Get five mixing engineers in a room and they will probably give

you five different tips on mixing your drums. Some want it au natural,

making it breathe and sound live. Others want it pumped in your

face with crushed compression kicking you to the ground. And many

like the happy middle, applying compression when needed but still

retaining the natural feel of the drum kit. No matter what your

preference is, there are certain guidelines that are good to follow

when starting to mix your drums.

In the following tutorial I'm going to walk you through the

basics of mixing together a drum kit. We'll be taking a few bars of

multi-tracked drums, mixing and sculpting with various things like EQ,

compression, levels and panning before we get it sounding just right.

Take note that these tracks are hard rock drums, and I will be mixing

them in that genre. That means that I will probably apply more

compression than you purists think, and I will EQ to get a proper

rock sound instead of a natural sounding jazz sound for instance.

Ok let's dive in. This is what we're working with.

A few bars of a decently recorded drum track, maybe a little roomy

but nothing we can't make sound great.

11 drum tracks. Some would argue that's too much, some would argue

that's way too little. I think Metallica's black album was made with

around 30 microphones just for the drums. But I wouldn't know where

to start a tut if we had 30 microphones to work from. So we just have

the bare essentials.



One mic for the kick drum.



Two for the snare. One on top, one underneath.



One mic for the hihat.



One for each tom, 4 in total.



Three overhead microphones, two over the kit, one in the

room.



Step 1 – Levels

I'm having every track at unity gain (0.0 db) in the screenshot

above, but there are a few methods for getting the correct levels. I

like getting the overheads into the mix first before I tackle

anything else. Getting them at a good level and then adding other

elements into the mix is an easier way to gauge the effect each track

has on the overall mix. Let's pull everything down except the

overheads.

By listening to the overheads we get an overall feel for the

drum kit. We can hear every drum, although it lacks all of it's punch.

I also pulled down the room mic since we'll have a different role for

it later on.

Now let's add other elements into the mix. Starting with the kick

and snare we move the faders up until they are loud enough to fill in

the punch we need from that specific drum without being way louder

than the overheads.

Now we have a pretty good level on the kick, snare and hihat. The

kick gives a nice punch to the track, while the combined faders of

the snare give a nice cracked accent to the dull snare that was

present in the overheads. But there might be something wrong with the

snare? If you are mixing tracks that you didn't record then you

always have to keep phase relationships between instruments in mind,

and seeing as the snare has two microphones, you wonder if they are

in phase. Let's check.

By zooming in on the two snare tracks you can see black on white

how incredible out of phase these two tracks are to each other. We

want the waveforms to go in the same direction and complement each

other, not in the opposite direction and cancel each other out. There

are various ways to flip the phase of a signal but I'm going to

Logic's sample editor and flipping the phase on the bottom snare

microphone. Double click the region and the sample editor pops up.

Go to FUNCTIONS>INVERT and Logic flips the phase of the whole

waveform for you. We want the two waveforms to go up and down in sync

with each other and now it looks much better. And sounds better too!

Now let's solo these two snare tracks and listen to a before and

after sample. Before phase reversal:

And now hear the snare in phase. A much thicker, fuller sounding

snare:

To finish off getting rough levels let's focus on getting the toms

right. I'm soloing a area where the drummer hits the toms and getting

those specific hits loud enough in the mix without making them jump

out.

Let's hear the tom break here with a roughly leveled drum track.

Step 2 – Panning

Now that we've gotten our rough levels, it's time for the

next step. Since drums are a stereo instrument and tend to fill up

the entire stereo spectrum, we need to put them in stereo. We

can't have all the drums panned in the center. We want to spread the

drums out a little bit and feel like we are watching a drummer play

in front of us.

A note on perspective: Some

people like to pan from the audience perspective, and others like to

pan from the drummers perspective. Meaning that when listening to the

drums you either feel like you are behind the drum kit playing it, or

sitting in front of it watching it.

Since I'm an awful drummer I'm

panning from the sound engineers perspective. That means that the

hihat goes on the right, the overhead above the ride cymbal goes to

the left and the toms roll from right to left.

The general rule is that kick

and snare stays in the middle. Kick and snare is what drives the beat

forward and thus it needs to be anchored in the middle of the stereo

spectrum. Some people pan the snare a little to the right, or maybe

just one of the snare mics to the right, but we'll be keeping it in

the center.

Take the overheads and pan them hard left and hard right,

filling out the edges of the spectrum. This is what will give our

drum kit width in the mix as by panning those two elements across the

entire spectrum we automatically position each drum relative to

itself. But since we have more elements to play with let's pan the

rest of the drums.

Pan the hihat to the right. Pan

the toms in a way that when the drummer makes a tom fill you can hear

it sound from right to left. In the audio sample below you can hear a

small tom fill that goes from right to left, just like you would

experience if you were watching a live drummer play.

That sounds a little more realistic

now as we get the feeling of more depth to the drum tracks. Go back

and compare this tiny level and pan change to the original

unprocessed track and see how radically different it has become by

only doing a tiny bit of processing.

Step 3 – Ambience

You might have noticed I was

leaving the room mic out of the equation completely in the last few

steps. The fact is that it's a room mic recorded in a not-so-great

sounding room, but it can illustrate a point that many engineers use

when recording drums.

Metallica's 30 drum microphone Black album

wasn't recorded with all of the mics close up on the kit. Many of those

microphones were positioned around the room, capturing sweet spots in

the acoustically treated drum room. That's the reason Enter Sandman

sounds so huge, cause it has all these microphones capturing the huge

sound the drum kit makes in a big room.

But we only have one room

microphone. So let's add him in gradually so you can hear the

difference a room mic makes to the sound of a drum kit. Keep this in

mind when recording, as a few room mics might come in handy for

various mixing tricks down the line.

As you can hear in the audio

file below, there is a radical increase in sound whether we are using

the room mic for ambience or not.

Some recording and mixing

engineers choose to use their room microphones for reverb, choosing

not to use digital reverb engines because they prefer the sound of

their recording room. Whatever you choose to do, it's always good

practice to have one or two mics as ambient room microphones. We'll

come back to this microphone next time, as I have a separate function

for this microphone that has nothing to do with reverb.

Until Next Time

Stay tuned for the next

installment in the the guide to effective drum mixing. We'll be

continuing to look at what comes next, namely equalization and

compression. We'll be learning to equalize correctly, enhancing the

fundamental sound of the specific drums as well as cutting out

unwanted or unattractive frequencies. We'll be looking at some

examples of compression, the New York Compression trick as well as a

few other mixing tips you can use to spice up your drum sound.