>Step by step

Making acoustic drums sound bigger and more powerful

1 Here’s a simple groove triggering Ableton Live’s bundled SessionDry kit – an extremely dry acoustic drum kit. Although its individual drums aren’t by any means tiny, collectively this isn’t exactly what anyone would describe as a ‘big’ drum sound. There are several things we can do with plugins to beef it up… 4 Perhaps the most obvious effect to reach for is reverb, positioning the source signal in a virtual space. Your reverb plugin will probably include a few drum kit-orientated presets, so use those as your starting point. Don’t go overboard with the wet signal: set it where you think it sounds right, then back it off a touch. 2 Compression should be your first port of call. By reducing the dynamic range – that is, bringing the volume levels of the louder parts down – and increasing the Gain to compensate, the whole thing becomes louder and punchier. Here, I’m applying a compression Ratio of 4.5:1 with a 2ms Attack time to let transients through. 5 Distortion – in all forms – is another solution to low-impact drums, implying added size with the harmonic shaping and natural compression it can introduce. Here, FabFilter’s Saturn multiband distortion plugin is thickening up my drums gently but very effectively. 3 If your compressor has a mix control, you can make the kit sound bigger but still retain performance dynamics using parallel compression. I’ll set the Dry/Wet balance to 50/50, for an equal blend of compressed/uncompressed signal. The Attack is reduced to minimum, as the idea is to crush transients then blend them in. 6 In reality, you’d most likely combine processes to get your drums sounding their biggest. Here I’ve inserted the reverb, parallel compression and distortion from the previous steps. Together, they not only sound huge but also give me plenty of options for tweaking the dynamics and spatialisation of the kit.