Start to Finish Drum Mix

hey guys for this video I'm going to mix some drums from scratch for you in real time and just let you see everything and try to explain it as I go so I've got this song pulled up it's uh actually a Bob Dylan cover by silversteen I recorded this a long time ago um but it's it's a fun song I like how it turned out actually it's funny I don't really remember where this even got released let me look this up 2012 Chimes of freedom songs of Bob Dylan released 2012 bunch of different artists on there okay all right well that's the story behind the song U but I think it's a it's a pretty fun cover here I'll let you hear the original bit of it I'm out here a thous miles from my home walking Road other men have gone down I'm seeing your world of people and face here poppers and peasants [Music] and okay so that gives you a little taste of the song you'll hear a lot more of it so basically what I did here is just brought up this session and as you can see on my drum tracks over here I've got nothing on them actually I do have a drum bus with some stuff so let me uh let me get rid of that okay so the drums have absolutely nothing going on and I'll just leave the bass guitars and vocals kind of as is there and just work on the drums so let's uh let's Dive [Music] In okay I like to start working on Kick and snare let me first just gate those and actually I'm going to need a gate on Senter bottom and Toms too so I'll go ahead and insert that everywhere here going to use the silencer plugin so we'll start with kick [Music] [Music] all right we'll work on the toms [Music] later actually the first thing I like to do is get rid of some of the low end from the [Music] symbols okay so that adds a little more Focus to my close mics here all right so Kick Drum by the way guys I normally would just import my mix template onto this and it will kind of automatically put my favorite signal chains and everything um onto each track but I just want you guys to see everything so I'm just going to roll old school like this let's get some compression going after EQ 3 to one slow attack fast [Music] release [Music] [Music] working on snare [Music] now [Music] I'm going to try to do this without any samples which I think is probably possible with this with this song this drummer is really good plays hard plays consistently uh the source tracks are recorded well might not sound exactly like you know kind of what a modern record would sound like but we'll see how far we can [Music] get [Music] [Music] see how hard that gate is working [Music] already all right let's bring the output down not afraid of clipping a little bit in that plugin let's get some [Music] saturation so we got a long way to go still walking Road men have gone down I'm seeing your world of people and things here Po and peasants and princes and kings hey Woody got three I wrote you a [Music] song that coming along since is okay let's get some saturation on the kick drum as well and that needs some more EQ for for sure now what I'm trying to do with the this saturation this tape head is kind of provide a ceiling that the transients can kind of softly push against and it's going to help even out I'm hitting them pretty hard because again not using samples this is played very consistently but it's also fast you know with the fast Kick Drum you know you can see it's not all know they're not all hitting at the same strength right which makes sense and so we want to bring some consistency to those hits which is going to uh come from compression and then also saturation now this still sounds pretty woy [Music] go okay let's get some compression happening on our [Music] overheads [Music] let's check out this snare bottom track I really like this uh CLA preset snare bottom it's a little crazy but um you can back it off a bit I usually like to boost higher [Music] [Music] though this VCA fader here just links together both uh the snare top and bottom all right so kick and snare overhead sounding better already let's throw some compression on the drum bus because I want to mix into that a little [Music] bit cool now I'm going to have a parallel bus happening later on but I just want to take a little a little bit here okay our high hat mic kind of same thing as the overheads I just want to get rid of that low end and woess just try to isolate those high hats [Music] okay let's check out our room tracks yeah so I recorded this in a really really small live room and I put up a pair of stereo mics and there's like there's not really any Ambience to that so I probably won't even use that let's check out the hallway mic though yeah that actually has some [Music] ambience [Music] let make it sound a little bigger here now you can hear kind of a woess yeah right around [Music] 200 [Music] okay I'm seeing your world of people in FA here and peasants and princes and kings so it's it's sounding okay in the mix so far but I'm kind of losing the kick [Music] drum let me see if I can tack on some more saturation at the end there yeah that helps and maybe I'll cut a a little bit [Music] less I'm seeing your world of people and things here let's check out the original mix now this one okay we're getting pretty close already skip a little further ahead in the song too hey Woody got know that you [Music] know okay I'm going to use a little trick that I've shown on this channel before I'm just going to choose a random bus here let's say bus two hopefully that's not being used anywhere uh we'll make it preader now on the hallway track back here again I really like the tone of that but it's it's just like so constant it's kind of uh muddying up the drum sound now I do like a little bit of that because it's gluing it all together and it's filling in the gaps and it's making it sounds like one cohesive kit rather than individual mics but really what I want out of that is more snare than symbol or kick or anything else so I'm going to send the snare signal over into this gate and I'm going to trigger the gate uh with that snare uh signal so that the gate is going to open up on that room track whenever the snare [Music] hits okay so that's the basic idea actually let me fix that except I only wanted do this a little bit just a few [Music] DB it's pretty [Music] cool [Music] so you can see how much that's actually adding to the kit and gluing it together all right let's get some more stuff happening on our drum bus here I usually like to have some saturation on the drum bus I love cran song Phoenix and it's funny for so many years I never really used the luster mode uh but check out how this [Music] sounds add so much fatness I love that okay let's get some parallel compression happening now uh yeah let's duplicate all that okay I'm going to send a separate signal to this bus though so I'm putting it out uh this pair of buses named drum comp so let me set up sends on all of the drum tracks here and we'll just set them all to zero right now I'm only listening to what's coming in on this drum comp bus here and this one we want to slam [Music] clam I'm going to send a little less kick to it and less uh less symbols because when you slam it uh when you slam the drum bus like this it makes the kick and snare and Tom sound really big and Punchy and fat but it also uh adds a lot of noise and kind of swirl to the symbols so by sending a separate bus you can just turn down the symbols that are going to that track like so I want to keep a little bit of that in there for attitude [Music] but okay I like that now let's pull up uh decapitator [Music] give it a little bit of Drive extra energy [Music] there [Music] okay cool now just to end uh end off the chain here let's put the BSA Clipper on we'll just shave off the Peaks a [Music] bit and I'm going to throw that on the main drum bus as well let's bring that [Music] back this one I want to just kind of barely clip it all the parallel I'll clip a little harder okay now let's see what the blend of these two sounds [Music] like [Music] cool all right drums are a little loud now so let's kind of reset that balance the rest of the [Music] song [Music] backing off a bit of low end on the snare there and by the way guys uh if you're trying to be like what frequencies is he boosting there where is he cutting um I actually have a a mixing cheat sheet that I made that outlines all of my go-to kind of starting point frequencies when I'm looking at eqing all these different tracks in the mix you can download that sheet uh just so you hav't you don't have to feel like you got to like copy it down and write it down or memorize it just go download it it's at the link below or mixe sheet.com and it's got my go-to uh compression starting points as well so just wanted to make you aware of that yeah I'd say I just want to hear a little more of the kick so I'm going to just turn up the kick but make it a little less clicky when I do that all the that I'm saying in many I'm singing you this song but I can't sing you cuz it's not many men done the things that you've done is sun and a all the good people that with you the okay cool now let's add a little more Ambience to our snare drum here so let's create a new ax let's make sure that's going out to my mix bus all right what bus can I use here let's just do 81 82 why not let's call it snare plate and I like the verb Suite plugin from Slate for my reverbs and one of my favorite uh snare reverbs is from the basty M7 unit just there snare plate setting I think it's snare plate B if I can find that there it is snare plate B okay all right so let's send my snare top and bottom over to that [Music] bus [Music] here still the hearts in the hands of the man the car with the D with away I'm leaving tomorrow but I could leave today ah that [Music] kick it's got kind of a ringness to it that I'm trying to reduce [Music] here all right we haven't touched Toms at all let me just address that quickly oh [Music] [Music] let's get rid of [Music] that [Music] yeah that's going to need a lot of [Music] EQ [Music] okay we've we've cut out some of the upper mid-range honkin but there's a lot of low-end mud [Music] still [Music] the cool yeah it just needs to be louder I think and let's make sure the panning matches uh going to the parallel bus as it is on the main bus here roughly let's copy these settings over to the ratom see how that sounds not much ratom in this [Music] song [Music] yeah sounds pretty good yeah there's this whole kind of ring out thing at the [Applause] [Music] end cool I think this is in a pretty good place let me uh just check my original mix from like more than 10 years [Music] ago here it is now it manytimes I'm singing you this song but I can't sing it cuz there's not many men done the things that you've done [Music] it's sun and Val Ain all the good people that Trav with you the just need more of that kick drum if we drive it more into the compressor here it's better saying it many times more I'm singing you this song but I can't sing you [Music] no many men you [Music] done now I just switched monitors here there's probably too much lowend like sub in the kick [Music] se you song but I can't sing there's not many [Music] menis and Valle and all the good people that traveled with you there still the hearts and hands of the man the car when the D go could yeah that's the challenge right so this is where like leaning on a sample a little bit would really help me with the kick because on the really fast Parts here you just a drummer just can't play it as hard right so I'm trying to get the attack of the compressor and the top end like you know to to cut through the way I want on those parts but then when we get the hard [Music] hits you know it's it's too much but but I could leave today somewhere down the roll the very last thing that I want to know is to say [Applause] I think I'm feel pretty good about this though coming alone see again it's hungry it's tired it's it looks like look it's Dy it's hard we've hey Woody got but I know that you know all the that I'm saying many I'm out here a thous miles from my home walking Road other men have G down I'm seeing your world of people and things here po so there you go guys that you know is pretty close to a finished record drum mix um didn't take too long obviously on a real mixed situation I might spend a little bit longer on this might tuck in some samples even though we don't need too much of it um for this uh for this track and I wanted for this video just to show you drum mixing without leaning on samples not that I have anything against them I know I probably moved a little quickly there but you can always watch this again and really try to pick up on what I was doing with those drums there but hopefully that helps guys hopefully that gives you a little bit more of a window into you know how I would actually mix Real Drum tracks for a record now I will say before I go that the reason I'm able to get like a pretty good drum sound here without using any samples is because they were recorded well and they were tuned well and they were played well by a good drummer and what you're able to accomplish in the mix is always dependent on the source tracks that you're working with so I do have another video that uh you might want to check out next it's called four dumb mist mistakes you're making when you're tracking drums you can check out that video next right here

Channel: Hardcore Music Studio

Views: 53,346

Keywords: jordan valeriote, hardcore music studio, drum mixing, drum mixing tips, drum mixing techniques, drum mixing tutorial, drum mixing plugins, drum mixing chain, drum mixing pro tools, drum mixing masterclass, audio engineer, audio engineering basics, home studio mixing, how to become a pro mixer, how to mix better, how to mix music, how to mix music like a pro, mixing for beginners, mixing music, mixing techniques, mixing tips, mixing tutorial, how to mix drums

Id: eiWNtDuBzv0

Length: 33min 37sec (2017 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2024