How to Set Levels - Kick and Snare

hey this is joe from home studio corner today i want to talk about how i go about setting levels for kick and snare they're simple but they're so important that i think it makes sense to make a video about this just last week i was on a live stream for my vip members and we were listening to mixes that everyone did of the same song so there were like 49 submissions of mixes of the same song and one vip member emailed me and commented saying how he made it through the first several rounds of this little tournament we were doing and he didn't even really have time to do much eq and compression he kind of ran out of time before the deadline arrived but he noticed that his mix was still better than a lot of other people because he spent a lot of time getting the levels right this is what i talk about in my five-step mix guide and if you haven't checked that out it is really helpful and something that you can read in one sitting and will help you get better mixes and kind of build a framework of how to approach every mix you can grab that at fivestepmix.com but the first the first step is setting up your mix but the second step we start listening to things is getting a good static mix and that means just setting levels and spending a lot of time just getting those levels right what a lot of people do is they'll just throw the faders up get some levels and then move on to the fun part which is adding eq and automation and all those other things but if you don't have the levels right you're working on something that's broken the whole time you're mixing and the fundamental like foundation isn't right so for example here's a just simple track here this is kick snare overhead and room mics for a song so you may just jump in and maybe you're kind of like me and you love kick drum and you may jump in and just make your kick drum ridiculously loud compared to your snare so your drum mix starting out might sound something like this and you just don't realize it your your mind's in a million different places and you just assume well the snare is a little quiet but i'll just add compression later okay that just doesn't work very well or the opposite is true maybe you're more of a snare monster and it sounds like this [Music] anything you do now will have ramifications later in the mix so by just taking the time to get those levels right you will make your future self happy because what happens is you do something like this and then you start to do maybe some drum buss compression and if you imagine the needle on the compressor it goes like this with the hits right except if your kick was too loud and your snare wasn't loud enough you get that compressor going but it really only goes with the kick so it goes and then you're having to do all sorts of stuff to push the snare up into the compressor and or use compression on the snare to get it in the solution all the time was just to move those faders and get them at the right level doesn't mean they have to be the same literal fader setting but the way i think about setting kick and snare this is kind of the point of the whole video is get them to similar volumes they are the stars of the show when it comes to drums and a lot of times in the entire mix and generally we start off our mixes at least i do i generally start with drums and then kind of build on top of it from there if you don't get those balances right then one or both of your kick and snare will disappear later in the mix and then you'll have to try to resurrect them and it's a lot harder to do at the end of the mix than it is to get those levels right here at the beginning okay so here's there's a couple ways to approach this but what i would probably start with is i would grab the overhead just to get a vibe of what the drums sound like so i would bring the overhead up until the symbols are at a decent level that i like now right out of the gate typically an overhead sound is going to have more snare than kick drum because it's getting more of a direct sound from the snare the kick drum is kind of round about so it's just not as loud so if you go to match that you'll end up with a snare heavy drum mix that's not the worst thing in the world but the drummer probably doesn't want his kick drum to get lost if we're talking typical rock mixing so from there i'll bring up my kick drum and get a nice beefy kick here now that's just matching the kick drum level to the kick drum level in the overhead it's not really doing much we it really it's almost pointless why even have it there let's crank it up until we can hear it nice and in your face [Music] and then here's where a lot of people go off they think okay that's great and they kind of forget about the snare or they have it just be in the overheads i did that for years where i would have mostly an overhead heavy mix and i would always be losing my snare and have to resurrect it later i did not like that workflow it never worked as well as cranking up that snare and getting it to a good level so let's do that now [Music] that feels about right to me at this point i might just solo kick and snare for a second to see how they're balanced just together one thing i would recommend doing is don't don't find a a really accurate volume meter and try to get perfect matching on decibels it's that's not really what i'm looking for and probably isn't the right answer the right answer is to get it to feel like the same volume the kick drum has mostly low frequency energy this snare drum has predominantly upper mid frequency energy that's kind of the core of its tone while they both have a little bit of both we want to get the overall feel at roughly the same volume so that means typically you saw me mess around with it i even closed my eyes for a second just to get a feel to see if they're at the right level and this feels pretty good to me now if i add in the overhead it should just support what we have there on the kick drum and not really throw the balance off of the kick compared to the snare [Music] and then we can even add in the room mic just to give it some extra space here's what that room mic sounds like [Music] and already this is kind of sounding like a drum mix now granted these were recorded in an eye studio uh and the engineer actually cut out some of the bleed in the snare you probably heard that on the snare track so it's a very clean sound but now what would my next step be for this i'd probably throw some sort of a bus compressor on here like the uh let's do something like i really like that classic comp on drum sometimes now when i get a little bit of compression happening with um fairly normal settings here like this is a fairly fast attack deal so i just want a little bit of compression it should look something like this [Music] you see how that meter there that's the gain reduction and it's mostly responding to kick and snare and they're both getting roughly the same amount of compression about three to four db of gain reduction that's a good to me i don't mix to that but when i've got a good level and then i throw the compressor on my mix buss on my drum buss when i see that that meter that little uh what's it called the needle is hitting at about the same level for kick and snare just reaffirms that i think things are at the right level and that's the start of a great drum mix don't overlook this don't skip past setting levels and and spending time it may take you you could spend 30 minutes to an hour just setting levels on all your drum tracks and figuring out panning and setting them and resetting them and setting them again it is time well spent because if you get to a point where you kind of forgot that you're just working on raw tracks and you think man these are rocking then guess what anything you do with plugins is now just gravy because you've got a great sounding raw drum mix now if your raw drum tracks don't sound that good well let's focus on that let's go back to the recording phase and make those better before we come into the mixing phase all right that's it for me thanks so much for watching if you have questions or requests for future videos please leave a comment i do see those and they are super helpful help me make this channel more valuable for you all right that's it for me see ya all right

Channel: Joe Gilder • Home Studio Corner

Views: 30,740

Keywords: mixing, gear, home recording, equipment, joe gilder, presonus, studio one, home studio, kick, snare, drum, level, balance, gain, staging, meter, dB, compressor, gain reduction

Id: ZT7--qsCcN8

Length: 8min 49sec (529 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021