Mixing Drums
by Cian Riordan
Editor’s Note: This is Cian’s response to a question posted 8/13/21 on the LWMR Discord server. It is archived here for posterity and ease of access. Enjoy!
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Mixing Drums
After now listening to many of Jon & Matt’s podcasts, as well as existing on this discord for a while, I’ve found myself feeling a little perplexed by people’s ability to mix things so fast. It finally clicked that many folks these days (especially in the pop world) are getting stems to mix from — not full multitrack sessions — and often not real drumsets/instruments in real rooms. In my world, for better or worse, I’m almost always getting multitrack files. So the prospect of only spending 2-3 hours on a mix is just impossible. That will often times barely get me past the drum sound! So for us mere mortals that are still stuck mixing real instruments, here’s my process for approaching drum mixing.
Template
Dropbox link for CR drum template
I’ve attached a slimmed down version of my mix template with all of the drum bussing. This has evolved over many years and has taken many forms, but it’s really just a good starting point for me and speeds up my workflow quite a bit. I’ve got three main busses that feed into a master drum buss. ‘DRUM SUB’ is my uncompressed (or lightly compressed) buss. ‘DRUM PAR’ is my heavily compressed buss, and ‘DRUM DIST’ is my parallel distortion buss. I don’t necessarily always use these, but having them ready to go makes it easier to quickly audition different ideas. Sometimes I’ll duplicate one or two of them to get another flavor involved. Again, everything to taste.
Also in the template are some very basic aux’s I find myself using often. There are two parallel SansAmp busses. I have two because often times if I use one on the kick drum, it rarely works for the snare drum, so I have a second one ready to go. There’s also a ‘SNARE SLAP’ and ‘SNARE GATE VERB’ that rarely get used but if I need to inject a little mojo, they’re a good starting point.
The ‘D SUB TRIM’ is just a master fader controlling everything going into the bussing, so if I get a little overzealous with level, I can manage the gain staging quickly without having volume automation grouped. These three (sometimes more) busses then feed into the final ‘DRUM MSTR’ , where I’ll do final overall EQ tweaks and level adjustments.
Process/Theory
I see lots of people’s previous responses say they begin with getting the overheads to sound great and then start blending in close mics. If the drums were recorded by someone who knew what they were doing, with a good sounding kit, in a nice room — this would be a wonderful way to approach things. However 90% of the time that’s not the case with tracks that come my way. So I’m solving fro two problems — making the drums: 1) The foundational rhythm element. It doesn’t matter how good tonally your drums sound, they need to fill specific duties to carry the rhythm of the song. This is usually problem solving with phase within the elements of the drum set and then mostly getting the kick and snare to sit right around the rest of the instruments. Literally getting the right transients in the right frequency ranges — agnostic of ‘tone’ and ‘vibe’. 2) The sense of space for the mix. The drums are a huge part of this… and the foundation for the aesthetic of a mix. Is it a tight space? Big verby snare? This is all great, but will rarely deal with this stuff until #1 is taken care of. So my process starts with close mics.
After poking around and listening to the close mic various options to get a sense of what I’m working with, I’ll start with getting everything in phase. Solo the kick drum mics and get those in phase with each-other. If they don’t add up, I’ll start playing with HP filters at various Q’s to try and get things closer. You’d be surprised what you can get away with even when things are even 90 degrees out. Then, I’ll start introducing more spot mics (snare, toms, HH) and start getting things in focus with just phase flips. By the time you get to the overheads and rooms, you should have all the spot mics in phase with each-other so then you can get a better sense of how the overheads are going to play into the game.
I'll gate everything with the Pro-G. Usually as tight as I can while sometimes automating threshhold to make sure ghostnotes don't get lost. I'll peel back the ratio once I have everything triggering properly to let some bleed in to taste. Sometimes I'll only gate 2-3 dB to just get something to pop. Sometimes its in a vaccum. I will very rarely compress individual drum mics. And I pray that the recording engineer didn’t either. I like most of my compression to come from the busses. It sounds more natural to my ear and allows you to get away with a more compressed, exciting sound than just whacking the close mics. I’ll find at the beginning my drum mixes will be very ‘pokey’ — I want each drum to sound explosive and over the top. That way when i start compressing them, they maintain their transient quality when they start getting dynamically reduced.
I’m always cutting tons of 250-350 out of the kick drums and trying to manufacture any attack with saturation instead of EQ. Having a SansAmp or a Saturn plugin adding high end always sounds more natural to me than just additive EQ. I’m always very wary of the 2-5khz region, and find even-order harmonics are the best bet to fill in the blanks there.
I tend to like my snare drums warm, so often low-shelving down the super low end and keeping the 150-300 ‘boosh’ intact. I try to avoid using HPF on drum mics because at this point, things should be relatively in phase, so if I put a filter on, it’s going to throw the whole kaboodle off whack. Shelves are your friend here. And same as with the kick drums re: adding high end — I’m wary off adding the snap in the 2-5khz range, I’ll try and have the body of the snare drum really singing so I only have to add a little bit of top end, often above 5khz just for some air.
If I get through the kick and snare and find things starting to sound too ‘scooped’, I’ll try and fill in some blanks with parallel sansamp or the distortion buss. I like the distortion buss technique because if offers a consistency across all the tracks and you dont just have a distorted snare drum but pristine clean toms. Often its a Decapitator with a low shelf going into it killing some low end. I’ll solo this buss, get it to sound crunchy but not messy, then un-solo, bring the fader to neg-infinity, and blend it into taste. You’d be surprised how much excitement you get without totally fucking up the aesthetic of the drums.
As for samples? Sure! I’ve you’ve gone all-balls on these tracks and you’re still lacking what you think you need, then no shame in supplementing with samples. ‘Supplement’ being the key word here. I use the Massey DRT to extract MIDI from the kick & snare mics and then use Battery to trigger my samples. I have a few samples that just solve various problems for me. Sometimes just giving me the low end sub, or a 100 cycle knock. They can be helpful to punch your way through phasing issues and really get the meat and potatoes of the rhythm track holding its own. I will never ‘replace’ with a sample… there’s always something useful in the recorded track if you try hard enough.
Now that the basics are happening — kick and snare are really standing on their own two feet and in a place to drive the song — I’ll start bringing in other instruments in the mix and getting a sense of how things are adding up. Usually starting with bass, guitars, keys and finally vocals. Some people do vocals first — that’s never worked for me. Once you have a balance of the track, you can start really incorporating some of the overheads and room mics to give the drums more dimension and flavor. If the engineer really fucked the dog with the recording — or the room just sounds bad — I won’t spend too much time making them work… I’ll just get to manufacturing something that sounds cool. This could be leaning into a spring reverb, or a fun delay, or using other creative reverbs to get the drums have the space you want. I’m a big fan of un-natural sounding drums… distorted spring reverb panned hard left with a slap panned hard right? Why not! If someone serves you shit, shovel them ice cream.
Toms will literally be the last thing I work on. It’s just a matter of seeing what’s missing from the overall picture and filling in the blanks with the spot mics. I don’t like to trim the regions because I might find that when I’m gating, some of the bleed sounds good from the track. Sometimes, if the engineer did their job, the multi-mic recording will be really complete and will need the tom mics for the overall sound… so no gating at all. Again, all depends on what you’re working with.
Once I move on with the rest of my mix, I’ll find myself doing EQ moves on the drum buss and treating it more like one instrument to get other things happening in the mix… only doing small tweaks to the individual sounds. I hope this all makes sense?
A Tangent
I’m lucky to have spent many years in a great studio with lots of great drums & gear… not to mention being mentored by one of the great engineers of our time. Having this perspective is massively useful in mixing other peoples tracks, because I feel I have a north star of what good drums can sound like if they’re recorded and performed properly. It used to be that my starting point for mixing drums were working with tracks that I had recorded myself… and most of the above problems were solved before the mix stage. These days, with smaller budgets and time constraints, its very rare that this is a possibility.
I’m including this drum tracking session from a few years ago that I recorded at Barefoot. It was for a project that Matt was producing that never saw the light of day. But we went all out with the drum setup in the big room, through the console, and had a great drummer. This might be useful for some people who have never gotten properly recorded drum tracks… to get a sense of how good thigns can sound before the ‘mix’ stage. These are the tracks that were printed into Pro Tools off of the console, and the three busses were prints of the outboard compressor busses we were using while monitoring. It’s unlikely these busses would get used in mixing, but they’re a good reference to what we were listening to in the room while we were tracking. But as you’ll notice, the individual drum blend can stand on it’s own two feet. Hopefully this is useful as well.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
