Mix Drums Like a PRO

hey this is Joe Gilder from the recording Revolution Let's talk about mixing drums I don't know about you but drum mixing can be really intimidating for folks today I want to kind of break down the barriers and share with you three easy simple but effective ways that you can mix drums and start getting great sounding drum mixes it doesn't have to be difficult and it doesn't have to be intimidating before we dive in if you haven't checked out our free guide this is one that Graham Cochran developed it'll walk you through his six step process for creating Radio Ready radio friendly recordings and mixes out of your home studio go check that out at the recordingrevolution.com all right so first off let's listen to the raw tracks that I've got here for you the only thing on these tracks is there's an EQ on the the room mics just notching out this nasty 3K ringing that was there but otherwise this is just the raw drums [Music] so the first approach that I love to use and it's my favorite with mixing drums is something called top down mixing if you followed me or Graham Cochrane for any length of time you've probably heard us talk about this it's the idea that instead of mixing the individual pieces of the kit first we're going to start at the bus what do I mean here are these drum tracks that you just heard these channels here are the drum tracks themselves and they're all routed to this drum bus I'll change it to Red just oh actually they all follow the same they all have the same color because these are all in like a folder as you can see there so all of these are routed to this drum bus and what top down mixing States it's kind of like a funnel we're going to focus on the drum bus first before we go and look at the individual drums why would we do that well first of all people that tend to go in and mix individual pieces of the kit a lot of times still don't have a good sounding drum mix because what a kick drum sounds like by itself is wildly different from what it sounds like in the mix for example here's the kick drum by itself big old like 24 inch Kick Drum and then here's what the kick drum sounds like in the whole mix right we're getting kick drum sounds from more than just the kick drum mic we're getting it from the overheads a little bit we're getting it from the room mic a little bit and we're getting it from this fat mic which is a Cascade fat head ribbon mic that's directly over the kick drum facing the drummer and it just has this big beefy sound so good um so that's blending in to create the overall sound of our Kick Drum so if we were to spend a half an hour just eq'ing the solo Kick Drum mic it may or may not get us results that make any difference because when we put it back in with everything else it's going to completely alter the sound so instead of banging your head against a wall and doing that bottom up approach going individual track by track start at the top down I don't necessarily mean go all the way to the mix bus but specifically in this instance go to the drum bus put some EQ and compression there and then work your way backwards only if you need to I've had some mixes where I haven't needed more than just a few plugins on the drum bus and I'm good to go we'll talk about the pros and cons of this top down method but let's throw something on here I'm going to use for simplicity's sake I'm gonna use the fat Channel plugin which is a Studio One plug-in I'm gonna throw in the I'll use the the classic comp and then the Vintage EQ okay these are very common plugins that you see all over the place let's just start with the compressor and see what kind of sound we can get again this is on the drum bus itself [Music] so for spending 30 seconds on it that's a cool sound let's turn it on and off so you can hear the differences it just glued a lot of things together the kick and the snare are punchier the rest of the kit kind of has a little bit of a vibe to it uh and it's just cool especially on the verses when it's just kick hi-hat and snare it's just nasty in the best way so the pros of this approach the top down approach are it's fast it's efficient and which means you can get more mixes done in less time which is pretty great and it's also creates a Cool vibe there's something about processing everything together especially with compression that just creates a vibe that you can't really get in any other way now that Vibe might not be right for every song but when it's right it's really right and it's delightful what are the cons of this approach the big one here is that it can you can sacrifice some of the clarity in the symbols when you do this if we go to the chorus section uh you'll have what's called pumping where the compressor is being hit and triggered by the kick in the snare which is causing the symbols to do that thing so the symbols don't actually sound like that right but when the compressor is responding to the kick in the snare the symbols kind of are they're kind of collateral damage in that scenario now pumping in the symbols can be a cool thing it's not a bad thing necessarily but sometimes depending on how the symbol mics sound it may or may not be too much so here's what that sounds like listen to what the symbols do when the kick drum hits you'll hear them do this like they're sinking down that's that's the compressor that's one of the downsides or at least the side effects of bus compression so one solution is maybe when you apply the compression you realize the symbols are a little too loud so maybe you pull down the overhead a little bit or maybe you ease up on the compression so the pumping's not so hard or maybe you just say I'm okay with it I want something really vibey and heavily compressed and that's what I'm going for then you're good to go the second approach to drum mixing is the bottom up approach so we talked about top down bottom up isn't bad I've probably framed it as bad in the past just because I love top down so much but there are scenarios where maybe this makes more sense and what I mean by bottom up is what I was describing before where you're mixing the individual kick the snare the Tom the overheads everybody's getting treated separately they may still run to a drum bus and you may still do some drum bus processing but you're really getting the core of your tone from the individual tracks themselves this can work you just have to be really careful and aware that what the kick drum sounds like like I said before by itself is not necessarily what it sounds like in the mix but certain styles of music maybe there isn't uh maybe you don't have the fat mic and the room mic maybe it's just kick snare and overheads and maybe you just really want the brightness of the symbols and the overheads and nothing else I mean just by turning down the room mics and that fat mic it completely changes the way this drum kit sounds [Music] so if we need a mix that's real dry real kind of straightforward then maybe we bring that overhead down and maybe we focus primarily on the kick and the snare individually to the point where we might just mute everything but kick and snare and EQ them independently compress them independently uh probably like you're used to seeing this would be the default mode if you're not sure how to mix drums this is just kind of the natural well I guess I just start with EQ on the kick drum and go from there so quickly I'll put something together on this oh okay honesty time I just tried twice to do a bottom up mix and it has been so long since I've worked this way um I wasn't able to get much of a good result especially on this Kick Drum um partially you could say Hey Joe you didn't record that very well because this is kind of the tone I'm getting [Music] it's just kind of a muffled it doesn't have a lot of like attack to it but I realize when I think about this recording session we were listening to everything in context so we listened in Solo just briefly to make sure the tone was okay but really the whole sound of the kick drum was with the overheads the rooms and that fat mic and since I've been in such top-down world for so many years I knew that that would give me the drum mix that I wanted so if you were to try a bottom-up approach with this Kick Drum I don't think you would get very far because it's not really the kind of Kick Drum that works for that where bottom-up approach works really well is when you're working with pristine samples electronic music things like that where the sound itself is almost exactly what you want by itself from a sample like a drum program or like actual like drum machine samples and then bottom up makes a lot more sense it doesn't really make sense to kind of Squish a bunch of electronic drums together to create Vibe because the whole thing is all the mics are picking up all the other pieces of the kit a little bit and that's what makes that Vibe when you kind of squeeze it down with compression so I said top down was my favorite bottom up is a legitimate approach it's just not one that I do and honestly not one that I'm very good at technique number three route the overheads to the mains so the main drawback to top down mixing is what I showed you about the overheads and the pumping and breathing so this is almost like top down version two where we take our top-down approach that we have here and instead of keeping the overheads routed to our drum bus we just come in and we literally just route them to our main outputs so now the overheads are bypassing the drum bus all together which means what it means the drum bus compression is no longer affecting our symbol sounds and by doing that one change we get this sound it's a lot clearer in the top end there's still a little pumping because the room mic also has a lot of symbols in it so if that's the case we could wrap them room mic to the main outputs as well and we're ending up with this this is a really cool almost like a hybrid approach of the first two because we're grouping a bunch of tracks together and using a single compressor and EQ to kind of give them a Vibe but we're not there's no side effects there to the symbols that come through as clearly and so if you're having for me I start with the first approach top down mixing if that's not working or the symbols are being wonky then I'll do this where I'll route the symbols to their own bus or out to the main outputs avoiding the drum bus altogether and that usually solves whatever problem I'm hearing in the mix a lot of people avoid drums because this stuff seems confusing to them and that's sad because it means you avoid using drums in your production at all which means you're really limiting what kind of stuff you can do especially if you're a singer-songwriter like me there's only so many different acoustic guitar vocal versions of a song I want to do I want to expand I want to do big full band stuff and even if you're not set up to record that stuff there are plenty of people online to collaborate with who can give you drum tracks and you're going to want to make sure you know how how to deal with them so hopefully this gets you started down the path of becoming confident in your abilities to mix Drums by the way in case you missed it at the beginning if you haven't checked out the recording Revolution Radio Ready guide which shows you how to get your from start to finish get your music sounding ready for the radio or wherever you want to put it head over to recordingrevolution.com enter your email address and you can download that for free thanks for watching see ya

Channel: recordingrevolution

Views: 23,546

Keywords: mixing, drums, top-down, bottom-up, joe gilder

Id: hdYLlrjUORE

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023