news

A Quick Guide To Mixing Drums

Oct 19, 2017 The Wavediggerz

Tags drums, effects, mixing

Mixing your drums right gives you a good foundation to build the rest of your mix around. More often than not regardless of the type of beats you create the drums are gonna play a prominent role. Think about it, listen to some of your favourite beats, particularly the drums. Where do they sit in the overall mix? What is their purpose? Drums are key to not only the track in question but also to your ability to define your sound as a producer. Check out our quick guide to mixing drums and bring some extra weight and punch to your drum mix.

Routing

It might seem obvious but lets route the drums before we start to mix them. Having a multi output kit gives us greater control of our drums. Creating individual channels for each of our drum parts is essential in order to be able to manipulate each stem of our drum mix. Next we want to take the individual channels and route them to a drum bus. In doing so we can now manipulate elements individually and collectively in a group.

As you can see in the example above, we have all our drums on separate channels using a multi output version of Native Instruments Battery. This will work with any multi output VST / AU device or with audio drum stems on separate channels. Each sound from our drum kit is then re-routed to our drum bus (Bus 1).

Levels / Volume

Once we have our drums correctly routed lets focus on the levels. Build your drum mix around kick and snare, typically the most prominent parts of the drum mix. Get your peak levels set at -0.3 to -0.6 for the Kick and a little lower -0.9 for the snare. These more often than not will be the loudest elements of the drum mix but be aware there is always exceptions to the rules and it will be up to you to decide which of your drums are the lead. Once the kick and snare are dialled in you can add the remaining drum parts track by track adjusting the level accordingly. The focus here should be complementing the foundation drums not overshadowing them.

Compression

Compression on the individual drum elements can help bring some consistency to the hits. If there are discrepancies between how hard and how soft some parts are being played you can use a compressor to even this level out if you desire. limiting the dynamic range with a simple fast attack with a slow release setting should do the trick however It should be pointed out here that compression might not solve the problem entirely. It could be depending on your source material that a transient shaper or chopping some of the individual hits could be a better solution.

We can add some mix bus compression to our drum mix to add some punch, smoothness or thickness. When used correctly compression can act as glue (coherence) to your drums. Be careful not to choke the mix here and focus on the groove of your drums when adjusting your attack and release settings. Compression can also be used as a creative effects plugin, greatly influencing the tone or shine of the drums as well as the groove. We will have a more in depth look at mix bus compression in a future post.

EQ

Using an equaliser we can clean up our drums, cutting away any frequencies that don’t sit well in the mix. We can then shape and adjust the tone to our preference. Using a graphic EQ can give us some visual indication of what our drums are actually doing and where they reside on the frequency spectrum. Below are some points of reference to consider when EQing your drums. As always there is never a one stop fix for all especially in the art of mixing and your ears are really the greatest tool you have. These reference points should help assist in getting you into the right ball park then its up to you to find the sweet spot.

Cut mids if sound is too boxy around 400 HZ

Boost lows for power

Boost the high-mids for point

808 - Click 1-1.5 kHz

Toms - Body between 100-200 Hz

Kick - Punch 50-60 Hz, Beater 2-4khz

Snare - Crack around 3 kHz

Percussion -Attack around 7 kHz

Cymbals - Increase hardness 10 kHz

There are plenty of more in-depth drum EQ guides online. For example this one from mymixengineer.com is pretty good check it out here

Panning / Stereo Imaging

Using the full width of the stereo field is essential to add clarity and space to your drum mix. A good tip to use here is keeping the lows in Mono and adding some width to the higher frequencies to help add some presence. Once you have your solid Mono Kick / Snare combination you can spread the drums with some panning or widening to particular elements such as the hi hats or percussion sounds.

Remember we’re just focusing on the drum mix and not the overall mix of our beat/song so it’s good to leave plenty of space in the stereo field for the other elements and generally speaking your drums are gonna appear fairly central. It’s a good idea to think about the way an acoustic drum kit is set up. Where is each drum positioned in the stereo field in relation to one another and the listener? A little panning to the Hi hats, toms and cymbals can give them greater natural clarity and their own space in mix.

Space / Reverb

Reverb can bring our drums a greater sense of depth. Using a send FX we can send our individual drums to the same reverb. This helps give the impression the drums are recorded in the same space. Having the ability to adjust the send amount of each drum channel individually gives us far greater control than adding an insert FX on the whole drum mix. For example reverb tends to work really well on Snares and Tom drums but you will probably want to use it more sparingly on the kick. This way you can adjust the amounts accordingly. You may also wish to experiment using multiple reverb patches. For example reverb plates work really well on snare drums. So you could use a reverb plate as an insert on the snare drums channel and still bus it out to our reverb send t give it the same spatial continuity as the other drums in the kit.

Conclusion

Taking these simple steps enable us to get a punchier, tighter drum mix. Our end goal here is to create an amazing drum mix that works as the foundation of the beat we are working on. There are obviously more complexed and creative manipulations you can perform whilst mixing your drums but its usually a good practice to build on these mixing fundamentals first. As always remember there are really no rules and these are just some guidelines to work with when building your core drum mix. You may well have your own techniques and we would invite you to share in the comments section below.