A Guide To Drum EQ

[Music] hey victor guidera here from recordium and in this lesson i'm going to show you some really easy and effective ways to eq your drum recordings and you know this is for when you're just starting out or if you you know have been working on recording drums for a while now these are some of the core concepts that you may have missed or that you need to pick up right from the start eq is arguably the single most effective type of effects processing that we can do to improve the sound of your drums whether that's the individual microphones kick snare so on or the drum kit as a whole or different combinations together eq'ing those combinations of microphones this will have the largest impact on improving that sound and so to demonstrate some of the concepts here today i pulled the recording session that i just captured uh very recently with john moffett up at drumeo and uh john moffett is the uh was the veteran long-time 30-year veteran drummer for michael jackson until he passed away um and he's also toured with you know all of the other jackson family and elton john and madonna and george michael the list goes on it's it's a very very uh reputable artist in this industry john was an amazing person as well and so the first thing that i want to talk about is cut versus boost now if you look at a standard eq here uh you'll see that there's you know i have some some dips going on in in this eq that would be a cut you know pulling a portion of the sound of that microphone down that would be cut and pulling and boosting it up would be a boost and so what i generally do with eq is i cut a lot more than i'm boosting portions of the sound so i essentially want to find uh a portion or multiple portions of the sound that i do not like and then i want to minimize that a little bit and cut that out and so you know i that when i do that process with individual mics and the drum kit as a whole that brings me to the sound that i'm looking for a lot faster than if i were to try to boost a lot of areas of the sound that i do like so i definitely recommend starting out with that mentality first cut more than boost but of course it's okay to boost certain portions of the sound that you do like and the next core concept i want to talk about is the high pass filter so what this is is i have that again on the snare microphone here um as you can see what's happening with the slope here uh it is going to cut off all of the sound of that source of that signal source microphone we'll call it uh from a certain point and everything below that so as you can see you know if i set it at 140 hertz here's that point where there's 140 hertz and it's going to slope downward and cut everything off at a certain rate which is the slope uh and and does nothing will exist in the sound uh you know below that point and so why do we do that we do that to clean up you know every single microphone that's recorded uh you know we we don't want to have that really low sub range sound uh of that microphone capture in that sound source even on a bass drum microphone i will still use a high pass filter but i'll show you here i'll just do something like a really steep curve and i won't cut off a lot of the sub range of that microphone maybe i'll roll it off at about 40 hertz or so or 50 hertz depending on how much sub range of that uh that bass drum microphone that i need in the source so i have essentially a high pass filter on every single microphone track yes even the bass drums that might sound crazy but um you know maybe don't start out with a high pass on your bass mic if you're just starting the you know to use eqs uh because you could end up you know easily very easily cutting off too much of that bsn or if you feel comfortable with what i just mentioned give it a shot so first on the snare i'm going to play back and start cutting off some of that sub range with a high pass and listening for portions of the sound that i don't like and we have we actually in this recording had two top snare microphones in earthworks sr20 ls and a sure sm57 right now let's just not worry about multiple mics i'm just muting the 57 and we'll work on the earthworks mic [Music] cool so as you saw i swept the high pass up until it cut off too much of the snare sound and uh you know then i brought it back down and i kind of wavered a little bit back up and forth and uh you know found that mid point where i'm not cutting off the fatness of the snare drum because that's something you don't want to do as well of course depending on the genre and the you know the overall mix of the song maybe you do want more fantas or not and so what i didn't like about the snare drum was just one pitch tone overtone that was ringing pretty strong and so you know to cut that like i mentioned cutting we're going to take one eq point boost it up quite a bit you know 10 anywhere from 10 to up to 20 db depending uh and then we will see sweep that frequency point across the spectrum and you know we'll really hear what i'm listening for is what i really went you know basically when it sounds the worst when do when do i really not like it but for this snare drum i'm going to be really trying to pinpoint that actual pitch that i was talking about and and then we will cut that down and that's essentially it for the boost sweep and cut and then the sound will be that much better so let's check it out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the difference is subtle when taking that eq out and putting it back in but you know when you do more of these sort of cuts and surgical moves on your microphones together you know listening to them in the whole mix as well of course we also want to eq not just solo on an instrument but with playing all of the tracks together it will just be that much more glued together all the way across every single microphone and of course this drum recording uh you know it requires that kind of work in detail on each of the microphones because there was a lot it was a very large kit a lot of microphones to capture all of those sounds with high fidelity and stuff so now let's talk about what i did on the bass drum microphone and again there are multiple microphones on the bass drum there's a 602 at the porthole and a akg d112 inside of the bass drum sort of my favorite combo and a sub kick solomon mike's low freak out on the bat on the reso head on the bass drum so digging into the eq here we'll just talk about the 602 which is what i call the all range bass drum mic at the porthole pointed towards the bearing edge meaning the bass drum head on the batter side and it looks like we've done a sharp little cut right here at 87 hertz which is an odd one let's check that out i don't quite remember and then a a dip a a wide dip in the frequency spectrum over at 215 hertz and low mid and um looks like i knocked down a tiny bit of the point to the at 5300 hertz or 5.3 kilohertz where the beater that's kind of where the beat is smacking across the head so maybe it's a little bit bright sounding and then we roll off the very top end of the frequency spectrum and if you choose to do that then be very light or careful with that or maybe not use a what that is is called a low-pass filter uh maybe just try something like it just a shelf that will bring down a little bit of that top end and what i'm trying to do with that is bring down a little bit of the cymbals uh bleeding through into that bass drum mic so um let's just have a listen here and i'll play with some of the eq points i'm really curious about that 87 hertz let's see what's going on there [Music] great so what's happening there is uh just with the tuning and the muffling that he had going on in the drum there is a build up at that right at that frequency point at 87 hertz uh where it was it was you know a little unpleasant and it was rumbling through i remember uh you know it just sort of affected the overall drum mix as a whole and um you know that's why it's a sharp little narrow uh range of the frequency spectrum that it's affecting just a little cone that i'm dipping out just to try to pinpoint just that that frequency point at 87 hertz and as you could hear when i pulled that down it was much more pleasant so then the low mid here at 215 hertz that's just a little bit of mud in the in the signal um and you know let's just have a listen to that you know boosting that back up and see what's happening there [Music] [Music] again so the changes are very subtle but when you make these subtle changes across all the microphones really they add up uh to a much higher fidelity drum makes as a whole and so let's just listen to the whole thing bypass and unbypassed [Music] and the high pass filter now i hope you have a subwoofer or really high quality headphones where they can go down to a really sub range which isn't too common necessarily but if i did not roll off at 43 hertz uh what i'm hearing is is like the lowest of low sub being captured by that uh sennheiser 602 mic and you know keeping that in the mix it'll just be crazy to have that really low sub range left over in the mix uh it may you know if somebody ever listens to your mix on you know a system where they have a subwoofer it may make it go a little crazy in that very low end so essentially i'm going to cut that off but not too high up in the spectrum because we want the bass drum to still have a lot of low sub range power to it and for the toms let's just talk about one of them the 12 inch tom and you're going to hear a really dramatic change with the massive amount of cutting that i'm doing here and a little bit of boost as well and so there's just a little bit more overtones than i would you know normally want in a 12-inch tom and so what i did is i i found one point whether it was it was really abundant with the uh the ring overtones in the tom and i cut that down and there is still more to come uh so i started at the low end uh you know the low mids first and then i swept around with the highs or the actual mids and then found another point and then once i really scooped those then it really sounded good and then of course i wanted a bit more more fidelity right on the root note of the drum and i found where that was and boosted that up so let's listen with before and after [Music] and that is how powerful the boost sweep find what you don't like and cut can really be for you especially with a little bit wonkier tuning or overtones that are happening in your drums now with the overheads really depending on the genre and the room and the placement of them and how many more microphones you had on the kit you may want them to capture more warmth and more drum shells or you may want that to have less and so for this mix i wanted just a sort of a medium balance i want the the tom close tom microphones and the snare and the bass to cover a lot of that low warmth uh you know from the those close mics and the overheads to really get a lot more of the ambience and symbols um but still have a decent amount of you know sort of shell sound uh drum shell sound in them as well so uh we're really not doing too much the overheads and again there are multiple mics let's just focus on one eq and and of course i will simply duplicate that eq to each of the overheads or work on them at the same time depending on what your recording and mixing setup is and so let's check out the left overhead only and i've collapsed it to mono just so that we can you know get a nice full fidelity right in front of our face as we're eq'ing something i do that actually when i eq all of the instruments even if i'm only working on one i monolize it or i pan it up the center so i can hear very nice and equally just right in my face from both of the speakers [Music] [Music] so as you can hear it was just a little bit of that sort of cloudiness and build up at about 350 400 hertz in the room uh with all of the instruments going on all the voices uh just they really start to build up and add on one another uh and and it just sort of gets uh you know unclear in that range so i just scooped out a bit at 360 hertz and did the of course the high pass roll off uh with the lower slope so it wasn't too steeply cutting off the the low end at 112 hertz and so that's pretty much all that that really nice earthworks sr25 microphone needed for eq so i'm not going to do much more than that maybe if you're using a cheaper lower end microphone which i use a lot is you know maybe you have to dip out different parts of the spectrum or maybe you need to get some more top end back into the thing and have the symbols really shine and brightness of them shine through and so you want to add boost a little bit at the top end as well and so that's it for all of the main microphones here let's have a listen to all of the mics together full drum mix and let's bypass the eqs and put them back in and that should be a really dramatic effect to hear all of the microphones without their main eqs in and then putting them back in for full fidelity [Music] and so isn't it a massive difference that the eq makes on the microphones you know putting it in taking it out putting it back in it really cleans up the entire mix uh each shell and symbol is really singing to its full fidelity uh you know there's there's not any washiness uh you know of any uh voices drowning out one another each of the shells are sounding really full fidelity and things like that it's a lot more clear and the drum uh performance is a lot more cr clear and crisp and just you know it just sounds better right and so you know of course there's a lot more we can do for the processing compression and gates and editing and things like that not in this lesson though we do a lot of that we go over all that kind of stuff in recordia.com and here on youtube so be sure to subscribe to us on youtube and facebook and instagram where we release all kinds of free lessons like this and uh we even talk you some behind the scenes in uh you know recording studios and recording sessions and scenario different scenarios and things like that and check out recordio.com where we have our awesome subscription service there and our wicked community of recording enthusiasts like yourself so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in some more lessons [Music] you

Channel: Drumeo

Views: 292,788

Keywords: victor guidera, drum eq, jared falk, mixing drums, how to, audio mixing, drum set eqing, recording music, home studio, home recording, pro tools, sound mixing, recording studio, recording engineer, drums (musical instrument), home recording studio, audio engineer, how to eq drums, how to record drums

Id: -rLjyz2Veis

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018