Logic Pro X - 3 Bus Tricks for Mixing Drums

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these are two of the three tricks that I'll show you how to add more punch to the drums overall and also how to make them a bit more live sounding so I've done everything I can to these sort of bring out the punch I've isolated a lot of the drums of you strip silence and gating on the kicks and snares and Tom's to isolate them a bit more I've also added a drum sampling and layered in a kick sample along with the kick in and kick out tracks I've also added a snare sample tucked in under the snare top and snare side mics but it's still not quite as punchy as I'd like it to be and as you start layering other instruments on top of your drums this will become really really apparent so for all of these tricks I'm going to be creating a send off of my channels here so it's go to bus one here and in logic fortunately enough to automatically creates an auxilary channel strip or an aux track and I'm gonna make sure that all of these are in stereo as I create them so I'm going to click the mono button to make it go to stereo here and then I'm just gonna option click on the send amount and basically I'm sending a hundred percent of each of the channels into this aux track now right now all that's really doing is just duplicating the signal and making it louder what I want to do is I want to parallel process the signal on this channel so that it complements the other channels so the first thing is I want to create an oxygen all that adds some more punch so the first thing I'm going to do is actually EQ the aux track and isolate the frequencies that really give the drums the punch which is mostly the mids and high so I'll just add the channel EQ on here you could also try using the linear phase EQ as well I'm gonna cut a lot of the low-end I'm just gonna solo the punch aux track here and one thing I like to do is I like to sweep around a band here and find a nice point that resonates in a way that adds to the punch but doesn't make it ring too much and you can try this with a few different bands I've added a high boost up here I could find maybe like a more high present boost up here as well [Music] so these resonating poles are going to add the punch to the drums but I pulled this down just so we're not doing all boosts and no cuts and then the next thing I'm going to do is isolate just the transient material so in logic under dynamics I'll use the envelope or plugin what I can do here is pull the attack up to create more punch and pull the release down to pull out the ring and the sustain and each drum hit now one thing you may choose to do here is actually pull out the overheads and room mics a bit going to the the punch track here just so it's mostly the closed mics that are getting that punch got a bit of a high emphasis let me add in sort of like a mid frequency boost here as well and an important thing here is I really don't want this channel to clip so I'm just going to make sure that I compensate the output level of the envelope er as well as the volume of the EQ to make sure that the aux track doesn't clip okay so on its own not that great sounding but watch what happens when I blend it into the existing drum recording now you can try experimenting with different dynamics processing here I'm using the envelope er and the channel EQ because they're low latency plugins if you use third-party plugins like you play around some different gate or expander or compressor gate whatever you end up using just be careful that it's a plugin that doesn't cause additional latency because even a few milliseconds of latency can completely destroy the signal because you can get phase cancellation issues between the aux track and the drive signal so you can pull this up more for songs that are a bit more dense and you're starting to lose the kick and snare and toms and you can pull it back for softer songs that don't have as dense of a texture so that's the first trick I do often with drums just to give them a bit more punch now the second trick I'll show you is sort of the opposite I want to smash the drums compression wise on an ox channel to sort of liven up the cymbals and the room tone and then under the rest of the kit so I'll create another send I'll use bus two here option click to pull them all up and I call this aux tracks smash and make sure it's stereo then I'll add the compressor plug-in and let's just solo this out I'm going to dial in a pretty heavy compression setting but again remember we're gonna be blending this with the original drum kit okay so I've got the attack time all the way down I've gone with the studio VCA circuit I like this one the most and some of the other circuits either don't have an attack time or didn't handle a really low attack time very well I also pulled in the soft distortion for a bit more bite now you might be thinking why not just take all the drums put them in a track stack add the compressor add this heavy compression and blend it here well you can actually do that and you'll get a similar result I like to do it this way because it gives me independent control right in the mixer so that I can quickly make adjustments to the over compressed smash sound versus the dry sound and what I'll often do is I'll take all of the dry channels put those in a track stack and I'll make that a summing stack I'll just call this drums and now I independent dry control punch control and smash control so over compressing a parallel channel on drums really works wonders it almost makes it so that you don't need reverb channel at all on drums if you've recorded with room mics and you have those room mics feeding the smash channel as well as the overheads as well as all of the close mics and all these things are feeding that smashed channel it can really help to create an ambience and make the kits seem more live it didn't sound bad before it's just when I mute the smash channel all of a sudden the kick gets a heck of a lot smaller now this takes me to my third trick for this video let's say that you didn't have enough channels to record even one room mic err a pair of room mics room mics are incredibly important for drum recordings because they add depth to the recording so when you used just closed mics that's sort of where the punch comes from that's your dry direct signal and then when you put a pair of stereo overheads that creates the width the room mics placed you know 10 15 feet away from the drum kit will create depth for you so sort of creates another dimension for the for the drums and when you mute the room mics it's really really apparent that they're not there anymore [Music] so let's say you're in a situation where you just couldn't record room mics maybe you're tracking drums in a home studio or something like that or you just didn't have enough channels well you can actually simulate room mics just by sending all of your closed mics and your overheads to another aux tracks I'll send the sort of bus for for this I like to make these pre fader because that means that any volume adjustments I make on these will not affect the room if you think about a full drum kit in a room the volume of the kick snare Tom hi-hat everything in the kit is gonna be full blast in the room no matter where you are in the room and no matter what you do with your clothes channels if you pull down the snare pull up the snare that has no effect on the level of the snare in the room so I like to make these pre fader just for that reason so make sure this is stereo and what I'm gonna do to simulate this room is I'm gonna add reverb but instead of using like an obvious reverb patch in space designer I'm actually gonna use one of these small spaces one of the small rooms and I'm gonna pick one of these rooms that has less than a second of decay I'll try this one called drum booth one [Music] and if the aux channel is clipping you just pull down the send amounts so let's try this with all the drums in I'm gonna mute my simulated room so you can get a feel what it sounds like with and without I like that but I'm not a big fan of this particular room tone let's find another one yeah that really helps kind of lick with the smash track it makes the drums just sound more live and more real and gives it that extra dimension and it helps to give the drums some depth and then you could add whatever EQ or compression you wanted on this aux track and treat it just like your room mics in particular I have a lot of people sending me mixes to work on and they're using logics drummer plug-in or they're using some other third-party drum instrument that doesn't have room mics built into it if you use drummer and logic before you'll know that you can multi output it to have kick snare toms hi-hat and percussion and then cymbals the cymbal track really isn't even an overhead track it's just a symbol track so you end up with these nice sounding drum patterns and nice sounding drum samples but they just don't sound real because there isn't a room channel so you can use this to simulate that room channel so those are three parallel bus tricks that I like to use when mixing drums adding punch smashing them and over compressing them to make them more live and simulating a room track I hope you guys enjoyed this video if he did please leave it a like and subscribe to the channel to see more content like this you can also check me out social media on Facebook Twitter Instagram and if you'd like to support the channel with the monthly donation you can check me out at patreon.com ford slash music tech help guy thanks to the support and thanks for watching

Channel: MusicTechHelpGuy

Views: 107,733

Keywords: logic pro x, bus, 3 bus tricks, tips, tricks, mixing, mix, drums, drum, punch, smash, compression, logic pro, logic studio, studio, audio, recording, beat, beats, musictechhelpguy, music tech help guy

Id: eG03XBfdmCM

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019