@Skub as ked the question about how to mix drums, and get kicks to stand aout without murdering the rest of the song with bass, here's my approach, which seems to work for me.
Do you "know" your speakers/cans?, Does what you mix sound close to how it sounds when you lsiten to your mixes away from the studio? bear this in mind too.
I'm assuming most of you won't be miking a real kit in a studio.
Before you start think about what the SONG needs, can you hear what would fit? Do you want open sounding wobbly jazz skins? or tight rock/trebly heavy metal drums, are the drums driving the song or just keeping it together, as Jazz brushes do.
First choose your kit wisely, picking the right one means a lot of the work has been done for you..pick the wrong one and it's a devils own job to sort it out.
The approach is different for drum loops, where all of the drums are in one stereo wav, I'll deal with that later...
For VST drum instrumentsThis first bit gives you the ability to control each kit piece individually
1. After picking the right kit, create individual outs, so each pierce of the kit goes to a separate fader in the mixer, this is really important.
2. Create a submix buss, where all of the drum tracks are contained
3. If you DAW can do it, create a VCA channel for the drum buss.
This bit gets the mix between the kit pieces right
1. Solo the drum buss
2.Bring up the kick fader to about -10db (by the time all kit pieces are up it'll be knocking on the door of around -7db on the submix buss fader) get the balance right beteen the bass and the kick.
3. Repeat by adding snare and hats, until all the pieces sit nicely, pan 'em around a bit, but keep the kick dead centre, and the snare pretty close to centre, cymbals wider and perc further out.
4. Should sound wide and tasty now.
5. The positions of the faders will be different across the drum buss, what the VCA does is to move the faders together with respect to each other, this is a feature on many consoles, this makes controlling all the drums a cinch.
Bring up the Bass instrument so it's balanced with the kit. It is very likely that it will sound too loud when mixed down, so pull it back a bit.
Balance the kit and bass with the Vocals
1. Bring in the LVox track, with the 3 together the vox should be very clear, (I tend not to use sidechains to move stuff out of the way), listen to any dance song on the radio and you'll hear the vocal, then bass and the kick above everything else, that's why it's important that the vox sits proud of the other stuff as that carries the hooky melody, and that sells records not the kick, nor the bass.
2. I pretty much always use an LA2 compressor to make the vocal pop out, usually a high quality plate verb and maybe a smidge of delay, but not much a couple of percent, just to file off the dryness, no EQ on the vox at this stage, if it was tracked correctly the vox might not need any EQ.
You won't get it right first time, but leave these where they are and add the other instruments around it, you need a reference point, otherwise you'll never get it right.
If you are really not happy with the sound of the kit, then try changing individual kit pieces rather than EQ/Compression, it's much quicker. One of my favourite kits is the Gretsch Pork Pie, or '60's Ludwig kit, it's OK too to mash up a kit.
EQ and compressionTheres been a lot written about these, but remember there maybe some compression applied in the tracking of the kit originally, so don't go bonkers at the start with either of these.
Because the kit pieces have been panned about, it declutters the centre so the LVox can pop out, but these panned kit pieces might clash with other instruments/voices sitting in the same place, the trick is to avoid their frequencies and move them away in the panorama.
Voxengo Span plus is a good tool to see where the frequencies clash, also Fabfilter Pro EQ 3.
Brave and bold EQ cuts, using High/Low/band pass filters can work really well too, they'll move stuff out of the way frequency wise, it stuns me sometimes how kicks get carved up, some sound really harsh and thin, others some boomy 808's especially, invert this to make the clashing instrument get out of the drums way...Sidechaining will also be very effective, but this is usually used on the vocal track to move kicks/bass out of the way.
I only use EQ on the drums to get stuff out of the way, sometimes the Aphex exciter on cymbals and perc like tamb.
How does the whole song sound?It's about now that I listen to the whole song, if there are loads of vocals a BV submix buss is very useful for balancing Drums and Vocals.
Individual kit piece CompressionOnce the balance is right and it's sounding good,I'll think about using a compressor on the kick and snare, as inserts in the submix buss. On a kick, maybe 2, a bit of one and a bit of another works well rather than a crushing All-buttons-in 1176.
Drum buss compressionSometimes a compressor applied to the drum submix buss works well, but it does apply to all of the kit, and can make the levels sound just right, by stopping nasty peeks in crash cymbals, or rim shots etc.
Some folk add "Vintage grit" to the drum master buss, Arturia has a Bus Force plugin for doing it all, and it does sound pretty good, but use them sparingly, think back to the love and care that the recording engineers took when miking the kit when they were capturing the samples...Why would you add distortion and smother the sound? Only do it if it really makes it sound better, not becasue you have the plugin and want to follow fashion.
Master Buss compressionWhen everything is sounding close to the end bung a good quality master buss compressor on the master buss, this will give the whole thing a "joined up" sound, don't use much, I can recommend the SSL master buss comp or the bx_Townhouse bother are brillant at this, just tickle the meter, at first you'll hardly notice any difference, but listen to the mixdown on the final streaming platform and you'll hear the difference.
LoopsI'll do a separate post for these....
Dance tracks
There is a brilliant vst called Big Kick which is an easy way to get at least the kick right for EDM numbers,it's from Plugin Boutique, just wish they did big Snare, one cool feature is that you can tune the kick to the key of the song, a much under used tip. Waves do a plugin called Smack Attack that handles this for kits, it works very well.
The main thing is to use your ears, leave it, return the next day and make subtle changes.
Hope this helps
Rich
