Mixing Drums

Recording and mixing drums is a huge challenge. A few weeks ago I posted a video showing you how I recorded drums in someone’s living room. We used 7 microphones going straight into some affordable mic pres, straight into Pro Tools. We were all very pleased with the raw sound we got. Today however I want you to hear an audio example of the raw verses mixed drum track so you can get a feel for what you can do in a home studio.

Raw Drums

[audio:Raw Drums.mp3]

Mixed Drums

[audio:Mixed Drums.mp3]

Kicking It Off With EQ

A lot of what goes on in mixing drums is getting the right EQ balance. You want to make sure you’re hearing both the low end in the kick as well as the click of the beater. The snare needs to be deep and fat but at the same time crack and cut through the rest of the mix. Obviously you’re hearing the drum mix out of context with the rest of the band so it’s hard to explain my mixing decisions, but I wanted to show you some screen grabs of the plugins I was using on this track.

Here you can see I’ve got a generous boost on the kick drum at around 56hz to emphasize some of that low end, while at the same time I’ve got a slight cut around 150hz to get out of the way of my bass guitar. I also wanted to bring out the attack of the beater on the drum head, but felt it best to really affect a copy of the kick drum track and blend it in with the original. So I bussed the kick out to an aux track and applied some serious EQ to it. See below.

The two kick drum tracks combine nicely to give me that low end that I want as well as that “click” to cut through the mix (especially on speakers with bad bass response like little earbuds).

Let’s Fatten Up That Snare

The snare is my most favorite drum so I tried to take some time with this. There is compression, EQ, an expander, reverb, and even harmonic distortion on this track. Right now I just want to show you my EQ curve for the snare as well as some grit I added with the free Massey Tape Head plugin I mentioned in a post a while back.

Using an analog tape emulator plugin like Massey’s Tape Head is a great way to give a snare track some “air” and crackle. I simply flipped the mode to “bright” and adjusted the drive knob to taste.

For the snare EQ I used a high pass filter to roll off a lot of low end. I boosted a smidge around 350hz to bring out the fullness in the drum. Then I cut some of the “boxiness” out around 625hz or so to get rid of the cardboard sound. And finally I used a subtle shelf to boost the highs to open up the air and presence of the snare.

Squashing It All

I tend to run all the drum tracks through a stereo bus and treat it like a group fader. What I also do is run a copy of all the drum tracks to a second stereo bus and then compress the heck out of it. This gives me a lifeless, but slamming, stereo mix of the drums which I can mix in underneath the uncompressed kit. I used another free plugin, the Bomb Factory 1176 that comes with Pro Tools to slam those drums down.

The Basic Tools

I obviously used more plugins than these, but really all I ever use to get drums to where they need to be are the basics: EQ, compression, reverb, and the occasional distortion plugin. There is no real secret to mixing drums other than listening a lot and using your basic tools to bring it all into focus. And like anything, the more you mix, the better you’ll get. Now get to it!

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For a video covering the techniques I used in mixing these drums click here!