Adam "Nolly" Getgood Mixing Masterclass part 1 of 2: Master bus and drums

[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 and 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 and 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 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 retro actively 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 EQ so I'm using the Neve stylee hue 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 hue to give quite a healthy amount of boost I guess it's like four and a half dB at 12 K 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 buss 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 fab filters excellent 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 probe master but this does two things one it means that when clients hear what I do it doesn't sound waste 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 buss 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 a 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 Tom's 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 Tom's 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 bounce 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 this 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 clothes 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 is 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 slash 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 in 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 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 light of 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 velocity is 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 logics 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 then 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 Evan flow in terms of the dynamics then 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 plug-in a lot this is a really exciting new venture for us this is a plug-in 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 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 knotch 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 smileyface 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 the signal it's in parallel with it so what I'm doing is I'm sending a signal from each of the closed 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 the main mix and what I'm at aiming to achieve here is I'm actually trying to get a very thick that's what I'm actually trying to get here is an extremely compressed kind of pumping compression with very little transient information left in to 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 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 peril of 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 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 a 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 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 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 Tom's and with a guest Tom's 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 for seeing how I process Tom so I'll just play the the fill for a second just to get us situated so with Tom's 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 on a frequency analyzer post EQ so typically when you see a Tom unnie hewed 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 best describe over the map but that kind of really boxy mid-range character that 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 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 will 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 present speak on a 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 this song here I just wanted to bring out a little bit more clarity up there so you can see here my movies are I've got a high-pass filter I've got cut kind of on where I could perceive the 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 on on Tom's so let's just take a little listen to the rack time I'm going to keep it so load 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 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 time 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 Tom's 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 to Tom and then generally your kind of mid-range mud cut and you're kind of boxiness cut are going to move down a little bit to is 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 to use quite different looking EQ curves on the different Tom's 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 Tom's when here really fast fills between the hands and feet I want them to kind of I want the Tom's to have a tone to them but I love that effect of the attack sounding quite similar on the Tom's and the bass drum so that when they 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 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 so so kind of like a really thrilling sound when you're here drama 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 the Tom's so that's kind of my ethos to Tom's 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 game really quite far down and probably the microphones not quite as efficient as picking it up as it is on the on the rack Tom so there might not need as much cutting of low in 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 bass 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 Tom's and if the attack is too prominent above the tone like if the actual transients too spiky it's really difficult to find a level for the Tom's where they don't jump house 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 Tom's so you can see the rack one was getting about three DB and the floor two is getting over 6 DB this also adds a consistency to the sound so when you hear a drummer player really fast Phil or just play through the Tom's in general this limit is going to ensure the peaks of the attacks are very consistent even if perhaps the hits are not 100% consistent this limit is 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 Tom's 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 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 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 meeting 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 Tom's 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 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 Tom's 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 Tom's as far as I'm concerned so I really love using that GTD 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 Tom's they don't take as much work I found as long as their world recorded I think Tom's are one of those things where if they won't tuned really well then you're gonna be fighting them but thankfully here you know you've got some really great team drums in this in this sample librarian over Tom's 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 and high hats that you 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 symbol 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 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 a 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 6 K and that immediately sucks away all of those very harsh sounding frequencies I mean for me getting over his right is all about that it's getting getting the symbols to sound right is all about that particular move you know you can mess with you hyoeun low-pass filters and other cuts but if you don't find where the crash cymbals in particular ringing out most harshly and cut there it's gonna be really difficult to make a simple sound good in the mix in my experience so that's my EQ I'm using on on the 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 honor than I'll unbias 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 the most abrasive and cut those so here that was that particular frequency that I found to be abrasive and 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 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 MySpace 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 mice 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 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 I 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 in the snare door in particular in the parallel compression change 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 way 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 some 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 the 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 as well as the room channels next up we've got our good old G GD comp again this time set two 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 the attack quite a lot with the snare drums and Tom's 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 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 parts of getting room mics to sound the way I want 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 if the snare in the room mics while also getting that really aggressively compressed vibe to and you'll hear once the whole mix is put together that the snare has this immediate kind of mid-range e stereo spread to it which is coming from those room mics there it's just a great sound and again the 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 and 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 eye drops it about a DB in 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 I till now I basically been 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 pin down the middle of the mix and I thought that would be a cool vibe is 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 film and I've also given the actual drum buss a bit of a boost about DB in 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 flea 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 phil 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 there 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 my mix up on one section of 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 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 mean time for more information head over to get good drums calm

Channel: GetGood Drums

Views: 226,943

Keywords: adam nolly getgood, getgood drums, ggd, smash and grab, modern and massive, mixing, drums, periphery, compression, eq, reverb, fabfilter

Id: cgfBcFTbir4

Length: 72min 27sec (4347 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2018