 Hertz, and I'm cutting away over that same kind of 5k region; this one didn't seem to need any extra airy boost on top. And then on floor tom—yeah, look, I've gone for a really huge cut here, and this time it's closer to 200, while this one's about 650 on the 18-inch tom. So I guess, you know what I'm saying—oh, it's true, you can see—are these—these mid-cuts are shifting down as the tone of the drum shifts down; then typically up here you've got your kind of 5k cut there.
So to then move on to the tom bus—I've got three things going on the actual bus which these individual tom place mics are feeding to. The first thing I've got here is a limiter, and I'm using the classic old Waves L1 limiter here. Gonna—similarly to the snare—I'm trying to shave off a bit of transient in order to get a kind of fat rock sound. I want to be able to hear the tone of the toms, and if the attack is too prominent above the tone—like if the actual transient's too spiky—it's really difficult to find a level for the toms where they don't jump out at you too much, but you can also hear the tone of the drum, because if there's a really huge transient, you try and turn them up loads to hear the note, and the attack is just out of control. So this is where a limiter can really come into handy, and I'm not using it to increase volume; I'm just using it to lop off a transient. So I mean, I just hit play, and we'll see how much gain reduction I'm getting here between the two toms. So you can see the rack one was getting about 3 DB, and the floor two is getting over 6 DB. This also adds a consistency to the sound; so when you hear a drummer play a really fast fill or just play through the toms in general, this limiter is going to ensure the peaks of the attacks are very consistent, even if perhaps the hits are not 100% consistent; this limiter's gonna help make it sound like every hit was hit very evenly.
Next up, I'm using a little bit of the SPL Transient Designer to cut sustain here. Now, it's great to have long-sustaining toms; you know, when you tune a really resonant tom to sound great, typically gonna have a really long note to it. However, in the mix, sometimes that note can be a bit too much, especially on the floor toms; they can kind of overwhelm the mix if they're hanging around for too long. So I like to use a transient designer to kind of reduce the level of that sustain; you're still going to hear some of that initial impulsive low-end coming through right after the transient, but then this is going to kind of cut it off a little bit, make it sound almost like you put a noise gate on it, I suppose, without losing any hits if they don't cross a threshold of a noise gate. So this is a bit of a better solution as far as I'm concerned. I'll just show you what this sounds like; I'll play that same fill, and I'll kind of—I'll turn up the sustain and then cut it again so you can hear the difference. [Music] So for me, that's just giving it a bit more of that kind of—I guess it's a bit more rock that way. It's funny when it comes to heavy drums; so much of getting the desired sound is about adding attack and then taking it away and then adding it again; it's kind of funny; it's just a strange process that—that I guess we've evolved to like hearing on rock recordings, and sometimes it takes these slightly kind of bizarre long-winded routes to get there. But this particular thing, I think—I think works really well, especially for cleaning up the low-end in your mix; you just have to treat it with care; if you cut too much sustain, then you're not gonna hear the note of the drum, like I was talking about earlier with the limiter.
Finally, I'm using our GGD Smash-and-Grab comp here on toms mode, as you'd expect; I've got it on smash, and I'm doing this again to further trim down the transient a little bit more. So this is another bit of a—bit of work that I'm doing here to reduce the initial transient spike, and I'm also using the mix knob here, so I've got it set to fairly heavy compression; I'm using the mix knob to dial back the effect of that compression in order that it doesn't sound too extreme. I'm gonna make this loop a little bit longer just so it's not really annoying. Here we go—is that toms soloed, and I'll keep this bypass and then engage it. [Music] Now, even though the attack is really quick in smash mode, there's still just a tiny bit of transient flap that gets through, which sounds really good on toms as far as I'm concerned. So I really love using that GGD compound on the tom bus—on that tom setting—and like I mentioned, you know, that is quite a different thing happening under the hood than you get with the other modes. I'm also running this into the parallel compression, although at a much lower quantity than I ran the snare drum, and I'm also running it into the reverb tube, and that just about finishes it up for toms. They don't take as much work, I found, as long as their well-recorded. I think toms are one of those things where if they weren't tuned really well, then you're gonna be fighting them. But thankfully here, you know, you've got some really great-sounding drums in this—in this sample librarian. Over toms—one of those things where if it's not a really good-sounding drum that's been tuned well, it's almost impossible to salvage in the mix—but thankfully these are really great-sounding drums from Cue Drum Guy.
Moving on to cymbals. So I'm using symbols to denote the overheads, but also the spot mics. Now, some people like to give really different treatment to the spot mics that are close up on the smaller cymbals on the kit; I tend to like to just treat them all at the same time, just kind of find a general blend that works. You can see here, just in terms of level, I've got my hi-hat mic turned way down; I'm not really using very much of that; all the rides a little bit more prominent. And if any of you have recorded live drums, you'll know the rides—although they're quite loud in person—tend not to cut through into the overheads anywhere near as much as the crash cymbals and hi-hats that you hear next to them. So the ride cymbal typically needs a little bit more help in the spot mics. And then I have the overheads channel here. So really, when I'm thinking about overheads, I'm not trying to generate a loss of extra kind of beef for the close mics. Some people love to do that; some people leave a lot of extra low-end in the overheads, and they kind of mix with the approach of starting with the overheads and filling in the close mics, and that's cool, and it works for plenty of people. But for me, I prefer my overheads and my close mics on the cymbals more of like a cymbal mic situation, whereas the room mics perhaps are going to give me more of the body of the actual shells.
So in terms of processing on the overheads, you can see I've jogged a huge high-pass filter up 280 Hertz here; I've also cut a little bit around 500 that I guess sounded a bit boxy. This is the big one though; I think there's always an issue somewhere between about five to seven K with them—with crash cymbals in particular—they tend to have this huge great big spike there that sounds very abrasive. Actually, perhaps the best thing I can do is bypass that, and I'll hit play on the overhead channel, because this song is riding on the crash; you're gonna hear it straight away, and you're gonna see on the spectrum analyzer a great big hump occurring exactly where I've cut here. So let's just take a quick listen to this overhead channel, which has the high-pass filter and low-pass filter on it, but doesn't have this kind of 6k cut there. That's a really drastic change that you get when you engage this EQ here. So I've got a big bell cut of 8 DB at 6k, and that immediately sucks away all of those very harsh-sounding frequencies. I mean, for me, getting overheads right is all about that; it's getting—getting the cymbals to sound right is all about that particular move. You know, you can mess with your high and low-pass filters and other cuts, but if you don't find where the crash cymbals in particular are ringing out most harshly and cut there, it's gonna be really difficult to make a cymbal sound good in the mix, in my experience. So that's my EQ I'm using on cymbals. However, I am also notching out a particular ringing frequency in the crash—I think it was—if I—if I—if I leave this flat and then cut it, you'll hear here just how much it's doing. So again, I'll hit play with this on, then I'll unbypass, and you'll suddenly hear this kind of whistling frequency appear in the events. You could drive yourself crazy finding every single frequency that needs notching and not to get out and end up with perhaps a slightly kind of neutered-sounding cymbal sound for your record. For me, I think that it's important just to focus in on the one or two most abrasive and cut those. So here, that was that particular frequency that I found to be abrasive. It's a bit of a skill that you need to develop to be able to hear that—you know, to listen to cymbals and be able to peak out—to pick out those frequency peaks that are ringing out above the others, but once you've done it a few times, it's kind of fun; it's almost like a game. My space. So having dealt with the EQ
On the cymbals channel, we then move on to a bit of compression. And here I'm using this trusty smash-and-grab compressor, set to smash mode with the overhead drum type on the dial. The smash mode is—we've said a few times—it's going to kill some transient information. And if you hear the overhead channel without the compressor, you'll notice, especially the snare, is peaking very loudly. And I mean, that's not the end of the world, but like I mentioned, I particularly want the overhead channels to be like a cymbal mic, and I don't want to be drastically changing the snare sound as I adjust the level of the overhead mics. So for me, it works well, too, to kind of compress the cymbals anyway, to get a bit of extra length out of them, but also to tame the transients off the snare and sometimes the toms too.
I'm also taking advantage of the air control here, just a little bit—1 and 1/2 dB—to give back a little bit of the sheen that we all have lost through the low-pass filter that I think I had set about 15 K earlier on in the signal chain. So by cutting that and then boosting it back with this very nice airy sounding hue, to give a more consistent shimmer to the cymbal sound. But you have to be really careful; these are very powerful controls. And finally, I'm not actually running this 100% mix; that can be a bit too aggressive sounding for me. And as you'll see when we move on to the room mics, there's plenty of compression happening there. So this is more about maintaining a really nice consistent vibe to the overhead channel. So I'll first play it bypass, then I'll engage it with 100% of mix, and then I'll roll back the mixer. You can hear that that way. [Music] The big place where you can hear its effect, I think apart from on the snare drum, is on the initial attack of that crash cymbal, which sounds a lot smoother with the compression there. And that makes it more of a kind of wash that will sit into the mix. Finally, I'm also sending a little bit of it to the parallel drum compression channel as well. The reason for that is because I do want all of the key elements to interact with that compressor—the snare drum in particular—in the parallel compression channel, so I don't leave anything out of it. But I'm not sending anywhere near as much cymbal as I am snare drum, for example.
So when it comes to the room mics, I'm not doing very much at all on the individual channels. I am just applying a little bit—well, I'm high-pass filtering and also cutting a little bit of presence out of the room mono mic that's quite trashy sounding—as well as a little bit of compression from the smash mode of the jeugd smash-and-grab comp. But most of the heavy lifting here is happening on the room bus. So in terms of EQ, I'm cussing quite a lot of low-end here; there's a ton of kick drum coming through in the rooms, and it's just not really necessary, as far as I'm concerned. So I'm cutting quite a lot of that. I've got a 120 Hertz high-pass, but I've turned the cue down quite a lot, so you're seeing it's quite a soft roll off, this reaching really high up into the spectrum, then giving a bit of extra aggression around 1.5 K, cutting again kind of where the cymbal sound really harsh, but then giving a bit of a kind of glossy sheen up on top. So, so here's the sound of the room mics summed together. [Music]
Now the most important element in the room mics for me is the snare drum. What I want to hear above all else is the snare drum kind of explosion expanding into the room, because it's gonna be such a crucial part of getting the snare to sound the way that I wanted to sound in the end. For me, rock drums have to have that explosive character with loads of ambience, and there's just no substitute for a great sounding drum room on on snare, as far as I'm concerned. So the snare drum is the most important thing. I'm not afraid to shelve away frequencies that are perhaps making the cymbals dominate too much. I'm not afraid to get rid of some lower end, although you'll notice there's still plenty of kick drum in there. And also I found that this kind of boost around 1.5 K with this particular miking setup that we used is a pleasant place to bring a bit more aggression in the shells without making the cymbals sound too crazy. However, next up I am notching the same frequency that I notched in our overhead channel, which is two thousand seven hundred and fifty Hertz. Again, that cymbal whistle coming from the crash is going to be coming through in those room mics too. So generally any notches that I apply to the overheads I'll apply to the room channels as well.
Next up we've got our good old GD comp again, this time set to rooms and on smash mode as before. Now, as I've been saying, I really want the snare to cut through loads, but I also want to compress the room mics a little bit to get a bit more of that kind of pumpy character going on. And as I do that, I'm gradually going to reduce the peaks of the snare drum—support above all else—which kind of counteracts what I'm trying to achieve in the end. So a bit like how we have to play with the attack quite a lot with the snare drums and toms in particular, here there's kind of a little bit of give and take. So first of all, I'm going to compress the rooms quite a lot to get that really thick kind of glued together room sound. And then what I use is quite a nifty trick using this same gate, but set to upward expansion mode. What that's going to mean is actually, instead of making things quieter when they passed the threshold, it makes things louder. And here I'm particularly feeding the snare top channel into the side chains. So basically, every time the snare hits, it makes the room mics jump up in volume for a certain length of time. In other words, I get back that headroom—that snare kind of poking out above the rest of the kit. Now obviously, when it does this, it is also raising the level of the cymbals and everything else that's in the room mics, but in general the effect seems to kind of trick the ear into feeling like there's just a lot more snare volume above all else. So these two things work together. So what I'm gonna do is first of all start with no compression, engage the compression—you'll hear how the snare kind of really sits back into the rest of the drum sound—and now I engage our upward expansion on the room channel. You'll see how the snare suddenly starts jumping out to the front again. [Music]
So for me, this—this trick, I guess you'd call it—is such a crucial part of getting room mics to sound the way I want them to, into getting my snare drum to sound the way I wanted to sound on a in a drum mix, because there's just no other way I've found of getting that same clarity of the snare in the room mics while also getting that really aggressively compressed vibe too. And you'll hear once the whole mix is put together that the snare has this immediate kind of mid-rangey stereo spread to it, which is coming from those room mics there. It's just a great sound. And again, the room here at Middle Farm is just so fantastic, so it's amazing to have at our disposal here in this program.
So the much lower dynamic of the verse sessions is mirrored in the programming; you know, the drums are not being hit as hard. However, there's still a few things that I wanted to do to the drum sound differently during the verse sections, in order that it didn't sound quite as—quite as explosive, I guess. Because without the wall of heavy distorted guitars going on that you've got in the intro and chorus, you don't need as much in the way of the drum room in order for it to be audible. You don't have to crank the level of the drum room to anywhere near the same degree. And also you don't need quite as much of the close mics to be cutting through either. So this is quite a typical thing that I'll do in softer sections of songs. They'll typically leave the overheads as they were, but I'll bring back the volume of the kick drum, of the snare, the toms if they're being used in that section, but mainly I'll bring back the volume of the rooms quite significantly too. So I'm just going to pop this into automation mode here, and you can see the moves which I've made. So this is my kick drum here; it's dropped about 2 dB and 1 and a 1/2 dB anyway. The snare, I drops it about a dB and a half, but I also dropped the amount of it going to the parallel compression by about 5 dB for 1/2 dB, and I've reduced the amount of reverb there. So so what happens is you go into the verse section, as it just gets a lot more intimate without the massively explosive sounding room mics you know being cranked there. The whole thing gets stripped back, and it sounds just a little bit more closed and upfront, but not in an aggressive way at all. With the rooms, I brought them back a lot in level. One thing which I did is I favored the room mono mic, which until now I basically had been muted. It being mono kind of changes the texture a little bit because, you know, it's not like the drums are exploding off to the sides all the time; it kind of keeps them more pinned down the middle of the mix, and I thought that would be a cool vibe. There's not very much room in there in general for this section, but I thought that having a bit more of a mono room would be cool. Right as this section ends, you've got a big old drum fill that takes you into the chorus. And what I did there actually was a little bit of the opposite; I boosted up the volume of the rooms just for the duration of the fill, and I've also given the actual drum buss a bit of a boost—about a dB and a bit—that lasts just into the beginning of the next section. So you get a really loud downbeat into that part too. So I'll play just, you know, from four bars away from the end of the verse, so you'll hear the kind of soft and more intimate vibe of the drums at this point, as well as the really huge sounding fill going into the next section. I'm also going to mute the vocal sub mix here, so you just listen to the instrumental. [Applause] So, hopefully you get the idea. I should do the same thing with the drums, so load and you'll get I think more of an impression of just how it goes from a kind of much tighter and intimate feel to a very huge feel as the as the snare fill comes in. [Music]
So automation like this, for me, is a crucial part of getting sections to flow from one to another really well, as well as maintaining a good sound. Because like we've just been talking about, having the room mics cranked in the chorus, for example, sounds great, but would probably be a bit too much in the verse. And while the listener isn't going to notice the automation moves you made necessarily, you know, they can be subtle—they can be a lot more subtle than ones which I've been making here—they might well take them out of the moment if you didn't make those moves, because you might find that the verse just sounds way too overbearing where it should be something a lot more intimate and subtle. So I definitely don't overlook automation. Once I've got my mix up on one section of a song, I'll do quite a few parts of the song just making moves from section to section, to try if anything to maintain a vibrant—ooh—change it. I think I think that's one of the biggest parts of getting songs to actually sound complete, as far as I'm concerned. Thanks for watching, and we really hope this has been informative and perhaps might even inspire a little bit of your creative process moving forwards. But in the meantime, for more information, head over to getgooddrums.com.