Guitar Gear Forum

For grins and giggles I stuck a compressor on my Slate drums and WOW! They perked right up.

Do you all normally add anything in your DAW to you virtual drums? What are my Logic folks using?

Damn forum maintenance, typed out a huge post. Anyway:

I usually treat programmed drums the same way as real drums if I'm not feeling lazy. Obviously these are the settings that worked for the project I copied them from, so ymmv.

Kick: highpass at 80Hz, narrow boost at 110Hz, 3kHz and 12kHz. Really wide boosts at 60Hz and 6kHz. (1-3dB).

Snare: boost 7kHz for attack, then Stillwell Rocket compressor which sounds great on snare.

Snare parallel send track: guitar amp sim for distortion, some reverb, mixed in really low, you're not supposed to notice the distortion, only the small amount of increased harmonics.

Tom bus: Stillwell Major Tom compressor, eq wide boost at 1.2kHz, big narrow scoop at 700Hz.

Overheads: small narrow scoop at 2kHz to give room for vocal sibilance (the same on the guitar tracks), high shelf at 12kHz, room impulse verb (very small amount and only if needed), a little bit of compression. High pass depending on how much snare and toms you want on the overheads.

Room: Usually compress the heck out of this one. High and/or low pass to taste.

Snare, kick and toms have a send to the parallel compressor track, which is set to really smash the dynamics. I use the Vladg Molot compressor for this pretty much exclusively.

On the stereo drum bus: really wide 3-4dB scoop around 500Hz, some tape saturation.

Good compressors: VarietyOfSound Density, Vladg Molot, Stillwell Rocket, Stillwell Major Tom, SSL Listen Mic, GVST G-Comp. Good eq, Stillwell 1973. (Can you tell I like Stillwell plugins a lot?)

For already processed drums, a buss compressor should be about all that is necessary. I wont get into the problems involved with using pre processed drums. In most cases they should work fine. A compressor and maybe some subtle eq and you should be good..

All the things nakedzen pointed are all techniques used, but i would really caution against using that amount of processing for something like Slate.. if it takes that much work to get something like pre-processed slate to work in a mix, then the problem lies elsewhere.. An the endless tweaking of drums will just get a sound and feel that s unnatural and unpleasant..

And all this comes from your own experience and trials. I've done everything and then some when mixing and recording drums. And something everyone hears at the beginning of learming how to mix/record, yet rarely believe until you get the experience is, "the less the better." I do a lot more live recording of drums again and i use to have use everything an the kitchen sink to try to get them to sit in a mix. Drastic eq cuts and boosts, heavy parallel compression, sidechaining, distortion , endless amounts of reverb impulses, etc etc etc.. Now I'm down to the essentials, eq, compression and perhaps the most important for sitting drums in its own space, reverb. And i use so little eq than from my past that i wouldn't have believed it possible 10 years ago. And imo, the best sound is the most natural and i feel I'm getting that at this point.

So using a compressor on the drum buss, which btw is usually neccessary, makes you drums pop, then by all means use what works. But if you are finding on some mixes that you are pushing that compressor harder and harder and the eq tweaks are getting bigger and bigger, the best option is to step back as reassess the entire mix. Cause i can say for certain my mixes are WAY better than they were 10 years ago, an the amount of processing i use compared to my older stuff is miniscule by comparison.

EndTime wrote:For already processed drums, a buss compressor should be about all that is necessary. I wont get into the problems involved with using pre processed drums. In most cases they should work fine. A compressor and maybe some subtle eq and you should be good..

All the things nakedzen pointed are all techniques used, but i would really caution against using that amount of processing for something like Slate.. if it takes that much work to get something like pre-processed slate to work in a mix, then the problem lies elsewhere.. An the endless tweaking of drums will just get a sound and feel that s unnatural and unpleasant..

And all this comes from your own experience and trials. I've done everything and then some when mixing and recording drums. And something everyone hears at the beginning of learming how to mix/record, yet rarely believe until you get the experience is, "the less the better." I do a lot more live recording of drums again and i use to have use everything an the kitchen sink to try to get them to sit in a mix. Drastic eq cuts and boosts, heavy parallel compression, sidechaining, distortion , endless amounts of reverb impulses, etc etc etc.. Now I'm down to the essentials, eq, compression and perhaps the most important for sitting drums in its own space, reverb. And i use so little eq than from my past that i wouldn't have believed it possible 10 years ago. And imo, the best sound is the most natural and i feel I'm getting that at this point.

So using a compressor on the drum buss, which btw is usually neccessary, makes you drums pop, then by all means use what works. But if you are finding on some mixes that you are pushing that compressor harder and harder and the eq tweaks are getting bigger and bigger, the best option is to step back as reassess the entire mix. Cause i can say for certain my mixes are WAY better than they were 10 years ago, an the amount of processing i use compared to my older stuff is miniscule by comparison.

Yeah, I am using the Slate stuff and feel it sounds really good for my needs "out of the can" - I was just surprised with a little compression that they perked up even more so I was just wondering if there were any other things I should consider.

Yeah everything I posted was taken from a project that has real drums, so definitely no need to use them all. There's no generic "right way" to mix anyway so they don't necessarily work for your mix that has real drums either.

I've never used virtual drums, but when mixing, I like to set up a drum buss and basically compress the entire kit (occasionally I'll take the kick out of the drum buss or HPF the compressor's sidechain) . Between that and mix bus compression I end up not really doing any further dynamics processing to the individual tracks, though I will EQ as necessary and occasionally mult snare/kick and sometimes toms to get some extra uncompressed transient detail or hyper compressed sustain/ body depending on the song. I like heavy compression on room mics in a GOOD room but since that's part of the drum sound I'd tend to record that on the way in.

nakedzen wrote:There's no generic "right way" to mix anyway so they don't necessarily work for your mix that has real drums either.

Nakedzen proves that he's a man worth listening to right here.