A Common Drum Bus Compression Mistake

hey this is Joe Gilder from home studio corner calm when you're compressing your drum bus there's a common mistake that people make and you may not even know you're making it but it's hurting your drum sound and that mistake is letting the attack time be too fast I was sharing this with a friend of mine the other day who was mixing some drums and he didn't realize that the reason his drums weren't sounding as punchy as he wanted had nothing to do with the individual settings on the individual tracks it had to do with his compressor setting on his drum buss so real quickly I've got this session setup with all my drum tracks here and these are all routed through this drum buss now the only processing you're hearing right now is EQ to carve out a little bit of that boxy mid-range and boost a little bit of low-end so here's the drum sound so great drums drum sound to start but now we want to add some buss compression now bus compression simply just adds some tightness and some punchiness to the overall sound of the drums this is how I like to mix drums I start with the bus get the EQ and compression on there and then I go back and work on the individual tracks as needed it's a cool way to work you should try it okay so here's the default settings this is the waves SSL buss compressor now if you don't have this plug-in no big deal this this concept applies no matter what compressor you're using even if you're using a stock compressor which i've used plenty of times on a drum buss totally still applies but you'll notice the default settings have the release at 1.2 seconds which is too long for drums and the attack at 1 millisecond which is way too fast for drums so I'm going to move this release down to 100 milliseconds which is fine and let's just take a listen to what the compression sounds like at one millisecond [Music] [Music] okay so we've got about three four DB of gain reduction happening there is some compression happening and it is a fairly cool sound but if you listen more carefully you'll notice it's just it kind of sounds like there's a blanket over the drums let's listen to it without compression then I'll turn the compressor back on so there's more resonance on the kick and the snare and that's kind of cool but the attack of the actual drums themselves has been kind of muffled we've got a blanket over the drum kit now that's no bueno so let's take a listen to something different what if we raise the attack as high as it'll go 30 milliseconds on this compressor and if we just lower the threshold a little bit because a slower attack is gonna compress less so I'm gonna lower the threshold to get the same amount of compression but listen to how much more punchy these drums sound [Music] suddenly that snare is just snapping through we're getting the benefits of that resonance that you get with buss compression but we're not losing that snappiness of the snare super cool so I'm gonna dial it back to one millisecond and then I'm gonna just turn it slowly back up to 30 milliseconds and listen to the difference in the drums specifically listen to the snare man it just comes through and punches you in the face now I know it's not a fair comparison because there was more compression happening at the lower attack time but you get the idea there's more transient there's more punch there's just more awesome in the drum sound so if you're making this mistake and using a fast attack timing on your drum buss try lengthening it out see what happens your drum sound will thank you for it

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 130,021

Keywords: home studio, drum bus compression, mistake

Id: aqMhSEgD9cM

Length: 3min 57sec (237 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2013