Here’s a nice explanation of how you can use expansion to clean up drum close mics. In most cases you don’t need to completely remove the background noise-just decrease it enough so that it’s not interfering with your mix. Many engineers use gates on drums, but they can make the drums sound choked and unnatural. You might know about expanders if you’ve ever used a noise gate. If the bleed is too loud, you won’t be able to push the close mics up in the mix without adding distracting background spill from the cymbals.Īn expander is like a compressor in reverse-it reduces the level of the signal when it drops below the threshold instead of when it goes above. The close mics are how you turn up specific sounds like the kick and snare to work best in the mix.īut no matter how well they’re placed, drum close mics will capture some bleed from the other sounds in the kit.
When most engineers record drums, they place microphones in the room, over the drummer’s head and up close on each individual element of the kit. Here’s a diagram of drum tracks properly bussed out for mixing. Set these busses to output to the main drum bus as well.įinally, you should create a separate bus for the left and right overheads so you can adjust them independently. You should also create mono busses for any drums that have been mic’d with multiple microphones, like if you used a snare top and bottom mic. With the output of your individual mics routed to this aux channel you’ll be able to apply processing to the entire drum sound and adjust it’s overall level. To start you’ll need a main stereo bus for the entire drum mix. That means creating busses to organize the tracks and process them in the right places.
The first step to mixing drums successfully is to set up your tracks right. In this article I’ll show you how to get a powerful and punchy drum mix in 7 steps.
But mixing a good drum sound can be hard when you’re just getting startedĮven so, you can get results if you know how to apply a few key techniques. Mixing drums is one of the most satisfying parts of music production.ĭrums propel the rhythmic action of a song and getting them right is a great feeling.
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