Unlocking the secrets of Mixing Drums

today we are mixing drums on this 96 Channel SSL Duality fuse console let's do this this video is brought to you by quiz tones my all-time favorite app for learning frequencies a few months ago I did a session with one of my favorite drummers of all time named Pete generous this guy is one of the best in the world I'm telling you it was such a fun session he's so easy to work with and he's just one of those guys that can come in and and really feel the track and do anything that you can imagine so I thought it would be perfect to kind of re visit the track bring everything back onto the analog console and show you my entire process for mixing drums we're going to start off in the Box doing some editing doing some uh simple gating some time alignment and then we're going to go to probably the reason why you're here really push these drums into the analog world and go a little bit crazy with the gear I have in the studio first I want to talk about microphones Kick Drum we had two mics on the kick drum kick in which was basically inside the drum was the d112 classic great mic the out was one of my favorite mics of all time the tel funkin u47 this mic actually didn't work that well because we had to record it inside our kind of small drum room I typically like drums to be out in a in a bigger room but we had a huge brass section coming in like immediately after the drum session so we got we got stuck there and the u47 didn't work that well but it was fine Blended in there so for the snare drum I actually had three microphones first was the snare top which was the top of the head is the sh sm57 another classic microphone the bottom was the nyman km 184 love that microphone on the bottom snares and then I actually did a technique that I found through a video and it was the first time I ever tried it and it was awesome I used an aea ribbon mic the N8 and I basically had it at the side of the drum let me hold on let me grab the mic in the snare drum one second okay snare drum so typically you'd have an SM 57 as the top snare right here then you'd have a bottom snare you can't see it a a bottom snare so a microphone kind of on the bottom right so this is my ribbon microphone so at the same time as having that top snare and the bottom snare I had this ribbon microphone pointed directly at the center of the shell so it may seem weird right I'm pointing it right at the Shell here but the thing is is this microphone is a bidirectional microphone that means that the front of the microphone were getting sound the back of the microphone were getting sound so putting the microphone directly in the center right here basically makes it act as if it's a top snare and a bottom snare oh my gosh it's freaking me out that sound this was honestly an experiment but it turned out so good and I'm probably going to do this every single time can't wait to show you on my high hats I had the nyman km 184 now on my Toms this is actually the first time I did this as well I had two different ribbons on the first two Toms and then the two floor toms so on Tom 1 and two I had the aea n22 and then on the floor toms I had the r92 the m22s man those were the best Tom mics I have ever heard in my entire life like I I don't ever want to do drums without those the overheads were another experiment I went with two different sets of overheads I was really only planning on keeping one of them but I went with the safe option which was the royal sf12 so this is a stereo microphone it's it's amazing it's another ribbon microphone super good just put it right in the center of the kit and then I also set up a pair of Telefunken Ela tube microphones so these are pencil condensers they're small microphones but they're they're actually two microphones and they oh my gosh they just I can't they they're my favorite they're I think they're my favorite alltime o overhead microphones all right so now that you've heard so much about microph phones let's actually listen to how these drums sound so here is my session it's going to look a little backwards to you but I promise there's a reason why I do this in most sessions and on most consoles on most everything you usually start with kick as your first channel kick snare high hat Toms overheads rooms for me and for working on this console I found that I really messed with the kick and the snare the most and the overheads and the rooms like take so little time to get them to sound right and then they're taking up a a big portion of the real estate right here so basically I'd have to slide all the way to the left side of this console to adjust that so what I did is basically just reverse the order of everything the cool part about that is that my Basse guitar and my kick drums are right in the same area which is really nice cuz I can kind of finess those together and and they're right next to each other plus inside this room the low end sounds so different when I move to the left side of this console and it's honestly perfect right in the center so to be able to EQ the kick drum without having to move over there I know it's right I don't have to roll back and forth to check it so that's why it looks like that just just have to just going to have to get used to it so basically I've got my overheads here my Toms 1 through four high hat snare top bottom snare double which is that aea N8 ribbon mic that is pointing straight at the Shell then my kick in in kick out I've got a couple samples here this is like my kick room sound and then my normal kick and then my snare sample as well so right now we're going to listen to the drums raw and just kind of see how they [Music] sound all right so sound like raw recorded drums they sound really good but obviously we need to we need to beef them up so the first thing I want to start with is explain my master bus so I have Master bus processing always on so basically everything on the console is going to mix bus a on the console that bus is being sent to a Shadow Hills mastering compressor and then a curve Bender EQ with a little low and highend boost and then my SSL Fusion which is built directly in on this console I only have the Vintage Drive engaged those three things are so important when I'm even just starting a mix because well let me just show you why they're important so I'm going to turn this off and we're going to we're going to hear just the raw [Music] drums and then turn it [Music] on there's obviously a level difference we're getting a little bit more gain but there's this depth and feeling and and smooth this already so if you're starting from that place you have to do less work on the individual drums to get them to sound good in in my opinion before we get to any eqing and compression and all the analog stuff let's take these drums and we're going to put all the microphones in time with one another so we're going to select all these drums right here and we are going to add the sound radex Auto align 2 so Auto align 2 is being put on every single drum now what this plugin is going to do is it's going to analyze every single one of those individual tracks and it's going to delay them to usually the snare drum so that everything is aligned together this takes away any phas it it cleans up the low end and gives you a really good starting place to work with on the drums I don't always do this but as I said before this song was recorded in a small room and it kind of has a small room sound a lot of Reflections and stuff stuff spinning around so I want to clean up that low end as much as possible and we do this with this plugin so it's pretty simple all we got to do is hit a line and let it play for at least 30 [Music] seconds now we wait for it to align everything sometimes when I'm doing strings this takes like 30 minutes because of how many tracks that we have sweet so it looks like it aligned everything to the snare box bottom which is perfect now let's listen to how the drums sound [Music] now such a big difference the snare is there's so much Clarity in the snare now it's not kind of washy the kick drum has that nice low end let me turn off and on this plugin so you can hear the [Music] difference [Music] [Music] pretty awesome pretty freaking awesome all right so now we are going to commit all these drums so I don't need that processing anymore I'm not going to adjust it I'm not going to change anything so we're just going to we're going to commit all these channels so right click commit and then make sure hide in yep okay perfect we have the exact same drums now and they're all in line okay so time to do some gating gating is pretty important we're going to use my favorite gate of all time and it is made by sonox Oxford drum gate I don't think there's anything better than this gate in my opinion we're going to first tackle these Toms real quick Tom sound really good on their own let's just listen to these real quick yeah sound pretty awesome it just sound very natural very real it's great so let's start with Tom one we're going to hit the Tom right there that's pretty big difference [Music] bypassed obviously we want to mess with the Decay so we're going to go to this Decay what I love about this plugin is you have an overall Decay so like if I turn this all the way up right it's just barely getting the end of it if you make it really tight super fast so we can adjust this so that we get our attack really clean which is great and then now what's cool is since we have our attack settled we can grab this guy and adjust the Decay for that low-end note so that we're not getting the symbols so basically when he hits the Tom the bleed from the symbols is going to get quiet really fast but it's going to open up that low end of the Tom yeah we'll tighten this up a little [Music] bit [Music] that's going to be great all right now let's copy this over to Tom 2 just to give us a starting place we'll adjust [Music] this might just lower this a little bit that's going to be great let's copy this to Tom 3 [Music] yeah sounds great I'm going to bypass this so you can hear it on its own and then un bypassed sounds perfect lastly Tom number four that's going to be great so let's hear the toms together that's pretty good so this is Gates off Gates on and if we add our overheads in here super super clean versus with it off that's going to come in handy once we add the compression the EQ all that stuff awesome now we want to look at our kick out so this is the mic the uh U Tel funkin u47 that I had an issue with only because that the room was just so small so I used this out mic and it really all I got was an insane amount of bleed it just wasn't open enough in that room so this is what it sounds like tons of bleed we don't want all that stuff in there we want the impact of that low end and that's it so we're going to un bypass this we're going to select kick we want to make sure we've got our Decay right all right sounds pretty good going listen to our kick in here there's a couple big hits in there but that sounds really good so we're going to bypass this and then un Bypass Great all right let's look at our snare top so the snare is really close there's there's a ringy thing that keeps happening and we just want to get rid of some of those symbol stuff because we're going to push this kind of heavy in the compressor we don't want all that stuff to get super super loud so let's get our our Decay going [Music] great that sounds that's perfect we're just going to keep that right there we're going to want to do the same thing to our snare [Music] double sounds great great let see how our snare bottom is I'm not going to put a gate on the snare bottom because I think it sounds pretty good on its own so let's hear how these sound [Music] now I'm going to buypass these [Music] Gates [Music] pretty awesome that's already huge huge Improvement gates are good everything's cleaned up we have room now to kind of do whatever we want I want to make sure my kick and snare samples have the same waveform that was aligned so that whenever it's triggering those samples it doesn't get all crazy out of time so I'm going to copy my kick in down to both of my kick samples and then my snare top we're going to do the same thing all right so I've got my sample kick here yep and then I basically what I did I do this a lot of time on the kick and sometimes the snare is I like to have one sample where I've got my kick in out sub mic sometimes the effects sometimes the overhead it kind of just depends on on the sound of those sometimes I'll take those out and just have this the kick in kickout Kick sub and then I'll mute my room mic chamber and another room mic and I will copy them over to basically another track that's a stereo out so our first sample which is these are both the same exact things it's just one has the the room and chamber stuff muted and one has all the main kick in kickout stuff muted that way I have a stereo spread of that effect kind of sound and then I have my mono kick anyway this is what the room sounds like I like doing that cuz then I can just mess with that kick and play around with it without that room stuff getting louder and I like how the room is so natural you hear the I like the that uh those Dynamics it's really really nice so here is the sample kick with the kit muted basically that sample Kick's just giving me that that kick out that I that I don't have that well so the last thing is the snare on the snare I just kept this top a top B and the snare bottom mic this kind of blend here let you listen to what this sounds like right just simple simple snare this is Blended in with the rest of the kit muted it's very very subtle but it just it it brings that glue together first we're going to mess with the kick drums here we'll start with my kick out listen to that all right so first we're going to do some EQ I'm going to take some of this this low mid around like 300 um there's a weird kind of frequency at around 2K and then I need some some top in there let's see how that sounds sounds great now I want some Dynamics so I'm going to start with some Dynamics on the console to hear how that hear how that [Music] [Music] sounds now I'm going to insert on my kick in we're going to put a Chandler limited tg1 limiter I it just adds a little something into the kick that I really like there's some rumble in there we're going to fix really [Music] quick I like that great so now on the kick out basically just boost a tiny bit of low take out some of the muddy frequency here and uh take a little bit of 1K out let's see how this sounds with the with the kick in and kick [Music] out decided to not do the tg1 limiter I liked it and but I kind of don't like it now we're going to leave no compression on that kickout I think it's fine the way it is now let's uh go to our our samples let's he those with the kick in and kick out all right we're going to add a little bit of EQ to my sample kit uh I just want to take a tiny bit of 300 out and add a little bit more lowend so about at 60 Herz all right let's see if that tg1 limiter works on this one I like that we're going to keep that I'm not going to change the EQ or dynamics of the room at all the kick room it sounds great how it is so let's see how this plays in relation to the whole drum set [Music] here I like that the kick sounds great all right snare top snare top what do we got here sounds pretty boring pretty lame we're gonna do a touch of the 1176 for compression [Music] here sounds awesome now we're going to add some EQ the ne [Music] 1073 that might sound dramatic but I think with the whole kit it's going to sound [Music] good sweet so we're basically with the 1073 we're boosting a bunch of low-end 110 Hertz uh a bunch of high-end and a little bit of 3.2k sounds awesome um I do want to add a tiny bit of EQ I want to take some like 1.5k out [Music] [Music] awesome now let's add one of my favorite things the Lexicon 480l so we're going to make sure we got snare plate is loaded going to bring up these faders so you can really hear how this [Music] sounds [Music] give some taste adds a really cool snap and we're going to add a tiny bit of my brasty we're just doing a small room a really fast Decay here Reverb [Music] time yeah awesome snare double just a reminder the snare double is going into the side of the shell on the snare drum let's hear that real [Music] quick it kind of sounds dead um sounds like nothing's going on but I I promise it's important so we're going to add a little bit of EQ I'm going to take some of that 500 [Music] out good all right we're going to add a little bit of compression we're doing the 1176 awesome and then a little bit of KN 1073 EQ let's hear it with the snare [Music] top okay it sounds terrible on its own but we're going to I'm just going to play the snare top sounds pretty good now the snare double with [Music] it it just has this this loveliness I don't know I'm going to cut we're going to listen to the whole drums the whole the whole kit but I'm going to cut that snare [Music] double double [Music] in it's so subtle but there's just that that low like awesomeness in fact when we did these recordings I brought Pete in to to show him this and I I brought him in I sat him down and I had it muted and he was like oh yeah yeah sounds really good and I was like now watch this and I unmuted it and our intern captured this photo and this is the face that he made when he heard that snare double it's it's really a cool little trick all right so snare bottom this is going to be pretty simple just doing a distressor to kind of match these 1176 and then a little bit of EQ on the Neeve 1073 all we're doing is adding a tiny bit of that nice KNE highend it it sounds really good with the snares so these are our three snares [Music] together all right and this is the snare with the [Music] kit what else do you want sounds sounds awesome the high hat is good on its own I'm just going to take out some of the lowend um we're going to put a highp pass filter around I think it's about 90 htz now let's get our Toms sounding good so the first two Toms we're just going to go to this little fill moment here I have the first two Toms going to my rert Nee 535 I had originally had my 543 is on Tom 3 and four but I'm getting some weird noises and something's wrong um so we're not going to do that I'm just going to use the Dynamics on the console so let's hear these first two Toms sound pretty good we're going to add a little bit of EQ here so let's listen to Tom one yeah we're going to add just a tiny bit of highend we're going to cut some of the low end [Music] out and then I want it to Peak a little more so we're going to [Music] add yeah we just going to add a little bit of 3K on Tom two o we got a lot of low Rumble so we're going to see where that's at yeah about at 300 going to add some 2K and 8K and roll off some low end sounds great Tom three oof we need to roll a bunch of the uh low mids out so maybe around 300 add some top end yeah great add some compression on the console oo now it's sounding awesome Tom for kind of boring let's add some EQ add some top end get rid of some of that mud and add some compression awesome now let's hear it all four Toms together all right to make these Toms sound even better we are going to add the pope audio the backx 2020 this thing is incredible so we're going to bring up a little bit of the high end a little bit of the low end and it's going to make these Toms sound even better here we go so this is the overheads without the back sand all EQ with the [Music] EQ huge difference it even makes the snare drum sound better so we're going to just do the whole kit here without the pope back sand all EQ now we're going to add [Music] it it's just so good [Music] all right so now on the overheads I watched a video a long time ago using the Rev one on the room mics and the overheads to create more of a room sound and I loved it as soon as I started working in the studio I started kind of using this technique except with the Rev five so it's the Rev five on a percussion plate we're going to add that into the overheads bring those up and I'm just going to solo the overheads and the Rev five so you can just hear how this [Music] sounds it's kind of cool uh let's take it out and blend it in so you can really hear it I took a little bit of low out low end out of [Music] it [Music] all right so we're going to mute [Music] it [Music] unmute all it does is is give a little bit more life to the drums without it the drums sound really tight which is fine but for this song I was honestly looking for more of a natural drum sound I didn't want the drums to sound like way overly processed cuz it's kind of a blues jazz song Let's listen to the Bas I'm going to go ahead and throw the tube Tech cl1b on cuz I can't listen to bass guitar without using that and let's see how it sounds with the bass [Music] guitar it's really close super close let's hear how it sounds with the the rest of the [Music] instruments really close Okay the last thing that we're going to do is add some parallel compression to the drums I love parallel compression it's so much fun to play with so I'm going to switch you over to mix B make sure everything's right so basically how I have it routed on the console is everything goes to mixbus a mixbus a is like your normal left right in your Daw I have all drums also going to mixb B and then mixb b gets routed back into a and then I have a separate fader that I can move up and down and decide the level the cool part about that is I can insert on mix bus be anything I want so I have the xener limiter inserted and then the TG 124 111s by Chandler limited both by Chandler limited I've got the input gain on the xener limiter cranked all the way up and then I'm boosting a bit of high-end 8K on the TG 12411 and a tiny bit of lowend I think at like 50 or 70 HZ 70 HZ so I'm switching you over to B so you can listen just to B and how that sounds this is with the inserts on [Music] off you're getting a really cool attack with that high-end lift of course a ridiculous amount of of gain that comes up now we're going to blend our B compression parallel compression and EQ into our signal so I'm going to mute the mix mute the base just so we can hear the drums and I'm going to push play and slowly lift it [Music] up all right let's listen to it with the mix [Music] there a pretty big difference from where we started real quick I'm going to play you where we begun so this is the mix with the base and just the raw [Music] drums and now the this is all the processing that we did with the full [Music] [Music] mix it's a pretty big difference and that's it that's drums using the best of digital and the best of [Music] analog

Channel: Josh West Mix

Views: 18,044

Keywords: analog console, analog mix, analog summing, analog vs digital, digital vs analog, mixing analog, outboard gear, professional mix, universal audio, mixing drums, how to mix drums, auto align, autoalign, josh west, josh west mix, mixing audio, drums time align, profesional mix, recording stuio, lexicon 480l, quiztones

Id: A4EMGpnrV8w

Length: 36min 53sec (2213 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2023