Opinions: Recording and Mixing drums

Posted on Dec 15, 2004 11:25 am
TheJazzyOne
Your favorite rockstar
Member Since: Feb 03, 2003

Much like the guitar mixing topic, I thought I'd just start some discussion on techniques, tips, tricks, whatever when it comes to recording and mixing drums.

Instead of starting with a question this time, I'll explain what I do. Then you guys can jump in, either asking a question about my setup, recommending something new, or posting your own ideas and opinions. The last thread had some good discussion (and hopefully it's still not dead). Let's see if we can generate some with this one, too.


My drummer plays a 7 piece kit, which is challenging. This spring I plan on updating my recording equipment a bit, but right now when my band lays down foundation tracks I only have 6 mics available for the drums. I mic...

-Kick
-Snare
-High Toms
-Low Toms
-Left Overhead (condenser)
-Right Overhead (condenser)


I have kind of a weird way of mixing the drums... well, weird in my mind anyway. The nice thing is, even though I only have 6 tracks of input, while mixing I'm not limited with tracks at all, so I make lots and lots of copies and stuff.

I put all the tracks in. I keep the kick very low in the mix. I make a copy of the snare track, and on the copy I heavily gate it and give it an EQ boost at about 5 KHz. Then I mix in the copied track barely higher than the original snare track. This makes the snap of the snare really shine thru the mix, and if the snare gets buried I can bring up that gated track to pull it out a bit more.

I do very similar things with my Tom mics, making copies and gating and EQing them so that the attack of the Toms are very prominant. I usually don't have to mix these tracks as high as the gated snare, unless there are some heavy tom-intensive parts.

With the overheads I pan them about 90% left and 90% right. Then I solo just those two tracks, and adjust the volume difference until the snare is in the middle of the stereo field. Then I'll unsolo them and mix their volumes to match the rest of my drums.

When I have a pretty decent mix of drums (with the kick still low), I render it to a stereo wav file, then open that wav in SoundForge. I compress the HECK out of it until it's basically a large rectangle. Then back in ACID I drop that compressed stereo drum kit mix into the project and tuck it back kinda low under the drums. This adds to the fullness of the sound, but since you still have the uncompressed tracks (especially the overheads), your dynamics aren't lost. I read that in the Mixing Engineer's Handbook, and I was skeptical at first, but I love the results.

At this point I take all these tracks and add them to a bus.

Then as a last step, I copy the kick drum track and take it into soundforge. I gate the track and use drumagog (drum trigger replacement software). I replace the kick with a very good sounding kick sample that comes with drumagog, and make that a new track in my ACID file. Then I use drumagog on the gated kick track again, this time using a techno-ish 909 kick drum from a drum machine program I downloaded, and call it Kick -Sub.

With the new edited kick and the kick-sub tracks, I make a new bus just for kick drum. The techno kick and the triggered kick sound VERY powerful together, and the fact that they're on their own bus gives me lots of control on how they sit in the overall drum mix. I just started doing this last part on my last couple projects, and I'm hugely impressed with the results.

So basically I start out with 6 drum tracks, but by the time I'm done mixing drums I have 12 tracks I'm working with.


Sorry, this turned into a long post, but I'd love to hear some other ideas, or some feedback on these ideas.

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