For me the main foundation for a solid track is the drums. Depending on the style of music you make, the approach to drum mixing varies. I mostly work in a mixture of pop/dance and R&B, and the way I mix drums here is quite different from rock or jazz. So just know that this is about getting great drums in pop, dance and R&B tracks.
First and most importantly, get a great collection of drum sounds! Unless you are a skilled sound designer and want to create your own drum sounds, I recommend buying a few good collections like Urban Fire from sonic specialists or the Hitkit from popmusic.dk. There is some great sounding drums in those kits that I use in almost all my songs. Without cool sounds to work from, it is really an uphill battle to get a great mix.
I start by focusing on the kick. It’s usually the loudest sound in the track and it needs to sound great. First decide if the kick you got is the right one for the track. You might need to blend it with another kick for a different attack or sub, or maybe replace it completely. Let’s say in this exsample we decide we need a harder attack. So to get a harder attack we add another kick with a different attack. Go through a few different favorite kicks and pick one that sounds about right . To avoid clashing the sub, I filter out the low frequencies of the new kick. Since I already commited the original kick to audio by recording the midi to audio, I can simply add the soundfile of the new kick to a new track. I match the start of the new kick with the old, filter out the sub of the new kick and copy it throughout the song. By adjusting the level of the new kick I can get as much or little I want blended with the old. Now that we have the right attack we need to make sure the sub in the kick matches with the bass. If not, we can adjust the bass with EQ. Please note that you need a pair of speakers that go pretty low to make this adjustment of the sub. If you don’t have speakers that go low enough, you might get away with using a pair of good headphones.
Next I go to the clap or snare. Is the snap or punch right? Again I will blend different sounds to get it right. Also experiment with slightly delaying one of the sounds to get a fuller sound. I also use a great plugin called Transient Designer from SPL that runs on themixing boards. It can really manipulate the attack and decay in a cool way.
Finally I add the hihats and percussion/loops. I often use Stylus RMX (read more here…) for that with many custom made loops. It’s a great tool I can highly recommend. Make sure you filter out the bottom end, so the loops don’t mess with the kick. Remember we need the kick to stand out. Also don’t use all the loops throughout the whole song. Cut some of them out in the verses, breaks and bridge so we create variations and developments in the arrangement.
Now that the drums sounds decent, I usually make a drum bus to control the level of the drums on one single stereo fader. I also run the drums through pre-fader sends to another buss to add a touch of hard compression New York style, and maybe even a bit of distortion from a guitar amp plugin. If you feed the second buss using prefader sends from the individual tracks, you can add the effect to certain elements only instead of the whole drum buss.
That’s it for now. I would love to hear any comments or questions you might have on drum mixing.
First and most importantly, get a great collection of drum sounds! Unless you are a skilled sound designer and want to create your own drum sounds, I recommend buying a few good collections like Urban Fire from sonic specialists or the Hitkit from popmusic.dk. There is some great sounding drums in those kits that I use in almost all my songs. Without cool sounds to work from, it is really an uphill battle to get a great mix.
I start by focusing on the kick. It’s usually the loudest sound in the track and it needs to sound great. First decide if the kick you got is the right one for the track. You might need to blend it with another kick for a different attack or sub, or maybe replace it completely. Let’s say in this exsample we decide we need a harder attack. So to get a harder attack we add another kick with a different attack. Go through a few different favorite kicks and pick one that sounds about right . To avoid clashing the sub, I filter out the low frequencies of the new kick. Since I already commited the original kick to audio by recording the midi to audio, I can simply add the soundfile of the new kick to a new track. I match the start of the new kick with the old, filter out the sub of the new kick and copy it throughout the song. By adjusting the level of the new kick I can get as much or little I want blended with the old. Now that we have the right attack we need to make sure the sub in the kick matches with the bass. If not, we can adjust the bass with EQ. Please note that you need a pair of speakers that go pretty low to make this adjustment of the sub. If you don’t have speakers that go low enough, you might get away with using a pair of good headphones.
Next I go to the clap or snare. Is the snap or punch right? Again I will blend different sounds to get it right. Also experiment with slightly delaying one of the sounds to get a fuller sound. I also use a great plugin called Transient Designer from SPL that runs on themixing boards. It can really manipulate the attack and decay in a cool way.
Finally I add the hihats and percussion/loops. I often use Stylus RMX (read more here…) for that with many custom made loops. It’s a great tool I can highly recommend. Make sure you filter out the bottom end, so the loops don’t mess with the kick. Remember we need the kick to stand out. Also don’t use all the loops throughout the whole song. Cut some of them out in the verses, breaks and bridge so we create variations and developments in the arrangement.
Now that the drums sounds decent, I usually make a drum bus to control the level of the drums on one single stereo fader. I also run the drums through pre-fader sends to another buss to add a touch of hard compression New York style, and maybe even a bit of distortion from a guitar amp plugin. If you feed the second buss using prefader sends from the individual tracks, you can add the effect to certain elements only instead of the whole drum buss.
That’s it for now. I would love to hear any comments or questions you might have on drum mixing.
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